TEOTWAWKI

The end is near: Climate change, hyperinflation, sun flare or class war … official media and conspiracy theorists all agree: Something will happen. Soon. What to do? Most of us trust that somehow everything will just go on. But not the preppers, a rapidly growing movement of mostly white, heterosexual, affluent Americans, who expect very concrete catastrophes and get ready for them: They build nuclear fallout shelters, make tomato preserves, stockpile machine guns and armor their SUVs. To watch them on Youtube, trying to preserve their authoritarian nuclear families into a post-apocalyptic future is as bizarre as it is unsettling.

Are there alternatives? Burmester & Feigl ask in their new performance series: How do we want to live after disaster strikes (if we survive)? Will all those models of fair, egalitarian, collaborative  living together that we experimented with for the last 20 years be worth anything, or are they merely a luxury capitalism grants us to keep us quiet? In the beginning of each performance of TWOTWAWKI the wheel of misfortune turns and determines the crisis Burmester & Feigl will have to deal with that night. With their tried and tested mix of performance art and critique they take their audience on a journey into a different end time. From sounds and texts he finds live on stage and on the Internet, Hamburg based musician Mark Boombastik generates an appropriately apocalyptic soundtrack for the catastrophe.

IDEA, PROJECT MANAGEMENT, PERFORMANCE Jörn J. Burmester, Florian Feigl MUSIC, PERFORMANCE, SOUNDS Mark Boombastik COMPANY MANAGEMENT Joy Harder PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO Chistopher Hewitt

A production by Burmester & Feigl in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten. Special thanks to our media partners Jungle World and taz.die tageszeitung.

Foto © Chistopher Hewitt