Shangri-La
Video / HD color with sound
26:10mins
2024

In James Hilton’s novel ‘Lost Horizon’ from 1933, ‘Shangri-La’ is a place in which people live an enduringly happy life isolated from the outside world in an earthly paradise. They appear to live in perfect harmony and are almost immortal, only aging very slowly. The downside of this reality is that if the people were ever to leave the utopian valley of Shangri-La, they would age very quickly and die.

The original footage of ‘Shangri-La’ was recorded in a present-day community setting as a performative action. The bare and surrendering bodies represent the act of giving up one’s identity for a ‘greater good’, for a common ideology. Such realities can quickly lead to dogmatic, black-and-white thinking and can especially thrive in settings that are isolated - in bubbles that are very often shaped by censorship: Censorship from the outside world, censorship of information and, ultimately, a censorship of the self.

The soundtrack by Perverts in white shirts is built solely on treated and untreated sound samples from The Children of God’s music. It explores memory and the manipulative use of music to direct people’s emotional and psychological attention. In cults, music is often employed as a form of propaganda and mind control, rewiring the brain to focus a specific ideology or person, and contributing to further indoctrination and isolation from the outside world.