Paradise Is exactly like Where you are right now Only much much (It's a shipwreck,) Better. (It's a job.)1
'It's 2046, and a young woman from the Multiversity of North Europe called Corona (born in 2020) runs through the space of an institutional building looking for something she left behind...she doesn't remember what it was, but she wonders what might have come of it now. All she knows is that she was sent here by an invitation: 'I have left something unfinished there for you...they used to call it art then...' (Anonymous slur)
As we navigate the day-by-day developments of a planetary pandemic event, my 17-year-old daughter and myself have spent the last few evenings movie bingeing.
Whilst the spread of COVID-19 has made the image of a 'global deadly contagion' ubiquitous in our daily lives, we converged and retreated into worlds of representation: this is not our planet anymore after all.
Once taken over by a runaway virus, the whole thing assumes the contours of someone else's plot and when the gaps between screenshots and suspended reality started to close on us, the Zoomer and the Gen-Xer ended up together in silence on the sofa, sharing the same online streaming platform.
As the reality of the contagion began to spread around us, the advisory guidelines spread with it, with 'social distancing' being the top of the list. At least our chosen cinematic self-isolation wouldn't be without its cultural and contextual perks: a bubble full of 'cultural content' might help us through this moment.
Between the years 2012 and 2018, a string of popular post-apocalyptic movies aimed at 'young adults' (The 5th Wave, The Maze Runner trilogy, The Divergent trilogy, and the most popular- The Hunger Games trilogy) were released in a rapid succession by all the major Hollywood production companies in a race to distribute the films to their expected audiences, prey to a savvy thirst for dystopian futures in a present looking more and more like a catastrophe in the making.
All of these were derived from fiction literature written just before or through the years that followed a real disaster in real time: the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and its subsequent unfolding in political and economic terms. Of course that would be my own reading and not my daughter Ella's, but the need for compelling high definition disaster scenario cuts across intergenerational divides. The fictional narrative of the classic novel After London2 reads like 'tomorrow' for some.
The 'young people' at the centre of all these narratives are invariably subjected to experiments of control and containment or group isolation and are being coerced -through deception by the totalitarian power structures emerging after the disaster- into variously intolerable conditions which forces them to perform competitive tasks to remain alive, like buskers of a precarious global
rhapsody in disguise.
In these fictional worlds, hope appears to be an impossible construct against all odds and love as the only cure against all ills: the love left behind as the only remaining institution of revolution3
Rather than through social distancing, the plight of the heroes in these narratives is dealt with by a desperate but utterly reliable close proximity, some unexpected acts of kindness and a solidarity of resistance that none of them knew they had in them until the 'turn' of events changed everything.
'Hey, you believe in germs do you?'4 Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) asks in Terry Gilliam's movie Twelve Monkeys. 'Social change will be enacted by things we cannot even see!' That's what really brings him to the edge of sanity.
Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement5
We are in a strange stupor between a heightened focus on materiality on one side (survival measures, how to live, acquire new rituals), and a stretched abstraction into a long view on the other (our part in the planetary ecology, human and not, there is no 'other' for a killer virus that looks like a sea mine).
All these oscillations take place in unprecedented territories where finally, ultimately and truly we come to be globalised by a non-human agent activated by human agency.
Fancy that: 'How to Make Art in Times You Were Made For?'
'My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people'6
Years spent in feral proximity and liminal captivity now meld and intermingle and start out to the maze. This is not the kind that holds the 'young people' captive for a 'good cause' in the everglades of The Maze Runner, but the kind evoked by the anthropologist Tim Ingold as a methodology of learning through experience:
What do walking, weaving, observing, storytelling, singing, drawing and writing have in common? The answer is that they all proceed along lines7.
Hold those lines till the end, even when the end doesn't come.
You Were Made For These Times.
1 Anderson, L. (1986) Language is a Virus (from Outer Space), in Home of the Brave, Warner Records Label. Laurie Anderson is currently the first artist-in-residence at the Art Intelligence, a collaboration between the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) and Sia Furler Institute at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
2 Jeffries, R (1885/2005) After London or Wild England, Echo Library, London.
3 Karikis, M. Love is the institution of revolution, July 1–October 15, 2017, Casino Luxembourg/Forum d'Art Contemporain.
4 Gilliam, T. (1995), Twelve Monkeys, Universal Pictures.
5 Pinkola Estés, C. (2001), Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times: Do Not Lose Heart, We were Made for These Times, reprinted in Buser, S and Cruz Len (2017), A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of President Trump, Chiron Publishers, NYC.
6 Pinkola Estés, C. (2001), Letter To A Young Activist During Troubled Times: Do Not Lose Heart, We were Made for These Times, reprinted in Buser, S and Cruz Len (2017), A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of President Trump, Chiron Publishers.
7 Ingold, T. (2016). The maze and the labyrinth: Walking, imagining and the education of attention. In E. Schraube, & C. Hojholt (Eds.), Psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 99-110). Abingdon: Routledge.
