Christina Ciupke & Darko Dragičević: Take me to an extinct place

 
The performance space the audience enters afterward is covered in trash as if stepping onto the shore where the ocean has washed it all onto its banks. The center space is left empty, without a form, like bodies of water themselves. Water, the symbol for the subconscious in psychoanalysis, wells the physical and reflects on it what it constitutes here to waste. The performance gives me an immediate saddening mirror image of a trampled body of Earth. The two performers, dressed in shirts one finds in tourist shops, are stepping immersed in their world, jamming to a silent disco that only they can hear from their headsets. They give the impression of being closed off when focusing on the actual performance space and the audience. Their feet stumbling, sweeping, and squashing the trash create an echoing soundscape in the space. A guitarist, Vera Pulido, wanders slowly and aimlessly, tempting the strings of her instrument. Her amplified soundscape washes through the space like waves, and a sense of overwhelming beauty, devastation, and sadness catches me. 
 
Flow: A party without an end
 
In the performance, 3 video projections begin and spiral in and out of the same and repeated story of wildfires in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and Hawaii. These news stories go unnoticed by the two jammers. They are unwilling to stop or cannot, so engrossed in their own experience. Everything seems without an end, stuck in a timeless paradox. Tension constantly builds up and then dissipates without reaching any climax – is it the ignorance of the performers about the disaster happening? A sense of acknowledgment is missing from me. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychological state of ‘flow’ is acquired when the doer is so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The act and state of doing so becomes an end rather than pursuing an achievement. 
 
Feelings of anger, sadness, disbelief, and tiredness wash over me, each as their distinct wave. I want to join the dancers simultaneously, and I want to put an end to their dance. The relations start to tilt upside down in my perception – my eyes mainly focus on the big screens depicting the suffrage, making the performers the performance backdrop – or, more accurately, in their case, the front drop: We see what is happening in the coulisse: the workers, the locals, the burning Earth: filtering the information through the trash that stays acoustic and smelly and the two tourists dancing into exhaustion unaware of their physical limits or the local situation. The high notes sung by the musician give me solace. 
 
Chitchat: something to remember
 
In the third and concluding chapter of the work, the two tourists who have danced their lives away take a rest on deck chairs, chitchatting under a burning sun, their eyes heavy and unable to open in the impending light. They want iced tea, mojitos, and ice cream but need more time to get back up and into action; even in their rest, they want to continue the consumption of limits. I give in to my tiredness, close my eyes to listen to the seagulls, and shut off the dirty water filled with plastic that is now projected onto the walls of my attention. They talk about how they saw some fish. I am left to wonder where. There were no animals in any of the videos. What if this is the consequence of consumption or wasting, and nature begins to exist in our memory and imagination?
 
I feel a sense of elevated anger: frustration with the insensitivity of one’s actions and environment and my desire to keep my eyes closed when coming to terms with accepting both the political and moral implications, as well as the overwhelming sense of beauty in the devastating performance. I remember Korn’s prelude about the degeneration of both her eyes and Mallorca Island. This place, to some, can still be accessed through memories, but to me, only through imagination and the stories of others. I find it accurate to conclude work on mass tourism with chitchatting, an everyday and often unconcerned action that rides on a flowing current. The act of chitchat, like water, is often associated with being empty in itself. Things carried in our lives can bubble out in a stream of thoughtlessness on the personal and public threshold. Thus, its aimlessness highlights the teller’s individual story – bringing to the forefront what lies beyond the story. A sensitive shift to that which underlies the environment or, like in this performance, to the wildfires behind the exhausted dancing bodies or the absent fish in the plastic-filled water. As a listener, this makes me halt my flow and reorientate my relationality to the story and the teller. With these thoughts, I exit the performance venue, still feeling the anger but thankful with a glimmering hope that a good story, I believe, can bring forth inspiring us all.