The Prologue

The Prologue begins, as its name suggests, with heaven, and thus the almost biblical beginning of all beginnings. However, it is a man in work clothes who emerges from the cuboid floating through the air, and not a divine being. And neither does the man create the world, but instead flips a large machine lever so that his cuboid releases a sphere, which in turn descends and triggers glowing, flashing light in a larger cube beneath it. Things don’t stop at this absurd, cryptic prelude. The beginnings in The Prologue seem to have no end, as if everything were an enormous Fischli-Weiss experiment: flipping a lever immediately leads to a new human figure, who activates another lever – down on earth, in the forest, after heaven has died when a hand pulls the plug. And then on to a diving bell in the ocean, which immediately disappears down the drain when the plug is removed during cleaning. 

The directing duo of Marzieh Emadi and Sina Saadat also offers stylistic references to the age of industrialization: In The Prologue, the people are digital cut-outs that could have come from 19th century workers’ magazines. With their muted colors, they blend in well with the otherwise rather dreary color palette of the analogue, quasi-surrealist drawings. The power socket in the forest, with its oversized dimensions, is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput, while the elevator of the engine room becomes Jules Verne’s diving bell. 

With its focus on mechanics, the exhibition of cause and effect, and the almost absurd seriousness of its protagonists, one cannot help but see The Prologue as a satire on human progress. Here, technology is nothing more than a tool that alienates us from our environment, or even destroys it. The unsettling final image, however, permits us to hope – unless, according to another possible interpretation, the prologue actually does come to an end. (Marie Ketzscher) 

(Translation: John Wojtowicz)