→ Fake and Extinct
Developed with the support of Centrale Fies and premiered at Live Works 2025
Collaborative work with Klara Kofen (Live works fellow 2024-25)
Fake & extinct is an intermedia performance work that uses the discovery of a broken rainwater pipe in the Dolomites as a departure point to explore the complex and volatile intersection of the different temporal regimes written in phantom ink into our present moment.
Conjuring ghostly sites of infrastructural sovereignty—some nourishing, some extractive, some both and neither, some material, some ethereal—the work creates a sensual enactment of what legal historian Natasha Wheatley calls 'chronocenosis': the coexistence of competing timescales within single moments.
Combining sensory percussion, song and music, digital hand puppetry, simulated worlds and spoken word, the piece traces and palimpsests connections between local water systems and global histories of colonial extraction, legal violence, and environmental monitoring. Through amnesia, nostalgia, and longing, it navigates the beautiful monstrosity of temporal hybridity.
The performance moves through chimeric landscapes: a turn-of-the-century Austro-Hungarian hydroelectric power plant disguised as a Neo-Gothic castle; the maritories that acted and continue acting as watering holes for Western colonial forces; data centers in rural China supporting vast computing empires; vending machines installed at thoroughfares, gauging and fulfilling the needs and desires of passersby.
Proposing performance as a multimodal methodology for historical thinking that is both rigorously researched and sensorially embodied, fake & extinct renders palpable the spectral governance that shapes contemporary infrastructure—revealing how power persists through curated processes of strategic habits of forgetting and remembering across the hybrid materialities.