Revolution Eternal with Megan Daalder

Megan May Daalder uses her interdisciplinary interests — performance, anthropology, storytelling and ‘spontaneous’ filmmaking — to create moments of intimacy and bonding wherever she goes. We spoke about her soon-to-be-released documentary art piece, Revolution Eternal, a film that weaves the history of the unbuilt Yugoslavian Museum of the Revolution with how she fell in love for the first time in what is now present day Serbia.

I get intimate real quick

Megan jokes as we talk about how she’s made herself comfortable staying at my apartment. It serves as a great segue into the next topic. There was something so intimate about her 2010 trip to Serbia that made her to want to forget the whole thing ever happened, to almost go so far as to delete the files from her hard drive. And then yet, there was also something so intimate about it that made her dive into it all over again and turn the footage into a film.

Trailer for Revolution Eternal

Megan was in Belgrade on an art residency, returning day after day to an abandoned lot with tall and overgrown grass and filming herself navigating the concrete floor in front of a large sunken pit while blindfolded, when she met Stanisha.

“The day I met him, he was like, you should go down into this black hole with me. There’s a learning curve when you make work about empathy that you have to realize. You have to anchor and hold on to yourself.” — Megan Daalder

Megan admits that she didn’t hadn’t known about this learning curve yet, and that it was especially traumatic at a time when she says she ‘fell in love for the first time with a total stranger.’

The black hole

The film features interviews with Serbian architect Slobodan Maldini about the Museum of the Revolution — ‘the abandoned lot’ — interspersed with Megan’s interactions with Stanisha, his friends, and finally a trip to his family home that was 4+ hours outside the city.

Stanisha is a Roma “gypsy,” a minority group whose reality of disenfranchisement and heavy discrimination is juxtaposed against the preservation of the Museum’s socialist ideals. The Museum, initially proposed in 1961, is physically non-existent even though its symbolism still haunts the upper grounds. Yugoslavia’s “benevolent dictator” Tito was thought to have helped elevate the historically persecuted group’s status as he sought to unite the fractured country. It was a campaign of co-existence but not assimilation. Now, the Museum houses a community of Roma people in its underground belly, just on the other side of the black hole.

Left: In the Silent Barn courtyard, Megan holds a postcard she created in order to promote the film. Right: The videos she was making on her residency. Both featuring the “black hole.” Descent is the password.

Megan hopes her meeting of Stanisha and her resulting ‘personal revolution and upheaval’ is a way to create a bridge that would allow Serbians to confront their view of the Roma people. She is excited to show this film again in Serbia, and to counter what she was told the majority of reactions would be — that there was no way she could have had such an emotional connection with someone from a group that everyone looked down upon.

Megan says she’s not really a tarot person, but that she would recommend looking into the Temperance card.

Methodology of spontaneity

Megan wonders if her life philosophy and belief in spontaneity could become a methodology or framework. How do we allow for the possibility of unplanned interactions, and give opportunity for rational mind to take a step back? She admits to aspiring to be a ‘bad anthropologist,’ to combine emotional logic with intellectual logic as she asserts herself into strange situations.

An “empathy machine” before VR

Mirror Box — the immersive headset that gives two people the sensation of sharing one face — takes on a different meaning now that “empathy” has become a popular but often misunderstood and misused word in the entertainment and design industry. She believes that this project, as well as the new film she’s currently working on, Children of the Singularity, are pieces of resistance:

“The point is about how human are we going to be. We can’t use ‘good’ as a blanket statement to describe technology. It can enhance and extend our humanity but we have to be so, so, specific about what it is we want to preserve.” — Megan Daalder

Left: My friend Akiko and her son Shoma in the Mirror Box. Right: Megan’s father, Rene, and Megan. Watch a video about how the piece was made here.

Megan doesn’t claim to “revolutionize empathy.” Just like Slobodan said at one point in the film, whenever you’re trying to make revolution, you will not make it. Part of Megan’s creative process and personal healing was to recognize and delight in the fact that portals to upheavals open, but that they also close. Until this particular inspiring yet frightening black hole portal closes, anyone can still go to Belgrade and explore the expired myths of eternal revolution, continue the resistance, and ‘not just fight for what was, but for what will always be.’

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