Extinction / I'm Still Here - Futurity Trilogy Episode 1

Along the path of exploring processes of extinction as a physical, political, ecological, social and cultural phenomenon, I’m interested in intentionally bringing together what might appear to be widely divergent source materials. Among them: recent work in cosmology; writings and new technology concerning the notion of the “post-human”; literature dealing with the limits of human life, transmutation and metamorphosis; survivor literature; ancient myths and prophecies concerning end times; Dante’s Divine Comedy, etc. 

The process of creating this musical performance trilogy would be dedicated to generating a constellation of images, narratives, movements, sounds, sensations that will allow the audience to think and feel their way to the edges of what now constitutes the measure of the human. The notion of the “anthropocene” has forced us to consider a radically new kind of temporality, one in which human history and geological time converge. How can this convergence be taken in by embodied subjects? How can it be mediated so that it gets under our individual and collective skins? How can the prospect of our own extinction as a species be brought into the now, into the texture of lived experience? Become an object of our own experience? How can this most abstract—and “impossible”—of possibilities be made concrete, palpable, urgent? Performance, especially dance, music and theater, live and involving the audience, can transform “theoretical” emergencies into lived urgency and form a way of waking up to our own dreams.

Speculations and predictions about the future often emerge in times of crisis. Striving to predict what is going to happen and when – in order to legitimize actions in the present and also to prepare for the worst-case – seems to be connected to anxieties over global ecological conditions, military and terrorist threats, economic breakdowns, to perceived abandonment of traditions and values, but also the destruction of the very resources of human survival. 

What if the end of world as we know it is happening now? What does extinction produce? What is the substance of the fantasies that sustain the natural order and reality of the world? What happens when these fantasies loose their grounding in a living tradition? What forces move us towards or against changes? What might these transformations incur? 

Extinction / I'm Still Here - Futurity Episode 1 was produced with the Konzeptbüro Rote Fabrik, at the Aktionshalle Rote Fabrik Zürich in March 2018