Oooops, I have a plan

Oooops, I Have a Plan is a performative, audiovisual, and sound-based work that explores how popular culture, collective imagination, and political narratives circulate through mediated forms.

The project takes as its point of departure a reinterpretation of the R&B song Oops (Oh My) by Tweet, transforming the original lyrics and vocal register into a performative gesture that oscillates between desire, irony, and political commentary. Through this act of appropriation and translation, the work reflects on how cultural material can be displaced and re-signified across contexts.

Parallel to the live vocal performance, a mashup video composed of water scenes from adventure films constructs an unstable landscape of movement, danger, and projection, evoking colonial imaginaries and narratives of conquest embedded in cinematic history.

Rather than producing a fixed statement, the work stages contamination itself as a method: voices, images, and references overlap and circulate, generating a fragmented space between popular culture, fiction, and political imagination.

Process

The project was developed within Lightning Studies – Centre for the Translation of Constraints, Conflicts and Contaminations (CTCCC), a research framework curated by Renan Laru-an for the Encura Grant at Hangar and Curators’ Network.

Within this context, the work emerged through processes of appropriation, vocal reinterpretation, and audiovisual montage. Existing cultural material—songs and film fragments—was re-edited and translated into new performative and narrative relations.

The project approaches translation not as fidelity, but as transformation: a process through which meaning shifts while carrying traces of its original context.

Forms

The research is translated into performative, audiovisual, and editorial forms:

Live singing performance: a performative reinterpretation of Tweet’s Oops (Oh My), transformed into a vocal and narrative action Here you can listen to the audioperformance

Mashup video: a montage of water scenes extracted from adventure films, constructing a speculative and fragmented cinematic landscape

Vinyl publication (limited edition): a semi-flexi vinyl functioning as both sound object and publication, extending the circulation of the work into a material format

These forms operate together as a system of translation and contamination, where sound, image, and voice are displaced from their original contexts and re-articulated through performance.

The Hangar resident artists who were selected for this curatorial experience by Renan Laru-an, Lightning Studies: CTCCCs are Megan Michalak, the artists duo Giuliana Racco/Matteo Guidi,Mario Santamaría and me.

Context

The work was produced in 2016 for Lightning Studies – CTCCC, a research project on postcolonialism, institutions, and processes of institutionalisation.

The project was developed alongside works by Megan Michalak, Giuliana Racco, Matteo Guidi, and Mario Santamaría within the Hangar residency framework.