As part of 3hd 2020’s scaled-down but interconnected “UNHUMANITY” festival week, “Crisis Management” is the second of two performance evenings at HAU Hebbel Am Ufer expanding on this year’s themes exploring a transition between an untenable past and an uncertain future. The November 7 event builds on this year’s extended and decentralized program (running across the global map since August) by recognizing natural and technological actors as equal partners, and bringing its audience closer to a new model for an interspecies community. With this in mind, two playfully-layered presentations reflect the deeply complex, multifaceted, and entangled issues and concerns surrounding such big topics as degrowth and decentralization, ecocritical theory and climate change. They are contributions that exist both online and offline, while generating a necessarily collective attempt to shape our shared future in a time of crisis.
Joanna Pope and Steph Holl-Trieu “General Intellect”
Joanna Pope & Steph Holl-Trieu’s “General Intellect” is a collaborative sound piece, a political compass distorted by melodic worldbuilding and pixelated fictional ventures with an original score by Pope, short fictions by Holl-Trieu and visuals by artist and illustrator Sam Lubicz. Their audiovisual performance for 3hd is a cannibalization of both art and theory: Whirring drones drop weekly rations of solar-powered GMO berries; lithium rivers, more dead than alive, stream down the inside of your mind—try not to fall as you jog through this real world fantasy, stuffed with algo-steroids.
Rory Pilgrim “The Undercurrent”
Rory Pilgrim’s “The Undercurrent” is a similarly diverse project, which is the culmination of the film “The Undercurrent”—screening online for the duration of 3hd 2020’s “UNHUMANITY” festival week—and a performance at HAU2 on November 7. Telling of urgent contemporary issues through music, the multidisciplinary artist’s film is a statement on the era of the climate crisis. It creates connections between art, activism and spirituality, while exploring community-building locally and globally, offline and online. Originally filmed in Boise, Idaho, with 10 young climate activists and the surrounding towns, Pilgrim builds on this project through a three-day “Undercurrent Laboratory” workshop in Berlin, exploring how to collectively respond to the problem of a rapidly warming planet. The closing event at HAU2 will include a live performance from these open-call participants, along with a string quartet and singer Ezra Hampikian. Idaho artist Declan Rowe John and other activists will take part online.
