Output details

'Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World', film, record and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction.

'Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World' is a film, record and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction. A theatrical staging of a morality play for 'end times' and future folk music, it recasts eschatology as a foundational myth for a future society.

The research question at the heart of the project is whether we can imagine the end of civilization as anything other than an atomized (non-)society. Post-apocalyptic writing and cinema are grounded in an ethos of survivalism. Invoking Rousseau’s state of nature, or time before government, these fictions propose violent scenarios in which nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe and other disasters generate an individualistic politics of pure pragmatism, negating the possibility of democratic deliberation. Terminal narrates this familiar scenario, but at the same time questions its validity by staging the end of the world as a folk play acted out by future generations long after the disaster. The film dramatises a series of conversations between future-historical archetypes about the needs and pressures of the situation in which they find themselves at the end of the world. The performers then gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain, radiation sickness and eating the dog. The piece thereby inverts the sequence in which the collapse of the social is the end: here, this end is reformulated as the beginning, the dawn of a new society that views the survivalist arguments about necessary and lesser evils as ridiculous.

'Terminal' co-authored by collaborative artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv was supported by Arts Council England, Electra, London and Merzbarn, Cumbria. The project has been performed at HKD, Rijeka and at the Rio, London, and formed the basis for a solo exhibition at Trade, Nottingham, and tour to Chapter, Cardiff, in November 2013 for Experimentica festival.