Apocalyptic Encounters
New Now
In September 2021, CAPAS contributed to the New Now festival of digital arts at Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany, specifically to the conference “Another End is Possible”, which was an integral part of the festival. The festival invited international artists for a one-month fellowship and addressed the structural changes in society, symbolized by the location Zeche Zollverein and the decay of the coal industry. CAPAS’ contribution consisted of two parts: 1) An innovative 360°-movie “Apocalyptic Encounters” exploring the intersection of art, science, apocalypse and coal. It is built as a collage around interviews with five artists from the festival, impressions from the Zeche Zollverein location and scientific statements on the overall context. The film was produced by the CAPAS team, in cooperation with this year’s fellow Thomas Lynch. 2) A panel on “500 years of (Post-)Apocalypse in Latin America”, picking up on the anniversary of the fall of the city of Tenochtitlan in August 2021. The panel included academic presentations by CAPAS director Dr. Robert Folger and fellow Dr. Alejandra Bottinelli, plus an artistic presentation by Mexican artist Rojo Cordova who was invited to the festival specifically for this part.
Apocalyptic Encounters
The history of coal is the history of the world. It is the history of extraction, of industrialisation, of colonialism and a way of humans relating to the rest of the natural world. It initiates a dependency on fossil fuels that we are struggling to unlearn. It created a world and sowed the seeds of that world’s destruction. In this sense, coal is an example of what Jason Moore calls ‘cheap nature’: a ‘civilizational strategy that is dependent on ‘uncommodified human and extra-human natures (slaves, forests, soils)’ that are appropriated, accumulated and exploited. A ‘new now’ requires the end of ‘cheap nature’. It requires the end of the world. The setting of Zeche Zollverein represents the possibility of this NEW NOW.
Another world is possible, as humans and non-humans find ways to coexist in the remnants of the old. The Jewish scholar Jacob Taubes writes that apocalypticism is the revelation of the contingency of the world. The world appears to us as all that is possible – the exclusive reality. The apocalypse is not a coming catastrophe, but the revelation that the world is not all that there is. The apocalypse is not about the future, but about the way that our ‘now’ is already filled with the possibilities of newness and ways of resisting the world. We explored this intersection through apocalyptic encounters of past and future, of the ends of worlds and new worlds arising and of art and science on the occasion of the NEW NOW Festival on Zeche Zollverein in 2021.