SPCUNY Artist
Dahlia Bloomstone
Collaborators
Maya Baran: Maya has a complex origin and identity and is still learning about and observing American culture as a transcultural artist. She became fascinated with the great powers and forces that move New York City – the prominent city sunken deep into late capitalism. Through the friendship and ongoing collaborative process with Dahlia, she felt compelled to join forces and create the film together. OPULENCE was made from two different points of view. It combined Maya’s POV as an outsider looking in and observing and Dahlia’s POV as an American who has been long embedded in the systems shown in the film.
OPULENCE
The first part of the project is the visual element, a short film by Dahlia Bloomstone and Maya Baran. The second part of the project involves donating packages to multiple organizations.
The first part of the project, the visual element, is a short film entitled OPULENCE. This film investigates power, loneliness, isolation, escapism, money, mundanity, repetition, late capitalism, tunnels, manufacturing, shapeshifting, unnatural light, New York, Wall Street, labor, currency, maneuvering the self in a coded world, classism, hierarchies, ambiguity, and ambivalence – the things that move the world – all through the lens of sex work. This film explores what it means to experience the micro-interactions that occur when one is getting paid based on their ability to attract, keep, and become. OPULENCE deals with how stereotyping can become complicated when negotiating power and money, especially during the surreal realities of economic recession. How do we silence ourselves to get what we need from those that have more agency? Are these spaces that create microcosms of racism and identity politics mini-dystopias? In this film, there is an excess of everything, and there is no way to stop the progression. There is a specific and complicated use of language that exists not only around sex work spaces but also in corporate spaces, the character is trying to understand the vernacular of both. The character finds ways to lean into the labor and consumerism that alienates her, and she navigates through the hellish labyrinth that is late capitalism’s sexual commodifications in all its forms.
OPULENCE Trailer
To further explain the second part of the project, starting December 25th, Dahlia Bloomstone began to receive packages from Walmart Returns that seemed to be knockoff goods. From headphones to speakers to shoes, Dahlia has received upwards of 40 packages a day from Walmart. Dahlia did initially try to stop the packages from coming by calling Walmart customer service and Walmart corporate, uncertain of who it might be hurting to keep these packages, to no avail. She now has hundreds of boxes in her apartment, and they continue to come. The packages (that are used in the film) will be donated to a list of thoroughly researched organizations.
Out of lack of time and money, Dahlia has never figured out this Walmart mystery – and her main concern is: how to deal with these packages ethically? Who does she give them to? How does she not detach herself from the labor it took to make the product? How does she not separate herself from the laborer? Dahlia has consistently written and thought about bodily detachment, labor, ethical consumption, and manufacturing in her work before this debacle began. She has worked in gentlemen’s clubs her entire adult life, it has become vital to her that she is not detached from her body, labor, and consumption. It became important to Dahlia to not act as an insidious consumer. This is the inception of Opulence the film and the idea of thoroughly researching and vetting organizations to donate the packages.
Events and Timeline
TBA.
