PANGAEA ULTIMA
Pangaea Ultima follows a field reporter on a tour across newly demarcated P.U. as she describes the recent environmental and cultural changes. Through its present exhibition, P.U. casts an illusory glance at a yesterworld, with mechanical trees reminding us of the once natural forests. In Pangaea Ultima, self-replicating viruses run rampant and harnessing every possible energy source is a necessary livelihood. The reporter laments, accepts, and explains. Nobody had suspected the impending doom.
Narrated by Sarah Wilmer.
– Mary Mattingly
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Pangeae Ultima presents a vision of a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future in which nomadic survivors navigate barren, inhospitable terrains. “When the public finally took notice, it was 43 years ago,” begins the voiceover narration. With this displacement into an imaginary yet eerily plausible future, long after rainforests were transformed into deserts, Pangaea Ultima continues the critique of humanity’s exacerbating role in global climate change, but deepens and complicates it by extending it into the domain of fantasy. An ambiguous sense of time and place productively hinders attempts to fix Pangaea Ultima in relation to present day causalities: are we seeing centuries, or merely months, into the future? Is this our destiny, or simply an otherworldly reminder of what could happen to our civilization? As viewers, we are asked to fill in the temporal gap between today and the indefinite moment at which the video takes place.
Through her video, Mary Mattingly discusses seismic shifts on a continental
scale, but they are as much shifts in understanding as invented plate
tectonics. The moment she imagines—the coalescence of Earth’s
continents into a reconstituted Pangaea—contains a metaphoric resonance,
suggesting a time when, as a species, we will shift our awareness of climate
change and unite in an effort to survive. This return to Pangaea—a
zero-point geological equilibrium before continental drift—and the
return to a society of tribal nomadism, is also evocative of the structure
of a feedback loop, a fundamental unit of networked technologies and a
dimension of our global ecosystem. A property of such self-perpetuating
systems is the capacity for adaptation; in Pangaea Ultima, humans have
found a way to inhabit a hostile and unstable climate, one that existed
before in geologic pre-history and will, ultimately, reoccur. As the nomads
construct paradoxically ramshackle and futuristic dwellings, we are reminded
of a cyclical narrative theme: Creation and destruction are inextricably
interconnected, endlessly reenacted.
Written by Shane Brennan from Rhizome.org's New Climates beginning April 1, 2007.
Pangaea Ultima 1 is currently on view at Ecocentric, Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, CA and was just on view at Galerie Adler, Frankfurt, Germany.
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