media artist
and educator
[site in progress]
Stelo Binara Collection
Escuta | São Paulo 2014
3 vol, 72 pages
PROAC 2012
In 2014, artist and USP professor Artur Matuck launched a literary series that brings together decades of literary and creative work in three volumes, the Stelo Binara Collection. He thus arrived at a rare work of science fiction, but also poetic, political and interlinguistic, challenging established genres and proposing new directions for contemporary literary creation. The narratives present in “Stelo Binara” are set in multidimensional spaces, with emphasis on the planet Megga. The focus is on the psychological drama of alien or human protagonists living in technocratic and ultra-rational societies.
Describing scientific limit situations, such as experiments on humans, brain invasion techniques, in addition to cryogenic hibernation in a conscious state, the work criticizes the exacerbated appreciation of science in our society and the objectification of sentient beings used in experiments.
The series follows the opposite path to what is common on the market, in which books become films. In the case of “Stelo Binara”, several of the artist’s performances and videos, even shown in the United States or at Biennials, such as the one in São Paulo in 1983, are now presented as literature.
First Volume: Kadmonvort:
Habitant of the Third Planet
The introductory book serves as a long preface to independent texts. The series begins with reports of experiences in other dimensions and the transposition of a character from a mythological past to an imaginary future. Then, there are reflections on the emergence of individual consciousness in a planetary space and questions about the effects that space travel could have on language. The book ends with a long prose poem about experiences in the Yucatán peninsula, now Mexico, using words in Nahuatl, the ancient local language.
This book delves into scientific experimentation on the fictional planet Megga. The reader here will be acquainted with the mensomekanic experiments that are carried out on human patients; as well as the Psi-Om energy, of resistance to science that reigns supreme locally. The hero Ataris Vort, soon to be on Earth, will also be known here. The narrative alternates between expressions of his individual will, trying to get closer and establish contact with a human being; and the speeches issued by an entity that has the power to invade your mind. The journey to the binary star of Alpha Centauri is seen as a hope, as it symbolically represents a way of bringing awareness of an internal polarity and increasing the consciousness of the people of Megga.
The Esperanto term that gives its name to the last book in the collection means “slowly”. It is associated with what the protagonist goes through, for whom time would virtually not pass, due to the organism preserved by cryogenics. An important detail in this imagined situation is that the human undergoing the experiment remains conscious, with possibilities for thought and even movement. Here, the idea of prison reaches maximum intensity and the character seeks death against the nightmare he lives in, as the experiment continues. The poem “Aquaverso, the Universe of Water”, with emphasis on icy moons, symbolically ends the volume and the series in a more optimistic way. Despite the traditional narrative break, it indicates the possibility and hope of living communication between beings from one planet and another, one moon and another.