London Agenda: Pil & Galia Kollectiv @ The Performance Studio

Wednesday 6 July, 20:00

The Performance Studio, The Nines
Copeland Estate, 133 Copeland Road,
Peckham, SE15 3SN

Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World is a film and live performance project exploring the politics of post-apocalyptic fiction, recasting eschatology as a foundational myth for a future society.

Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World, film still

Post-apocalyptic writing and cinema are grounded in an ethos of survivalism. Invoking Rousseau’s state of nature, or time before government, these fictions propose violent scenarios in which nuclear holocaust, environmental catastrophe and other disasters generate an individualistic politics of pure pragmatism, negating the possibility of democratic deliberation. Terminal narrates this familiar scenario, but at the same time questions its validity. The film, shot on black and white VHS at Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn in Cumbria, dramatises a series of conversations between future-historical archetypes about the needs and pressures of the situation in which they find themselves at the end of the world. The performers then gather to play worshipful songs about acid rain, radiation sickness and eating the dog, using a mix of conventional, obscure and makeshift instruments.

In the tradition of books such as Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Arthur M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Terminal imagines artistic expression and new folk traditions for a world to come after the apocalypse. If, as Slavoj Žižek would have it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to think of the end of capitalism, the project juxtaposes these two endpoints to test out how alternative scenarios might emerge from the collaborative practice of making theatre and music against a setting of social collapse.

– words by Pil & Galia Kollectiv, artists, writers, curators

Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Terminal: A Miracle Play
with Popular Music from the End of the World
The Performance Studio
Free, no booking necessary