School of English Language and Literature - A.U.Th.
Doi
Abstract
In the opening decade of the twenty-first century humans faced a rising surplus of historical double binds that threatened no shortage of highly charged political and ethical dilemmas. For example, humanity’s success at performing survival began to outstrip the carrying capacity of Earth. And, of course, such blatant global dramas offer no obvious denouement. When all futures seem to promise only impossible scenarios, such as an end to ‘history’ or even ‘nature’, what kinds of performance paradigm might offer some glimmers of hope? This presentation approaches that prospect paradoxically by attempting to treat it lightly, as if we are always already such stuff as dreams are made on. So it delves into an end to all ethics and the onset of an especially extreme state of political exception for Homo sapiens as the species passes under a rainbow called climate change. For this particular specimen, on the left is a 1970s Hawaiian happening titled H.C.A.W. – Happy Cleaner Air Week – to the right a recent land-based installation known as A Meadow Meander. Between these unlikely materials it aims to conjure up a few random poles of a dynamic dispersal of Earthly doom that goes by the dubious bioethical alias of ‘performing ecology’
