Output details

Terminal: a miracle play with popular music from the end of the world

‘Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World’ incorporates a film (DVD, 45 min.), audio soundtrack produced in format of vinyl record (edition: 200), and 45 min live performance staged at venues including Rio cinema, London and HKD Theatre, Rijeka (in conjunction with an exhibition for Drugo More, Rijeka). These artworks explore the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction, in particular, addressing the question as to whether we can imagine the end of civilization as anything other than an atomized (non-) society, as expressed in post-apocalyptic writing and cinema where the vision is grounded in an ethos of survivalism. 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 performers gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain and radiation sickness. The research production 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. This approach connects with previous artworks produced by Pil and Galia Kollectiv that attempt to stage future manifestations of philosophical and political problems as a way of destabilizing conventional ideological myths.‘Terminal’ was supported by Arts Council England, Electra, London and Merzbarn, Cumbria. The project formed the basis for a solo exhibition at Trade, Nottingham, and toured to Chapter, Cardiff,(November 2013) for the Experimentica festival. Reviewed in http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/terminal-equilibrium/id/6134#.UiDWGxZpCzd. Pil and Galia presented a paper about the work Portsmouth University (5/3/2013).