“In 1969 Federico Fellini had the premier of Fellini Satyricon, a polemical film based on the homonymous text by the poet Petronio Arbitro in which the central part of the piece is the reconstruction of the extravagant feast offered by Trimalchio — a slave converted to a new rich man […] Forty years after Fellini’s masterpiece, AES+F offers a new version […] Their film installation The Feast of Trimalchio (2009) is indulgent and technologically impeccable. The dystopic Arcady in which the feast takes place is an amalgam of oriental and neoclassical architecture digitally recreated and traversed by a series of characters that relate to one another polyphonically; their poses emulate iconographical archetypes of Mannerist paintings and their frozen and distant gestures mimic haute couture. These figures characterize a new oligarchy that continues to pursue the realization of their extravagant pleasures, set against their equilibrated diet, cholesterol-free foods and Japanese seaweeds, their relaxation in the sauna and lengthy workouts in the gym… […] AES+F’s work is nurtured from moral and cultural paradoxes: seduction and threat; hyperrealism and artificiality; classicism and contemporaneity; spirituality and sensuality; historicism and the end of history. AES+F does not conclude the narrative; there is no final scene. The outcome remains as an open question that will disturb the spectator, inasmuch that only he can give an answer.”
Javier Panera
Read Javier Panera’s full text on AES+F’sTheFeast of Trimalchio in the October issue of
