CAPITALISM IN THE PUBLIC REALM – HOW WE LIVE TOGETHER (2016 – 2022) – A text sculpture installation and a 4 short film monologue performance series with acclaimed actor Bill Sage, extracted from texts by French philosopher Roland Barthes.
HOW WE LIVE TOGETHER, 2016-20 by Anne Katrine Senstad. Brushed Brass corporate aesthetic letters. Exhibited as part of Senstad’s solo exhibition with the same title at Yi Gallery, Brooklyn in 2020 and the Manhattan Borough Presidents Office, New York, as part of the exhibition Welcome Back, 2021.
UTOPIE / UTOPIA (How We Live Together), 2020, in the High Desert, Joshua Tree, California, 2024. A site specific video installation with MOMENTUM as part of the inaugural High Desert Art Fair, February 24-25, 2024.Supported by the Norwegian Consulate San Fransisco.
How We Live Together presents a series of four performative monologue readings in a short film stream of consciousness format created by Anne Katrine Senstad during the pandemic of 2020-21 in response to, and analysis of isolation and its implications on societal changes. The films are conceived as authentic, personal, and real-time remote collaborations between Anne Katrine Senstad and acclaimed American actor Bill Sage, with sound management by composer/sound producer JG Thirlwell.
The monologue texts derive from French philosopher Roland Barthes’ 1977 lecture series on idiorrhythmic living formats and societal critique; How To Live Together: Novelistic simulations of some everyday spaces. The films were created in context of Senstad’s solo exhibition How We Live Together at Yi Gallery in New York during the first summer of the pandemic, further, screened on Streaming Museum in the fall of 2020. Utopia/Utopia was included in the WCPUN’s book Centerpoint- Are We There Yet?, published on the occasion of the UN’s 75th anniversary.
The How We Live Together Vimeo page presents several trailers from each of the cinematic reading short films, with in depth texts in the drop down menu’s.
The short films, HOW WE LIVE TOGETHER, are represented by The Film-makers Cooperative in New York and The Norwegian Video Art Archive at The National Museum of Norway.
HOW WE LIVE TOGETHER – Four Short Films with Bill Sage
UTOPIE/UTOPIA, 10.22 min (2020). The first film in the series, UTOPIE/UTOPIA, Barthes’ examines in his chapter on a utopia of idiorrhythmic Living-Together, our “Sovereign Good”, as a form of tactful cohabitation and an inner state – the state of tolerance is considered a place of utopia. Bill Sage creates here a rich texture of spirit and authenticity, embodying the internal conversation and experience of the human enterprise transmitted through the character he created for the piece – a navigational journey through a meditative analysis as understanding of our sense of place. By jointly reshaping and exploring new systems for expression and cultural production, the artists simultaneously respond to the human experience of isolation, societal and political deconstruction through the absorption of Barthes structural novelistic lectures and internal dialogue on ways of understanding community and individuality, spaces, and rhythms of life for our possible futures.
MÔNOSIS/MONOSIS, 11.22 min (2020). In his chapter on the human monastic state, MÔNOSIS/MONOSIS, Barthes contemplates the isolated self and seeks to identify the problem of separation from our true state of internal unity as an aspect of idiorrhythmic Living-Together. Within societal structures, he discusses forms of displacement and separation in relation to repression, where the ideorrhythmic cohabiting individual searches for states of peaceful tolerance as a place of unity. Sage’s immersive reading performance invites us all into the experience of the internal dialogue and narrative examinations on idiorrhythmy, community and individuality, public space and value systems, as a method of understanding, observing and processing the current times, and in contemplation of how we want to shape our new futures as a unified human experience in a post-crisis world.
MARGINALITIÉS/MARGINALITIES, 11.27 min (2021). In contemplating ethics of citizenry, states of isolation, disenfranchisement and marginalization of the individual, and the societal erosion taking place globally, the film unfolds and journeys through the critical eye and visual poetry of the internal voice of Barthes philosophical language. By drawing lines through the history of religious monastic systems, anthropological and spiritual forensics, and the agency of the human experience, Sage’s performance reveals the history and conditions of power and oppression in relation to our autonomous space.
XÉNITEIA/XENITEIA, 17.39 min ( 2021). Created over the span of a year during the pandemic, the four films are real-time responses and an archive of the human experience of living through social-political crisis, perspectives on how quarantined life, societal isolation, displacement and loss of lives cloak humanity and the transformational evolution of time. In conclusion of Barthes 1977 lecture series on idiorrythmic living formats through novelistic simulations, XÉNITEIA/XENITEIA unfolds forms of exile, isolation and estrangement; as displacement from the mother/fatherland, as the departure from the past through ritual or action, or isolation within ones home – yet as a state of isolation and distance within oneself.
Acclaimed actor Bill Sage has appeared in over 120 films, theatre and TV productions, including American Psycho, Law & Order, Orange is the New Black, Hap & Leonard, and many, many more. Throughout his career, Mr. Sage has been a champion for diversity and equality in the film industry. He has made a point of working with female Directors, Writers and Producers such as Mary Harron, Lisa Cholodenko, Mira Nair, and Amy Berg to name a few. Mr. Sage is a graduate of SUNY Purchase and a proud member of the “Purchase Mafia”. He continues to be a driving force in the world of film and high end television.
Capitalism in the Public Realm 