NGMI

vertical HD (1080x1920px / 9:16), colour/audio, 12’00”, 2022

“Who would’ve thought the end of the world
would look like mowed lawns,
a holiday to Greece,
or a new pair of jeans?”

“what a fascinating film–i’ve never seen anything quite like it. i’m very glad to have played a small part in inspiring it!” – Bill McKibben, January 2023.

NGMI is a sequel to Mistakes. The artist talk. NGMI is a string of tableaus, or chapters, connected by transitions with their own roles. 

• Anthem for the End of the World as We Know it
• Long Distance Call
• Grief
  • Cognitive Dissonance
• The Review
  • New Mythologies
• Generational Amnesia
  • Call Again

Mistakes was made during the first pandemic lockdown of Spring 2020, as an acute response to the extraordinary circumstances at the time.

NGMI is expresses post-pandemic sentiments, mainly of disappointment. The pandemic provided an opportunity to implement large-scale and necessary measures to benefit the health of the planet. Instead, society’s desire to return to ‘normal’ has prevailed and change has been stalled.

Both films process the emotional experience of ecosystem collapse through chapters that alternate between information, absurdity and speculation. Mistakes and NGMI also notably include ‘me’ as a narrator, in the form of avatars and superimposed text. Music is prominent in both films, contributing to Bill McKibben’s call for more crisis-aware art: “Where are the goddamn operas?“

My work has revolved around apocalyptic and post-human scenarios for years: my 1998 art school graduate paper already shows signs of what is now recognized as ‘eco-anxiety’. In the context of my doctoral research, I use a former forest destroyed by a climate-induced bark beetle infestation as a lens through which to view these larger issues.

Six months after the clearing of the forest and the beginning of my artistic doctoral research, a global pandemic broke out. The connection between the demise of the forest and the upheaval of a virus was abundantly clear: both resulted from relentless human intervention in natural ecosystems. But where the clear-cut forest has slowly but surely begun to heal itself after the shock of the disappearance of the trees, our society has missed the opportunity to heal the planet that the pandemic offered. Instead, deforestation, oil drilling and overall emissions are at an all-time high.

The effects of climate change and biodegradation are shattering all models and projections. It will take many, many generations to regenerate what is being lost now, if there is anything left.

Writer Amitav Ghosh describes our predicament as not just an ecological crisis, but a crisis of the imagination. It seems that politics, industry and even the general public have lost the ability to imagine different futures and alternative ways of organising society, blocking the path to urgent change. As an artist working with speculative, post-human scenarios for over two decades, my work has long been informed by knowledge from fields such as evolutionary biology, archaeology and palaeoanthropology. It has influenced my perception of time and helps to put current events – and current human behaviour – into perspective: things really can be different.

The often misunderstood genre of science fiction may have a role to play. As artist Kelly Richardson puts it: “What science fiction does brilliantly is it allows us to experience what life might be like, and so I use it to suggest potential futures should we continue down our current trajectory of planetary pillaging and consumption. It allows people to experience that future and in doing so provides a window through which they can look back on our current time, our current priorities with some measure of hindsight and clarity.”

Some chapters of ‘Mistakes. The Artist Talk’ and NGMI take place in a hypothetical space I have come to think of as the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ – a reference to the 1941 short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges. It is an early example of non-linearity, often associated with later scientific concepts such as multiverse quantum leaps or the technological innovation of hyperlinked text. Borges’s garden is not a physical garden, but a hypothetical novel that potentially follows every possible plot line of a suspense story. I use the ‘garden’ as a liminal space, a non-location between spaces, a multi-dimensional crossroads where all options are open but urgent decisions must be made.

The opposite of NGMI is WAGMI: ‘we’re all gonna make it’.

NGMI was also the title of my solo exhibition in Collectie De.Groen in 2022.