Electra
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Terminal: A Miracle Play with Popular Music from the End of the World

By Pil and Galia Kollectiv, featuring Jack Barraclough, Katia Barrett, Emily Rachel Beber, Victor M. Jakeman, Joseph Lewis, Rosie Ridgway, Stefan Sadler and Jamie Sutcliffe

19 April 2013, 11.45pm
Rio Cinema
107 Kingsland High Street, London, E8 2PB
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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. A theatrical staging of a morality play for end times and future folk music, it recasts eschatology, or the study of the end of history, as a foundational myth for a future society. ?? 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.

Image: Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Terminal, 2012, courtesy of the artists

About the artists

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work addresses the legacy of modernism and explores avant-garde discourses of the twentieth century and the relationship between art and politics. They often use choreographed movement and ritual as both an aesthetic and a thematic dimension, juxtaposing consumer rites and religious ceremonies. They have had solo shows, The Future Trilogy at Te Tuhi Center for the Arts, New Zealand, Svetlana, at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, 2008 and Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet at The Showroom Gallery, London, 2007. They have also presented live work at the 5th Berlin Biennial and the 5th Montreal Biennial, as well as at Kunsthall Oslo, Arnolfini, Bristol and Late at Tate Britain. They are the directors of artist run project space xero, kline & coma and work as lecturers in Fine Art at the University of Reading.

Terminal is a collaboration with a group of London based artists and musicians:

Jack Barraclough is an artist and a member of the band Halo Halo. Katia Barret is an artist and a member of the bands Peepholes and Cover Girl. Victor M. Jakeman and Emily Rachel Beber are both members of WE, with Pil and Galia Kollectiv. Victor also plays with Whitby Bay, Gold Bars and Human Hair, and Emily is a writer. Joseph Lewis and Stefan Sadler make music together as Swinething, as well as pursuing individual art, writing and curatorial practices. Rosie Ridgway is an artist and curator at Sauna as well as a member of the band Ravioli Me Away.