ABOUT THE PROJECT
Fathomers has engaged artist Julia Solis and her colleagues from Seafoam Palace on a work titled The IDA Sessions. Set near an abandoned waterway outside Los Angeles, the event is a multi-media walking tour and landscape performance based on an absurdist interpretation of the 1974 film Chinatown as an ancient battle myth.
“Through a portal,” says Solis, “our guests enter a kind of double atmosphere, navigating along a projected mythical river while solving an existential puzzle underlying the Chinatown film. Oriented along pearl necklaces, ancient records of the Albacore Club and the contemporary ruined road, the two intermingling atmospheres superimpose two points in time on each other. It’s an exercise in simultaneity, with the road as a wormhole.”
Gallery above: Seafoam Palace, research images, The IDA Sessions, 2020. At top: Seafoam Palace, documentation, Islands of the Hollow Earth, 2016.
ARTIST BIO
Seafoam Palace is a collective whose members have organized site-specific events and exhibitions in abandoned and neglected locations since 1999. The group has designed surreally themed excursions that interweave adventure games with absurd performances to challenge perceptions of obsolete architecture and suggest new playgrounds for the imagination. Locations have included a historic shuttered New York subway station, the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, a Bronx courthouse, a decaying resort and many other disused tunnels, bridges, office buildings, hospitals and industrial sites in Berlin, Barcelona, Detroit, Kansas City, Vienna and elsewhere. The core team of Seafoam Palace is loosely based in Detroit with an evolving group of participants all over the United States.