In the fall of 2024, a large-scale, state-organized earthquake drill took place in southern Germany. Experts from across Europe demonstrated, for an audience of journalists and politicians, how to respond to a tectonic disaster.
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The performance Great Acceleration by Oliver Zahn takes this multi-day exercise as its point of departure for a journey: it moves along linguistic pathways through devastated infrastructure and human-made tragedies, slipping through the cracks in the fault lines of state security promises.
It finds itself in an unstable landscape where the temporalities of unstoppable geological processes prevail – processes that make belief in civilizational progress and technological acceleration appear as desperate attempts to escape one’s own future.
The performer Toni Jessen reenacts this movement as a performative traversal of the stage – an attempt to bring the human body into proximity with inhuman temporal horizons.
