Hezboullah’s Latest Suicide Mission

Amid the din of self-negating office politics, one underling aspires to introduce her own agenda to the workflow. This intern--a millennial who wears what she wants, comes in when she wants, and does "whatever the fuck she wants"--designates herself as North American Korea, a neo-NATO opportunist who stands to capitalize on any sort of merger between her constituents (or their failures to maintain discrete national identities after such a process). In doing so, she also alters the narrativity of the video, advancing a linear plot line, which makes the rest of her company vulnerable to concepts like before and after, cause and effect. 

With the nature of nonsense thoroughly conveyed through the frenetic stasis of K-Corea INC. K's corporate logics, Sibling Topics reverses the pendulum, adopting a narrative and style that is more cinematic than any of Trecartin's other or previous videos. In this sense Sibling Topics counterbalances the circularity of K-Corea INC. K, and together the videos explore polar dimensions of narrative absurdity, along with the persistence of communities (be they corporations, families or both), to form and operate in any circumstance, real or imagined. 

Not surprisingly, family is the central theme of Sibling Topics, post-family to be precise. Trecartin returns to his conception of family-as-business-enterprise (I-Be Area), casting parent figures as managers and executives on one end of the spectrum (do they lead with a hands-on style? Or are they more absent?), estranged children as freelancers on the other. The director plays four sisters named Ceader, Britt, Adobe and Deno, the boundaries of whom are indistinct... it is difficult to tell where one sister ends and the next begins, especially in the case of the middle siblings, Adobe and Deno (but isn't that always the case?).