1979-1982 The Elf Wars @elfwars - Tumblr Blog

1979-1982 THE ELF WARS

|PROJECT DESCRIPTION|

In Spain in the late 1970s and early 80s, there was an outburst of armed conflict that went largely or wholly unnoticed. A hidden, forgotten stage in our collective memory that started with the coming and rise to supremacy of elf culture and lasted until that culture disappeared, leaving practically no trace or record of its passage.

According to ancient prophecies, the blossoming of the elf period would come with the birth of two liberating female humans, one in 1979 and the other in 1982, though divergences of opinion as to which of them was the real symbol of splendour led to a bitter civil war among the elves. And that in turn was the direct cause of their subsequent exodus and their definitive extinction in 1998.

The Elf Wars, 1979-1982 is as an attempt to examine that period and salvage its history, and it is the only comprehensive, thorough and well-grounded study existing to date.

|ARTWORKS THAT FORM THE PROJECT| Installation, mixed media.

CÚENTAME video 5’33’’. fullHD. Barcelona, 2008 OLD FUTURE I video loop 12’00’’DV. Barcelona, 2008 OLD FUTURE II video loop 16’00’’ DV. Barcelona, 2008 ELVE PEOPLE video clip 2’36’’DV. Iowa, 2008 ENTREVISTA LESLIE HALL video 15’32’’DV. Barcelona-Iowa, 2008 SHELTER structure 1.85 m x 0.90 m x 2 m wood and natural hair 2008

COMMON GRAVE archaeological material 1.20 cm x 1.20 m x 35 cm Leds, earth, died elve, slide projection of the archaeological excavation doing in Torelló 2001

DOCUMENTATION Texts, elfic tools and weapons, maps, java application for mobile phone, rear-view mirror...

CÚENTAME video 5’33’’. fullHD.

#cúentame como paso Momu & No Es videos

|VIDEO DESCRIPTION - PLOT LINE|

The Alcantara family works as a plot line in the remake of "Cuéntame cómo pasó" (Tell me how it happened, a historic and popular TV series from Spain). Cúentame pretends to bring the audience closer to what the coming of the elf wars meant for Spain. The disappearing of neighbours and friends happened in an uncontrolled and masked way, on the background of an already difficult political situation in the country during the period between 1979 and 1982.

In this occasion Antonio and Mercedes are worried about the disappearance of a journalist friend that happened under strange circumstances. The apparition of dummies, alongside the finding of weapons that are wrapped in huge quantities of hair and the uncontrolled burning of the oil wells in Valdeajos and Tarragona are some of the events that are narrated and that were lived by many Spaniards.

ELVE PEOPLE video clip 2’36’’

#Momu & No Es #leslie hall #elfwars

|VIDEO DESCRIPTION - PLOT LINE|

Leslie Hall is the last half-elf-half-human to survive the elf wars. She was born in Iowa during the first elf exodus wave. Leslie keeps the hope to find, by means of her songs, other elfic survivors. ELVE People is a tribute to the memory of her kind.

Interview LESLIE HALL video 15’32’’

#Momu & No Es #leslie hall #elfwars

Installation view. Espai Moncada-Caixa Forum, Barcelona.

#Momu & No Es Caixaforum

CATALOG

THE CHRONICLES

THE ELF WARS – 1979-1982 –

–CHAPTER I–

THE ORIGIN, HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ELVES

Very little is known about the origin of the elves, though there are evolutionist theories speculating on human-elf relations throughout history. Though scarcely reliable, those theories maintain that when human beings first came to Europe they may have found elves already living in the continent. Fossil remains of elves in Portugal and the Czech Republic corroborate those studies. Turning to written sources, documents alluding to the world of elves only appear in the thirteenth century, meaning that any cohabitation between humans and elves is very poorly known – a gap in knowledge that, as shown in this study, points to a situation blending peaceful harmony, secret integration by the elves, and a lack of awareness of their existence among human beings.

The earliest written documents on elves

The Spanish monk-knight who discovered the elves during the crusades The earliest written record alluding to the special nature of the elves takes the form of verse glosses contained in letters from a warrior monk who was a member of the Order of Calatrava – a religiousmilitary body founded by the Crown of Castile in the twelfth century. The letters describe in profuse detail the training practices that the monk imposed on the knights of the Order of Dobrin in what is now Poland. Various graphological studies indicate that they were penned by one Diego Rodríguez de Padilla.

Illustration of The Prophecies, 42 x 29,7 cm,1973.

#Momu & No Es #elfwars prophecies

In those letters dating from between 1222 and 1224, the monk tells his brothers-in-arms how certain peculiar features, previously only noted in people from his native Castile, were also common in the lands he then found himself in. That was how he commenced the account of what was later to be seen as the first written treatise on the elves. A clear example of this is the way he defines some of the men in his charge: “a fellow form the mountains with long hair and slight build”. After those early letters, no subsequent document making direct reference to elves is known until well into the twentieth century. According to analyses of the materials existing – texts, maps and drawings – elf activity was concentrated in Spain, Switzerland and the United States. There is no reliable documentation on the elves from the thirteenth to the twentieth century. Physical features of the elves – morphology The most striking feature of elf morphology is how close they are in appearance to humans. They do however possess a number of exceptional and clearly non-human special features:

Very low body density – 78% less than a human being's.

Inordinate hair growth. We know that they were in the habit of cutting their hair standing in front of their houses, the first hair-cutting of the day being when they emerged in the morning and the last at dusk.

Serious diction difficulties. An anomaly caused by a maxillofacial structure differing from and less practical than mankind's resulted in their having to use small straws when imbibing liquids. There are records of a peculiar, obsessive tendency to drink fruit juices with large amounts of sugar, all specially served up and adapted for sucking up by elves.

Sight deficiency. Their minds separated objects and spaces into distinct planes, disregarding global vision, and they thus depended on an automatic system of selecting and ordering. They also had an odd capacity to bring about optical illusions: they would see mirages – visions that usually took the form of signalling flashes and arrows that helped them to perceive things.

Astral-based mental characteristics of the elves

The thirteenth sign of the zodiac

All elves belonged to the thirteenth sign of the zodiac. That sign is governed by a parallel arrangement in the opposite direction to the rest of the astral configuration. Differing from the characteristics of the ordinary twelve signs, belonging to the thirteenth sign defined and oriented the logic associated with elves, and was also behind a key fact: they were always born towards the end of the year, between 30 November and 17 December.

The elves' distorted logic The elves followed an inner logic of their own that guided all their actions. Perhaps the key difference between elf reasoning and human reasoning is that the elves had special access to primitive sensory units dating from before the appearance of organisation by concepts. They were thus able to perceive all the component parts of a process, but could never grasp the whole.

OLD FUTURE I (stills)

videoloop

12.00 min.

Elves and death

In contrast with the human species, the striking lack of interest in building memory and in the past observed in elf culture means that we know very little of their relationship with death and their funerary rites. The scant evidence we have suggests that elf skeletons tended to disintegrate swiftly because of their physical peculiarities, and with only small, fragile, slender bones being left after a short time.

–CHAPTER II–

THE ELF PEOPLE

The prophecies

Though elves as a people were never power-hungry, their ancient prophecies spoke of a redeeming advent that would equip them with a number of powers enabling them to set a new world political system in place, dominated by themselves. A treatise was passed down orally from one generation to the next, based on a special arrangement of a collection of animals: a badger, a cross between a wolf and a fox, a wild plant, a goat, a worm and, circling overhead, a hummingbird, an owl and a butterfly. The coming together of all these animals revealed a coded message announcing the birth of two non-elf beings that would irreversibly transform the existence of all elves: two liberating female humans who, between 1979 and 1982, would guide the elves towards a period of splendour. Elf culture always maintained a latent duality with regard to the messianic figure that was to make such an impression on their history. A duality that stimulated the growth of two independent, complementary paths in their beliefs: a more numerous group (corresponding to the 1979 birth) that prized the purity of the first figure, and a minority group (the 1982 birth) convinced that the coming of the first of the liberators was a farce, their own path representing the truth and the genuine re-establishment of the elfish order.

Cultural and developmental characteristics

For as long as their existence has been recorded, elf people have always dwelled in the same places as humans, and their harmonious life system meant they went unnoticed and could mix with humans without the latter really being aware of their presence. It can be stated that elfish sociocultural awareness is recent, since they only became politically organised in the twentieth century when they first took steps towards forming an elf body that later evolved into a complex system of secret societies. Before that, the elves had been aware of their own nature, but lacked organisations distinct from the human ones, and while they could join those human organisations as full members, they always went incognito, camouflaged as human beings.

Political organisation

The IEF as starting point

Here are some of the most significant secret organisations and bodies of the elves:

IEF Imminent Elf Future; IEFS Imminent Elfish Future Society; EUF Elves United for the Future; ELFOFU Elves For the Future; ESIF Elfish Society for the Imminent Future; EA Elves Awaiting; ELVIW Elves in wait; UUE Universal Union of Elves; ELFPRI Elf Pride; EGF Elves for the Gold Future; EWI Elves Waiting in Iowa.

The IEF originated in the meetings staged by a group of university students in Spain in the early 1930s. They met at nights to rerun the animal layouts associated with the sacred prophecies. These undercover meetings later spread to other areas in Spain and in central Europe. Seeing how their like were generally scattered, these groups championed a specific debating arena for elves, one that soon required a physical manifestation in the form of an exclusive club. That club soon moved on from being simply a meeting place for elfish culture to become the first politicosocial organisation in the history of the elves. In view of the high levels of attendance and growing interest in the club, the IEF was seen as a place of reference for the elves, and the model was exported all over the world. One particular manifestation of it was the great elf meeting held in Extremadura in 1960, a gathering that lasted several weeks and in which the elves organised themselves into two broad groups that were to act as custodians for the births and to watch over the liberating female humans. Thus, strictly in line with the prophecies, a great elfish power base was formed in Spain as the champion of the first birth, and another in Switzerland, clinging obsessively to the second.

Economic planning, finance and resources

The rise of secret elf associations that came in the wake of the IEF required work on new planning systems. Oil had been taking over from coal as the main source of energy since the 1950s, and this led them to try to get into positions of control over the new oil-production facilities that were appearing then in Spain. A clear example of this can be seen in the enthusiasm with which the elf people greeted news of the oilfields of Valdeajos (Burgos) as announced by the NO-DO – the Spanish TV news programme they used to watch as a way of analysing and studying humans.

The elves' fervent passion for that 'black gold' was not entirely illogical: their marine origin and their lower-than-water body density led them to identify with oil – a kind of empathy and complicity with that material, a material in which they saw themselves metaphorically represented.

Going for the black gold

The IEF produced a specific elite corps – the EGF, Elves for the Gold Future – whose mission was to plan out a system of attack for gaining control over the Valdeajos deposits. Their ambitious plan envisioned an underground oil pipeline that was to link Valdeajos with the port of Tarragona, so as to be able to export the oil safely to all elf-dominated territories. Before the Elf Wars and guided by the EGF, the elves in the Iberian Peninsula began to launch night attacks on the oil wells, setting fire to them to frighten off the humans controlling the oil extraction. In this respect, the existence of expert elf engineers has been ascertained, and they took over the coordination of small oilfields.

It is interesting to note, in the context of these oilfields, that the humans of the time were never really aware of what was going on. The climate of political unrest that reigned in Spain under Franco's dictatorship, with all sorts of suspicious episodes happening every day and being hushed up, camouflaged the actions of the elf terrorists. Moreover, since the elf oil concerns were always very small, and insignificant in comparison with human oil production, their conquest was barely noticed by humans. A few isolated cases are on record in which some humans delved a little further into what was behind those fires, and that was when the elves, fearing that they would lose their recent gains and their cover, implemented one of their most treacherous strategies: the murder and extermination of over-curious humans.

Old Future II (stills)

videoloop

16.00 min.

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1979-1982 The Elf Wars