kiki kouniari

2022, Single-Channel Video 

Three figures are sitting inside a car, next to a lake. The car will not start, and they cannot go anywhere. Most importantly it seems that they fail to understand why their will to leave is not enough to make the car moving. At the end, as they find themselves at the bottom of the lake, they utter their final words: “Damn it”.

The work refers to modernity’s failure to take its deadlocks and crises (environmental or others) seriously; an impasse that Chomsky has named as humanity’s ‘drive to species suicide’. Although the political reasons for such failure are not examined here, what is examined is the type of thought that supports this impasse: a combination of infantile denial and of popular metaphysical psychology (culminating in prescriptions of the type “believe and will become true”).

As the protagonists’ drama unfolds, it appears that they are incapable to see through a way out of the deadlocks and they prefer to drown in the water of the lake than do anything which might change their circumstances. The use of satire and humour aims to stress this irrationality.