16 February 2013

Little Red Riding Hood - the other side of the story

Like many old folktales, Little Red Riding Hood is steeped in violence and cloaked in sexuality: although it has taken many forms over the centuries, the protagonist (a girl, innocent or perhaps not, with her sexual red cape) is devoured (or perhaps symbolically raped) by a wolf (perhaps representing male predation), and then she's saved as the wolf is sliced open and killed. Quite a lovely little story we read to children, of course. Or maybe it's just an innocent little fairy tale. Either way, Mimesis Monday (also known as Frigg Radu or, in real life, Heidi Dahlsveen, a story teller in both worlds), invited three artists to explore the tale and to create an installation on her sim, The Companion. Little Red Riding Hood—the other side of the story opens tomorrow, February 17, at noon slt.

Artist Alpha Auer's contribution (in which you might see creations by her alt Alpho Fullstop, both of whom create for alpha.tribe) is a solo build wherein a dark forest wraps around central scene in which a party of wolves looks up in horror at one of their companions, mercilessly speared and bleeding (top image of this post). The wolf heads were crafted by Leben Schnabel, and entire scene is gorgeously rendered. A free alpha.tribe Little Red Riding Hood avatar (designed in that unique alpha.tribe sort of way) is available here. If you're not running a viewer that provides automatic windlight settings I'd recommend you manually adjust to the sim's default.

The second area was collaboratively constructed by Cherry Manga and Soror Nishi. Here we see several scenes: what looks like the initial meeting and interaction between Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, a dance (perhaps), a sexual encounter, and finally the violent death of the wolf at the hands of a plunging knife (middle two images). Here again the environment is beautifully rendered. And, separate from the LRRH story, another fantastic creation of Soror Nishi's stands at the entrance: a huge tree known as Yggdrasil (photo below). Mimesis says she'll be doing some storytelling at the installation from time to time, so keep your eyes out for those events (probably best through the Facebook page). The builds will be up until mid-April. Do leave a contribution at the landing point if you can.

3 comments:

  1. Thank you Ziki, beautifully written

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  2. And thank you, Heidi and Elif, for the excellent installation!

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