Dramaturgy of Extinction: Sentient Landscapes, Spectral Bodies, and Unthought Worlds in Kris Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing)

Abstract

Among the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, perhaps none has been more central than redefining ‘the human’ that this epoch seems to name. It is no secret that the European liberal subject has been the directing force of the Anthropocene and the model from which a global humanity, and its globalising technology, has been envisioned. This essay begins by bringing together a diversity interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives to ask: does the Anthropocene mark the realisation of this homogenous human subject, or its end? Extinction seems constitutive of a climate narrative dominated by a Euro-American imaginary, wherein a fixation on endings suggests the anxieties – and the possibilities – of that imaginary coming to an end as a globalising worldview. Two recent performances by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company, Conversations (at the end of the world) (2017) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) (2019), imagine extinction through scenarios depicting human figures displaced and overtaken by sentient landscapes. Composed of synthetic materials and activated by bio-technical forces, these landscapes scale down a computational planet, embodying an accumulated history of technological progress and human interventions in environments. Extinction, in these works, is not the end, however, but rather the slow dying out of a singular idea of the human subject, if not its singular narrative of technological progress