AES+F is happy to participate in the TickTack Cinema program in Antwerp with Feast of Trimalchio, screening nightly until February 28th.
Selected by Domenico de Chirico for CINEMA TT.
In AES+F's The Feast of Trimalchio, an imaginary island with an absurdly luxurious resort-hotel, which is a de-personification of Petronius' Trimalchio, serves as a 'temporary paradise' that guests pay to enter. The island's landscape combines a tropical beach with a ski resort, with scattered structures simulating the architecture of ancient Rome and Asia. The masters, clad in full-white attire, span all ages and social strata, while the 'servants' are attractive youths from colonized lands of different continents, dressed in traditional ethnic garb and working in Trimalchio's hotel as its permanent staff.
The Feast of Trimalchio is a deconstruction of the self-obsessive and indulgent behavior of modern civilization and is an allegorical symbolization of a mass-media generated version of Heaven. The guests of the hotel indulge in all of the contemporary pleasures perpetuated in advertisements of resort getaways, from leisurely fitness to 'body purification,' while the viewer sees any notion of social hierarchy dissipate as the masters begin to court the servants, acting out their fantasies of a Roman Saturnalia. The pleasures in AES+F's Feast of Trimalchio are intermittently interrupted by catastrophes that are simultaneously tragic and comical.