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Long-shot/run/dead

"The First Intermediate Period, around 2025 BCE, was the occasion for a remarkable constellation of innovations in Egyptian thought and civil order. After the death of Pepi II, the longest-reigning monarch in history, none of the numerous claimants to his sacred throne was able to reverse the dire drought, which announced the modern incursions of the Sahara into Egypt. One after another these 'seventy pharaohs in seventy days' were secretly denounced and executed, and simultaneously Egypt was visited by refugees filtering in across the eastern and western sands. Local nobles were unopposed in their power for the first time in a millennium, and they attained to the same privileges as pharaoh in the afterworld ('the West'). Eventually for the first time men and women won rights of private ownership, of contracted marriages, and of entry to the West (with a proper burial). Remarkably, individuals began reflecting in writing on the world around them, and the first introspective literature was invented. Long-shot/run/dead immerses itself in this concatenation of catastrophes, which is elaborated across the mixed space of family, gender, writing, law, civil order, religion, personal identity, and death. Any historical complex is simultaneously an invocation of our own condition—the conviction that sustains 'history' as narrative arises amid the multiplication of overdetermining details that compose its 'authenticity.' When it is completed, Long-shot/run/dead will incorporate scenes set in the present day US. It is the 'Egyptian' scenes that are attentive to authenticating details of period props and costuming." —Tony Conrad

With Donna Simpson, Seth Tamrowski, Julie Zando