Johanna Ackva, Cécile Kobel, Judith Milz ciao²/aoap

A final dance. The last polar bear. The last rain. An entire species is dying out. The pub is empty. You’re left alone at the bar. You won’t have said the things that really matter. Damn it.

ciao²/aoap (pronounced: ciao ciao, as often as possible) is an exercise in saying goodbye. In keeping with Herbert Marcuse’s epitaph, ‘Carry on!’, ciao²/aoap explores saying goodbye as an essential cultural technique and a ritual spanning a lifetime – or beyond.

For the very last time, the artists Johanna Ackva, Cécile Kobel and Judith Milz explore various forms of ending and the inability to end, of successful and failed separations, and of grief both concluded and yet to come. From surrendering to the mourning of personal losses to coming to terms with irreversible global changes (the climate! the heat!), they bring together different dimensions of farewell in texts, scenes and songs, asking who or what can be mourned, where one is best off saying ‘ciao’, and why it’s good every now and then to reflect on what one might be saying goodbye to at that very moment.

A precautionary measure, a form of exposure therapy, a space in which we put roller skates on the spider together and attribute a wordplay to Vanitas, so that we can laugh together at what might be terrifying: it all passes.

The title ciao²/aoap refers to John Cage’s ORGAN²/ASLSP (as slow as possible), a piece for organ which, since 2001, has been performed as the slowest and longest-running piece, spanning over 639 years. A bittersweet consolation for all those who, at the end of the evening, will be sad that it’s already over: something continues, will continue, even when we are gone.

• In German, English, Swiss German and Italian