Kishkindha NY is a collaboration with the Office of Uncertainty Research and Italian dance group STORMO, choreographed by Carla Marazzato.

The piece was performed at the TIME SPACE EXISTANCE exhibition during the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy.

I composed and recorded the original score for the 4 act performance.

In this speculative-fiction work, Kishkindha NY reimagines New York as a multi-species ‘forest-city’. It is not a ‘design proposal’ but an ‘epic’. It is intended to provoke a radical reimagining, a conversation on how we live on our planet as a response to the climate emergency, Its inspirations are indigenous, global and posthuman. – Office of Uncertainty Research

The agent of change is a sci-fi inspired ‘beastie’ that is part mechanical and part fungus/octopus.

Today we walk and drive. In Kishkindha NY, they say, we all dance. Today’s performance enacts this transformation.

ACT ONE: UMBRA. We begin by observing the death of the contemporary city, the end of the ancient imaginary as the locus of civilization.

ACT TWO: DNA molecules disintegrate and recombine to form a new interspecies. We see octopus, mushrooms and tree roots. The ‘beastie’ is created.

ACT THREE: KISHKINDHA NY: Above ground, the ‘beastie’ transforms the city. Spores are released. It destroys and rebuilds. The old city metabolizes into the forest city. Human consciousness, locked into momentarily, rewires.

ACT FOUR: BALANDO. We can no longer walk. We can only dance. Moving in curves, tangents, and parabolas, we leave our homes and gather in the forest-street for joyous reaffirmation of life. The epic has begun.