FUTURELESSNESS STILL LIFES: BAT + VIRUS entangles the language and etiquette of gay hook-up culture, American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", and flying foxes or bats as reservoir hosts of past and emerging viruses.
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.