Deconstruction Mind Map of Samlandia

The intentional logic of Samlandia is built on memories of moments, snapshots of time and place that form connections. The images, though random, and the stories they represent congeal at certain points into familiar archetypes. These archetypes are in our DNA and, therefore, recognizable, and anyone can relate to them.

For example, there is a scene in Samlandia where Sam takes a train. We see the modern world as it is with tunnels, highways, bridges…. But, long before this area became what it is today (what it looks like and how it functions), the area the train crosses was revered as a body-spirit. That spirit hasn’t gone anywhere. We just don’t see it because it’s not our frame for living now. That place is now placeless and lives in dream time.

As a Sensitive, Sam feels it and it throws him into a quandary. It tugs at him and he can’t shake it. It possesses his spirit. He knows that place. And, yet, it’s not there. He feels it. But it is within the dream.

He is a conduit for that dream.

But dreams are unstable. The variables of them, how random thoughts string together, regardless of their content, reveals to us something about ourselves that we *know* and often don’t want to see: We are all fragile, unstable, confused. And when we encounter a neurological difference as pronounced as autism, we…well….

Tectonic plates silently move beneath our feet and we just never know when they’re going shake the stable foundation we’ve attempted to erect and startle us into rethinking our lives. And then there is the wind. Like fishes unaware of the water, we don’t see the air until it gets muddied up somehow. It builds slowly, but at some point, there is a tipping point, something big happens to make us aware that something’s gone terribly wrong with the very ether that supports life. But, it’s a current. And we’re dragged along.

And life is like that. We drift.

We hang desperately onto the drift. We try to nail it down. We call it trend, linear in nature.  We give it a label…anything to separate it from ourselves. We are not…that. Are we? And then, a story builds around it, makes its way into our present-day oral tradition, our media. Not so long ago, autism was 1:10,000. How is it that it morphed to affecting 1:83 now in just a mere 16 years?

The transmutation of any life from creation to decay is something we don’t much notice day to day. But, when life throws us a curve ball like this, we look for answers, we realize we are startled. Something has intruded on the dream. Everyone knows someone with autism.

So, I use still images which I dissolve together in video edits to create the feeling, because we are confused about what’s happening in the air-fishbowl. We recognize life. But something’s profoundly changed. Is this an aberration? The new normal? Or just a bad dream? It could be any place, any city, any train. It could be any child, any young man or young woman, anywhere.