Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson

“The year is 2016. 62 people own the same wealth as half the world. 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day. The 62 multi-billionaires who own the same wealth as half the world could fit on a double-decker bus. I just have one question: who is driving the bus?”

With those words Illusion Woman – a young leftist feminist heroine, or anti-heroine, for the 21st century, with, from and for the multitude – opens her first appearance, applying a dazzle mask as she speaks while we look at her through her mirrored image. In this work the artists have again embarked on a collaboration with British philosopher, activist and feminist Nina Power and for this first study Australian actress, Michelle Myers, brings the character to life.

Illusion Woman ́s speech, written by Nina Power with Libia and Ólafur, is a plea, agitating and reflecting on the socio-economic and political situation in Europe and beyond since the financial crash of 2008, and forecasting two possible futures: Firstly, a dystopian, despotic, inhumane and coarsened world, ruled by a powerful political class, instrumentalized by the interests and the clock of an economic and financial system owned by the 1%, and secondly, a growing worldwide revolutionary alternative – a feminized, democratic and environmental insurrection – combining alternative economies, a new image of time and an active political global citizenry operating beyond nations: A transnational political environmental movement taking power in the name of peace and the end of poverty.