100 Seconds to Midnight

Video HD, 12 minutes, sound.

In the last years my attention has strongly turned to the subjects of how, now and in the future, humans relate to other living beings, other natural elements, leading back to two basic questions: 1) what is the essence of definitions such life, person, human? and 2) how will humanity survive the rapid changes in the Anthropocene? I am working on two large installations, one about the dimension of human life in contrast to the age and power of Earth as mineral, temperature, movement; the other, about how we will survive ourselves in times of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2011). I have been making videos, video installations and games for a long time. Now, I am merging the ideas of game and video to a fake videogame about the end of the world. The work you see here, the video, is a direct response to the exhibition invitation, in Melbourne, and the project started with a web formulary asking all participating artists: “if you would have all resources in the world what issues would you solve” – all of us answered that we would solve environmental problems, and fight against necropolitics or social injustice. Because all these themes are familiar to my work, I am making a fantasy videogame in which or all of us win or all of us lose.  The process of creating this video, 100 Seconds to Midnight, using the input of seven other artists has been a game itself. Based on the narratives of my fellow artists, of how they saw their time at SomoS and in Berlin, where we all came together, the characters and a system of “points earning” were developed . The idea is that we gain endless resources as more we relate to each other, as we learn to exist as inhabitants of Planet Earth with all its complexities, as the quality of respect we are exercising matures, as we understand and assume how women, from totally different backgrounds, can dream and work to create moments to fully experience utopia-like sororities.

The seven artists are:

Corinna Berndt
Cynthia Arrieu-King
Dongyan Chen
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang
Rochyne Delaney McNulty
Shraddha Borawake
Sophie Morrow
(+me, Marcia Vaitsman)

Sound developed by Enrique Bernacchini.
Character illustration by Guilherme Caldas.
“Singularity” design by Pedro Pousada.
Videos recorded by Marcia Vaitsman and Franz Pascher.
Concept and image by Marcia Vaitsman.

SOON at Trocadero Art Space in Melbourne, Australia.