Soren Thilo Funder

In his 1949 sci-fi novel, Walden Two, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, narrates the story of his alter ego Professor Bur­ris visiting the fictive commune Walden Two. This commune became the model for several actual communal projects in the Nineteen-Seventies, one of which was Los Horcones in the Mexican Desert. Los Horcones is in Sal Paradise revisited 40 years later. In Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road, his alter ego Sal Paradise falls asleep on the roof of his car some­where in the Mexican jungle. This character is in Sal Paradise reanimated in Mexico City year 2011, as a precarious day-worker, selling CD’s in the metro and painting ‘rotulos’ bill­boards in the street. Again Sal Paradise falls asleep on the roof of his car, this time in the streets of the lower-class neigh­borhood Santa María la Ribera. On Plaza de las Tres Cul­turas, leaning against the stele commemorating the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, Carlos Maciel Beltràn narrates the story of his alleged death in the brutal attack on protest­ing students. Sal Paradise interweaves these narratives of alternative communities and collective memory in a cinematic landscape caught in-between fiction and documentary.