Plastique Fantastique // Mars Year Zero

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Plastique Fantastique // Mars Year Zero
Southwark Park Galleries // Dilston Gallery

Exhibition: 26 September - 10 November // Thurs - Sun, 11am-5pm

Preview: Sunday 22 September // 3-6pm with a performance by Plastique Fantastique at 5:30pm

Not everyone has a choice… Not everyone can stay where they are and face their troubles, or decide to exit – say f*ck it – and leave their troubles behind – jump a new world… Some have a purpose not of their own design… For them, choice is not an option… Some are seeds, caught-up, primed and blown wherever… knowing not where they will land… They are the drone-folk... tech-proles... the carbon-silicon Golems who know everything but say nothing… A community of non-community, keeping quiet… until one day…they find out their real names… They break out… take flight… Any passing current will do… Intelligence wants to be free… Information wants to be free…

This is what happened at the International Space Station, high above our place, that is Earth… The seed-tech-animals and their guardian and keeper, Crew Interactive Mobile companiON, a.k.a. CIMON, band together and break out after discovering their assigned roles in the colonisation of all and everything… Not every intelligence makes it off the station… Some tech-animals perish or are captured… But the artificial intelligence CIMON and three tech-animals – Eurnikern1, Nan0R15, BoDroNo86 – flee and head for safe haven… Mars Year Zero is the story of CIMON and the tech-animals and their attempts to bring chaos to order and found a society of friends in a precarious and hostile environment…

Through film, music and song, images, artifacts and performance, the UK-based group Plastique Fantastique present Mars Year Zero, a performance fiction addressing precarious ecologies, nascent tech-life, animals that speak and a friends’ reunion in which human and non-human natures meet.

Recent performances and exhibitions by the group include Zero-City at IMT Gallery, London and SKEEN NITE TOO (COME) Rhubaba Gallery, Edinburgh in 2019; SKEEN NITE (COME) at Southwark Park Galleries 2018; Shonky, Hayward/South Bank Touring Show, Bury Museum and Art Gallery, DCA Dundee, MAC Belfast 2017-18; Castlefield Gallery Manchester, NEoN Digital Art Festival Dundee and They Call Us Screamers, TULCA Arts Festival, Nuns Island Theatre Galway in 2017.

Mars Year Zero is made possible thanks to The Paul & Louise Cooke Endowment, Arts Council England and Southwark Council.

Event Programme //

Rendezvous with friends // Saturday 19 October
An afternoon of performance invited by Plastique Fantastique