TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it

2019

“An alphabet of apocalypses

A catalogue of catastrophes / There are stretch marks in the stratosphere and it feels like only a profound makeover could fix this
/
But it’s easier to imagine the end of corals than to imagine the end of 
fillers, feeds, weekend getaways
/
Someone shouts furiously: the future is endless!”

TEOTWAWKI is a place, a planet, a state of mind (& body). A troubled one. It resembles an approaching apocalypse or one that already occurred, there’s something unliveable about it. The body that inhibits TEOTWAWKI is uneasy, inevitably aging and worried that the promises of self-optimisation won’t be enough to stay safe. It’s hard to breathe and it seems like it has something to do with flaming forests, the confusion of migratory birds and tan-lines in October.

In TEOTWAWKI there’s an ongoing search for how to manage the mournings of bodily and planetary emergencies. Things are lost (seasons, flying foxes, years) but someone keeps chanting that everything is fine. TEOTWAWKI knows that nothing is fine but still searches for a position beyond grief. It insists on meditative movements, tries to hide, composes an unsteady shelter and speculates on the nature of this situation.

TEOTWAWKI is a piece of audiovisual poetry that shifts shape and expression in an ambivalent preparation. A pre-traumatic, possibly navel-gazing hunt for strategies on how to live in a body on a planet that is about to change irreversibly.   

Idea, sounds, text, performing: Johanna Malm
Dramaturgy, collaborator: Fabrício Belzoff
Light, technique: Peter Widell
Mentoring: Johan Forsman
Graphics: Barrie Sutcliffe

Produced by Skogen and Inter Arts Center.