waiting rooms for doom

Two reporters are speaking from the inside. They witness characters emerging out of architectures and submerged city infrastructures, they register these coded signs in a highly subjective manner. They squeeze themselves into spaces and roles that cannot contain a human form, such as sinking through polluted, radioactive soil, being transmitted through an undersea internet cable and vaporising as nitrogen oxide. During this residency we research, and shift, different aspects of the audio tour format; the trusted reportage, absurd narratives, muzak, and sonic instructions to make imaginative, and maybe impossible, somatic practices.

As audio guides obsessed with the already present but neglected dystopia, how can we understand that we are already within the collapse that we are waiting for? We want to move away from linear, human-centric narratives, and use scholar Kathryn Yussoff’s methods of reconsidering geology as guidance in how to make extractive logics visible. She proposes;

“Crisscrossing this caesura between the inhuman and inhumane(e) is a way to walk about the historical forms and contexts of the racialisation of matter. The organisation and categorisation of matter enact racialisation. This enactment is productive of racial logics that extend through and beyond mineralogy and the deterritorialisation that accompanies extraction”. [Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota, 2019. p82]