Understory

Text by Blaire Murphy

Layering objects and text, fact and fiction, history and the present moment, artist Andrew Barco’s Understory explores the possibilities and difficulties of understanding across culture and time. Understory incorporates sculpture, projection, and hand-drawn texts to tell the fictional story of a Chicago theater group creating a live-performance version of The Cave (2019), a real-life documentary about a subterranean hospital during the Syrian civil war. 

The characters that populate Barco’s story about the theater group are modeled on real artists in his community and the location of this story–a disused swimming pool in the basement of a building in downtown Chicago–is a real place he once visited and dreamed of using for performance. The project’s texts, written by Barco, present the perspectives of the different characters, inviting viewers to move back and forth across different viewpoints to piece together the layers of the story.

Understory incorporates mythology into this layering of fiction and reality, taking inspiration from the Cult of Mithras, which Barco describes as an “anecdote of sublime misunderstanding”. The Cult of Mithras developed in the 1st century CE, when Roman Italian soldiers garrisoned in what is now Germany developed a set of religious beliefs and practices centered on their interpretation of the Zoroastrian deity Mithra. Their (mis)interpretation of a figure drawn from the religious beliefs of another time and place, Mesopotamia 400 BCE, became the foundation for a new, earnestly held belief system. 
In Understory, references to the Cult of Mithras seep into the work’s aesthetics and narrative, connecting Barco’s contemporary story to an ancient attempt to connect across the boundaries of time, language, and experience. The characters in Understory are so moved by The Cave that they risk their own misunderstandings and cultural miscommunication in attempting to adapt it, an endeavor that is well-intentioned but perilous. Understory invites viewers to consider the ways human beings make sense of the world and, specifically, of experiences beyond their own personal realm of understanding.