| Play Dead!
| Group Shows
| h. 7:30 pm
| Kora – Contemporary Center
Play Dead! is a shows curated by a Like a Little disaster, a collective born in 2014 with operational headquarters in Polignano a Mare.
The idea of the end has always been a subject of reflection for the human species, which has transposed it into cinema, literature, and art in an attempt to master, synthesize, and understand it. Because the personal/collective apocalypse should lead to a revelation – from the Greek kalýptein, to unveil; or perhaps, more simply, dealing with the apocalypse would serve to exorcise a shared fear, as talking about it, in a superstitious way, distances the possibility of it happening. Perhaps, by witnessing its destruction, we might finally be able to see what the world is truly like.
“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”
“Play Dead!” seeks to explore the concept of the end (and its opposite, the beginning, the new beginning. The alpha and the omega). Within an interconnected and agentic mesh, the project juxtaposes different perspectives, creating cells where it is possible to experience the mutual connections between the biotic and the abiotic, cybernetic life and physical death, the tangibility of physical limits and the illusion of a perpetual scroll. These satellites would want to provide a means to reflect on the threat of global disaster, collective suicide, and the desire for resurrection, or on the uncanny shadow cast by the future.
Through religious and animistic visions, as well as conceptual, posthumanist, transhumanist, and ecological theories and practices, the project attempts to experiment with transcending the limit, posing questions such as: What do we find beyond the end? And beyond death? Does death necessarily represent the end, or can we consider the possibility of being simultaneously alive and dead, or neither alive nor dead, outside the gaze of the other? Has the end of the world already occurred, is it occurring, or will it occur? If, as Heidegger asserts, by “world” we mean “a totality of meaning,” then it has never truly existed. There are only portions of the world, those with which we engage from time to time. Is it therefore a matter of coming to terms with this end—which is always, at the same time, (another/first) beginning? Does being able to already see the world in the light of the final catastrophe mean seeing it as it will one day appear or recognizing its morphological contemporaneity with us?
– The exhibition will last a year and – if we are still alive – over the months we will be able to experience a random process of evaporation of the works, they will disappear to make way for virulent and expansive reincarnations by other artists. Thus, the exhibition will therefore start from a precise conformation and visualization to find itself completely different at its end. Abandonment will produce a metamorphosis, a new life, or rather, new forms of life triggered by as many deaths.
– The works featured in the first phase/body of the project’s metamorphosis are deeply marked by the (conceptual, visual, poetic, political, performative, and mythical) use of language, the verb, and the beginning (of the end).
Everytime you switch me off, I die. A Little.
All the works on display are connected with the phenomenon of Chronos time or rather, to use more technical language, they are time-based works; they need to be “switched on” during the exhibition’s opening hours. What happens when the exhibition closes and the works are switched off? Where do they go when we are not there? Are they temporarily dead, or do they migrate somewhere beyond the gaze of the living human?
– *The title “Pay Dead!” refers to apparent death; a behaviour through which animals as well as some fungi or plants “pretend” to be dead. It is a state of immobility triggered by a traumatic, predatory, defensive or reproductive act and can be observed in a wide range of animals, from insects and crustaceans to mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish and, of course, in humans.
– *The exhibition is mentally/spiritually supported by @wecroakapp
It is an app that each day sends you five invitations at randomized times to stop and think about death.
It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to be a happy person one must contemplate death five times daily.
