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Performed October, 2024
Performed October, 2024
Coming in 2025: Tessa Marie Luminati as Evan Task in Outer Space! 🪐
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Corporare: the journey of Evan Task… from child prodigy to tech entrepreneur billionaire; lift-off! Bound for Mars in the Optima Mark II. In outer space, corporate evangelist Task battles the ghosts of victims of his negative externalities and workers who grew tired of his bullying. In the wormhole he meets a technician killed with his family in the Fulfilment Centre Mall crash of the Optima Mark I. On Mars, Task initiates the hermaphroditic embryo humidifier to populate the barren wasteland with his own spores. But, to his horror, he discovers that Mars was not so barren after all.
Corporare looks at the corporate body, a metaphor of madness made real.
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Development of Corporare was facilitated by the generous support of The City of Melbourne
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What a show! Just bloody gorgeous. Elegant, funny, gently caustic. I felt so privileged to live in a city where this kind of event might happen, a coming together of artists to witness someone at the height of his expressive powers!—Maude Davey
Light and space are obvious in the matter of space travel, but that combo also works on many other levels, physically, emotionally, and metaphorically. The whirling, spiralling constellations on your geegaw world are reduced at the end by human decay and infantile ambition to nursery room playthings, like bubby's mobile—Jim Daley
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Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, screenshot of cinematography by Cobie Orger
Matthew Crosby in Corporare, Photo: Oscar Socias
Photos: Oscar Socias
Writing Corporare—Evan Task in Outer Space
Matthew Crosby
There are quite a few steps in this description of Corporare… how did I find myself in outer space?! It began, finding myself alone in the studio for some sessions in 2022. At that time, I was looking into research on what is known as ‘the tragedy of the commons’. It’s a business term that refers to the co-op approach to the management of resources. In ancient times, village leaders developed customs as to how many head could be farmed on communal land.[1] If one person decided to farm more, it threatened the sustainability of the resource. It’s a commonsense approach that seems to have been lost in the kant, ‘winner-take-all’. This led me to Jan Dejnožka’s book concerning the legal and indeed ontological notion that, in terms of liability, a corporation can be considered as a fiction. That is, if there is some harm committed to the environment or to a person, personal liability cannot be attributed because the ‘entity’ causing harm is non-corporeal body… not a person. Who should the law punish? This notion is known as the ‘veil of corporate impunity’. I looked into extreme cases of corporate ‘negative externality’, in part concerning industrial accidents. The BP America (Texas City) explosion, 2005 [2], Deepwater Horizon 2010 oil spill disaster [3] and others. The damage to the environment, to workers and to their families became a touchstone for Corporare. I considered my embodied existence. That is, how I sense myself inwardly, and how that internal sense perceives and interacts outwardly. By stages, the mythology of boy-wonder tech entrepreneurs and their influence on society centred in my horizon—emblematic but by no means exclusive among them was Elon Musk. The complexity of a celebrity ‘founder’ entrepreneur who governs a company seemingly whimsically with little regard for personal liability or consequence for worker or the community in which they operate became the performance story of my research; the horror trope of alien invasion in space is for me delicious theatrical terrain. So it is that my Evan Task, boy prodigy, is faced with the (horrible) dilemma of outward invasions and inner eruptions. Corporare becomes a kind of retribution for wrongs done without remedy and tries to understand how, yes, male businesspeople can delude themselves so successfully.
[1] Carl Stephenson, ‘The Problem of the Common Man in Early Medieval Europe’, The American Historical Review 51, no. 3 (1946): 419–38, https://doi.org/10.2307/1840107.
[2] ‘BP America (Texas City) Refinery Explosion | CSB’, accessed 17 October 2024, https://www.csb.gov/bp-america-texas-city-refinery-explosion/.
[3] Jad Mouawad, ‘For BP, a History of Spills and Safety Lapses’, The New York Times, 9 May 2010, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09bp.html.
