Simone Aughterlony

Collapse in 5 Acts: there is porn of it

Performance Discourse Art

A person wearing a crown, holding a knife, and with an apple in their mouth stands in the middle of a framework of metal pipes. Stage fog billows into the room from one of the pipes. — © Ali Haji

Halle G / Tanzquartier Wien

What opportunities for transformation lie in the ruins of our world? Among eroded architectures and toppled monuments, the new work by performance maker Simone Aughterlony formulates criticism of the capitalist drive for progress and permanent renewal, and, in contrast, devotes itself to processes of decay.

Amid the fog of fallen pipes and broken monuments are enigmatic figures: the King, the Narrator, the Fairy, the Tourists, the Lack, the Horse, the Architect. Together, they detail a space of opacity, erotics, and fragile connections.

Drawing from Jack Halberstam’s theory of “unworlding”, performance maker Simone Aughterlony seeks to address the aesthetics of collapse and its potential to loosen the body from systems of gender and progress.

Driven by an uncanny numerological significance of the number 5, “Collapse in 5 Acts: there is porn of it” confronts architectural and structural ruination against a backdrop of the capitalist drive for renewal. It invites the public to consider the wreckage of all that we have built and inherited as material for a romance with the future, archive of the past, and sobering recognition for where we are now.

With the kind support of the Swiss Embassy in Austria

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