It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognise them in their early stages.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942.
Contemporary culture struggles to imagine alternatives to what lies ahead. One response to that failure is the seduction of apocalyptic thinking: the romantic vision of spectacular collapse, the promise of great ruptures. It is everywhere in contemporary discourse. It seeps through right-wing politics and through the language of climate change and mass extinction alike. For at least two decades, these visions have saturated academic discourse, artistic practice, and popular culture.
And yet real endings seem to follow a different logic. The shifts that reshape the world are often imperceptible until they have already happened: no announcement, no spectacle, no shared moment of recognition. This performance lives in those moments. When we still believe in the continuity of the world, while the ground beneath us has already cracked.
Endgame Assembly unfolds across a scenic landscape, created and designed in collaboration with artist Maria Jerez.
It starts with events that bring imminent realities to the foreground: a crack in the earth’s crust, a crowd gathering to demand a president’s resignation, the arrival of a galleon on the coast of Virginia in 1607, a walk during a pandemic, a failed lecture by Antonin Artaud, an afternoon of shopping in October.
These events are simultaneous, presented as the source of changes that will reshape the world forever. Endgame Assembly is a slow unveiling of their unfolding.
more information and reservations: almost summer festival
- concept & direction
- david weber-krebs
- performance
- paula almiron, maria jerez, david weber-krebs
- narration
- sonia si ahmed
- spatial design
- maria jerez
- dramaturgy
- jonas rutgeerts
- technique
- hans valcke
- production assistance
- nick von kleist
- thanks to
- petar sarjanović, jan fedinger, marko gutić mižimakov, famke dhont
- residencies
- kunstenwerkplaats, monty kunstencentrum, kaap kunstencentrum.
- production
- outline
- co-production
- c-takt, buda kunstencentrum
- with the support of
- flanders, state of the arts
- duration
- approx. 3 hours
- language
- english