Ptarmigan existed as a project space in Vallila from 2009-2011 and a mobile curatorial/creative platform until 2014. We no longer exist as an organised collective, but this website will continue to serve as an archive of the activities produced as/at Ptarmigan during these years.
Ptarmigan's Liminal Images series, in conjunction with the ongoing Workshop in Architecture and Vitality, will be screening Dusan Makavajev's 1971 classic, WR: Mysteries of the Organism.
WR - Misterije Organizma (WR - Mysteries of the Organism)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev
Yuvoslavia, 1971
84 minutes
English, Serbian, Russian and German with English subtitiles (imdb)
This feature-length film is described by Amos Vogel in Film as a Subversive Art as:
... unquestionably one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s; a hilarious, highly erotic, political comedy which quite seriously proposes sex as the ideological imperative for revolution and advances a plea for Erotic Socialism. Only the revolutionary cubist Makavejev ... could have pulled together this mélange of Wilhelm Reich; excerpts from a monstrous Soviet film, The Vow (1946), starring Stalin; a transvestite of the Warhol factory; A.S. Neill of Summerhill; several beautiful young Yugoslavs fucking merrily throughout ... It is an outrageous, exhuberant, marvellous work of a new breed of international revolutionary, strangely spawns by cross-fertilization between the original radical ideologies of the East, Consciousness III in America, and the sexual-political radicalism of the early Wilhelm Reich ...
... Beneath the film's light-hearted frivolity and marvellous humour lurks a more serious ideological intent: opposition to all oppressive social systems, East or West, the removal of prurience from sex and a final squaring of accounts by the new radicals with the now reactionary Russian regime ... Makavejev is quite accurate in describing his film as 'a black comedy, a political circus, a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others.' ... The film is also a tribute to the ultimate power of ideas over institutions.
