FUTURELESSNESS STILL LIFES: Flowers + Collapse entangles the depiction of flowers, a long-standing, fine art tradition, with notions of collapse. From the ecological - the sixth mass extinction; the emotional - Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice and Context Collapse - a sociological phenomenon that describes what happens when many social groups exist in one space, that 'talking to everyone is the same as talking to no-one'.
FUTURELESSNESS STILL LIFES is an ongoing, multi-channel video series rejecting the Utopian and Dystopian views of ‘a future’ for a palliative position toward a future-less world.
Proposing that the colonised concept of ‘Future’ is paradoxically limited and unhelpful, and instead explores, without nihilism, the provocation of new possibilities of faith and aliveness in a non-future.
What is it to thrive, celebrate, prepare for and sensorially experience a world with no future? How can this help us experience the present and make it more liveable?
This video series and corresponding photography queers the western art principal of a Still Life – the subject matter of a painting or sculpture that is anything that does not move or is dead. Instead presents a network of Still Lifes as living systems – open, self-organizing, composting, maintained by flows of information, energy, matter, poetics and agency.
Inspired by artist Terike Haapoja’s manifesto "Three Modalities Of Futurelessness" in which Haapoja identifies three key approaches: Melancholy, Hoax, and Surrender, as a framework for living now.