This Too Will Pass

This new piece by Marcel Weber (MFO) features a score from vocalist Lyra Pramuk, and will be on display at Berlin Atonal's Metabolic Rift exhibition.

Several car wrecks are distributed in a large space, their arrangement faintly reminiscent of a parking-lot rave. Strong haze fills the air, it is difficult to recognise things. The cars are dead skeletons, weathered or burnt, yet their sound-systems are magically working: fully ablaze. Underglow and interior lights are running, small items shimmer.
An eerie scenery to cautiously explore.

The work centres around memories of automobile rave culture; a way of the young to escape the girdle of traditional views and expectations. Driving off into the night, they discover and experiment with music, drugs, sexuality. Yet unwittingly staying in established frameworks: freedom by consumption. And with it in a mechanistic understanding of the environment. Grab, use, trash.

A hope for transformation runs as an undercurrent through this installation, primarily expressed by decay. It parallels a feeling of the end of youth. The ultimate end of automobile rave culture coming full circle.

PAST PRESENTATIONS

25th Sept - 30th Oct 2021 - Metabolic Rift, Kraftwerk Berlin, DE

NOTES

“ This is quite a personal piece, a reflection about my own youth. Automobile rave culture as a means to run away and discover an alternative life.
Presented dream-alike as it appeared to me in a dream: an apparition in a post-apocalyptic setting. I've interpreted this as what car culture also means, environmental destruction.

The installation was on display in two alternating modes. Most of the time it rests in the Post Anthropocenic one, which sees the cars as decaying skeletons in an apocalyptic haze, a million years old. And yet occasionally a transformation flashes up, a leap back in time, into a surreal underwater-alike state – a memory fragment. The two states don't line up, and yet, like in dreams, they do. The second state is called Mind Pops:
The underfloor lighting dances and flickers, while plenty of memorabilia appear, stickers and CDs from the 90ies I still had somewhere, someone's old bong, borrowed items of eroticism and fetish, neon glow sticks (long over date, yet under UV light..), glitter, books.
For that second state, the active one, Lyra wrote a brilliant piece of music. A submerged longing voice oscillates in a rhythm of breathing, like an eerie after-echo, with waves of sub-bass rolling up, resonating with Kraftwerk's insides and rattling on old steel.

During the making of this installation another focus was on sustainability. Almost everything is second-hand, recycled or returned afterwards. Fun fact: the car wrecks were rentals. The exhibition saved them from their demise in a the scrap metal press - for a time.  ”–m

Some references:

"This too shall pass" is a Persian adage translated and used in multiple languages. It reflects on the temporary nature, or ephemerality, of the human condition. It is known in the West primarily due to a 19th-century retelling of Persian fable by the English poet Edward FitzGerald. In it, a sultan requests of King Solomon a sentence that would always be true in good times or bad; Solomon responds, "This too will pass away".

Panta rhei (πάντα ῥεῖ), meaning "everything flows."
Heraclitus recognised the fundamental changing of objects with the flow of time (i.e., impermanence) and the philosophical issue of becoming.

"Allegory of the cave" / Plato's Cave
In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall and give names to them. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, in lack of a more accurate representation of the real world. However, the inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.