H.Y.L.O.ZO.I.S.M was a sculptural research project undertaken with collaborator Marissa Benedict. In this project, we looked to Joseph Beuys to react to the Chicago landscape and its potential. We grounded our research through a set of proposals. The first proposal was to stage a performance of pulling a huge sled of symbolic blocks of material along the abandoned railroad line (which existed at that time) which has now become the 606 trail in Wicker park. The second proposal was to create a sled to be pulled by Cayotes through the abandoned narrow gauge mail train track that runs below downtown Chicago. This sled would hold a spark gap generator powerful enough to jam city cell phone communications and would be powered by vats of bacteria pulled from lake Michigan mud. This project embraced the research process–including performative expeditions to collect mud from lake Michigan, to collect clay from Terra Cotta, Illinois, to create our own felt, to bake salt blocks. The project archived the intense conversation and theoretical research we through ourselves into to work out what these proposals met to us and our City.
Andrew Barco 