Nests For The End Of The World - SURVIVOR 2020
2020
Cindy Baker and Ruth Cuthand
When humans imagine the end of the world, we imagine war and violence. We imagine being taken over by aliens from outer space. We imagine instantaneous, spectacular, cataclysmic environmental collapse. We think of the end of the world as sexy; exciting.
We are not warriors. The end of the world is soft and quiet and slow and we are soft and quiet and slow, and we sit in the hot tub and try to relax, and slow down, and talk about how to take care of each other while we watch the world slowly die, while we slowly die.
Self-care is denial. Self-care is a neoliberal racket demanding that we take personal responsibility for the fact that we are breaking down because the world is breaking down. Self-care is a box of band-aids on our gaping souls; counter-productive and wasteful and essential to our survival. We indulge in order to allow ourselves relief from the crushing weight of the end of the world which is already here, already unstoppable.
The end of the world is not a threat or a fantasy; the end of the world is now. There are a dozen apocalypses bearing down on us and we can’t stop them all. We are doing our best to fight them. We are doing our best to survive them. We are doing our best. We are in too deep to dig ourselves out but we can’t stop digging. We can’t shop our way out of this, but we can’t stop shopping.
The installation consists of a fully functional 6-person hot tub with custom deck and stairs, a 30-minute-long video featuring scrolling text outlining hundreds of facts and factoids about the destruction of the planet and the end of the world, a LED neon sculpture of an oil derrick spurting oil, a light sculpture featuring an abstract representation of anthrax just below the surface of the permafrost, changerooms with a neon Aesthetics sign inside, and a small waiting room with a grassy carpet and lit word-bubble sign shouting “WOO” using the channel letters from Edmonton’s old Woolworth’s department store, demolished in the 1980s.
