Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019) is the third instalment of a tetralogy, Petra Széman’s Monomyth.
Born in Hungary and currently living in Japan, Széman is a moving image artist working with a variety of media, including video games, whose main concerns are the notion of identity and shared reality. Through her practice, Széman explores the interstices separating existence and memory, real-life and online narrative, time and space. In her videos, the body is presented as a vessel traversing various layers of existence, both onscreen and offscreen. Memory is instrumental in making sense of such environments and experiences. Mixing game-like aesthetics, digital animation, photography, and gameplay footage, Petra narrates her own trajectory as it unfolds through different planes of reality.
A chapter in the ongoing Monomyth series, / Return uses the hero’s journey trope to investigate how real life might be experienced as a cinematic fiction. What connects all episodes is the keyword gaiden, Japanese for side story, which manga and anime fans use to indicate a parallel story set in another universe or as a follow up to the main storyline. In Petra’s work, multiple narratives are generated by the relentless interplay between the concrete and virtual self, the shift between various platforms, editing tools, and multiple storylines.
In the first instalment, / Departure (2018), Széman questions her own relationship to a digital avatar named “Yourself” and her evolution through a multilayered image world. The surrounding environment becomes an active agent of narratives “oversaturated with movies and fiction”, as she puts it.
The second chapter, / Initiation (2019), introduce novel ways to conceive multiple layers of experience coexisting within an increasingly decentralized self. The character’s motion is presented as a series of anecdotes of pilgrimages inspired by pop culture. The linearity of the cinematic fiction is disrupted by the rhizomatic nature of Széman’s storytelling.
Travel is another recurrent theme. Like the loading screen sequence that precedes the avatar’s introduction to a virtual world, the train is a liminal space where time is stretched and expanded. A plurality of points of view generate a fragmented reality. The traveller occupies more than one place at a time: a two hours journey and a two minute video highlights become indistinguishable. As space collapses, time is compressed.
In 2019, Széman released How to enter a fictional realm / TUTORIAL (2017) which was presented at the MILAN MACHINIMA FESTIVAL. A prelude to the monomyth series, / TUTORIAL is an instructional guide for hypothetical travelers of Tamriel, the idyllic setting of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011). Adopting the format of a YouTube tutorial, the video invites the viewer to consider the relationship between two entities, the player and her alter ego, raising questions about such notions as identity, memory, and storytelling, which play a key role in each installment of the Monomyth series, a work that succeeds in being simultaneously personal and meta referential.
Széman is currently working on the fourth and concluding part of the series, Master of Two Worlds.
Gemma Fantacci
