Performance as part of the event 'Beyond Cataclysm' curated by Transit Arts (Marcus Jack) imagines the landscape of a post-human future. Visualising the return of nature and the disappearance of the body, the programme excavates the ruins of modernity: its architectures, colonial past, and enduring psychic residues. Taking its title from John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which a carnivorous plant species reclaims the planet, “beyond cataclysm” describes humanity’s invariable belief in the impossibility of self-extinction.
In two parts, the programme first observes modernity’s denatured landscape, one scarred by industry and evacuated of spirituality. In films by Matthias Müller, Jon Schorstein and Emily Richardson we visit Brasília, Glasgow, and Orford Ness respectively, as witnesses to the past, present, and future of the landscape under capitalism. Thereafter the programme anticipates a future post-collapse, of triffid-like eco-supremacy, and of life unburdened by the chore of capital. Works by Fern Silva, Ben Rivers, and Jorge Jácome imagine dream-like scenarios of overgrowth, featuring animal invasions, the last human transmission from Biosphere 2, and an island entirely consumed by pink plantlife.
At intermission Michelle Hannah adopts a musical guise to express an ambient Cosmic Pessimism through expanded cinema. Mixed with their interests in the dark matter of queer pop, 'Render Me' is a vocal performance that explores speculative text, queer dystopia, meditative soundscapes and theatrical abstracted projections.
With a unique text-based commission developed with weird fiction editor Simone Hutchinson will also be distributed at the event.
