Peak Panik documents an ongoing series of performative workshops. Placed in a relation of tactical dis/engagement with the institutional dispositifs of fine art and academic theory production, the gatherings tapped into a ubiquitous sense of crisis pervading our contemporary moment in what increasingly desperate-sounding voices still call Western civilisation.
Encore un effort. Not to achieve progress, but to be done with it already. To more fully inhabit this civilisation’s collapse by retreating from its technologies. To elaborate techniques instead, including war, not as a reactionary lashing out against the Other, but as tactics for dissolving the apparatuses of capture still fixing our subjectivities to government in the moment of its failure. To develop pragmatic ways of reconstructing collective forms-of-life from the scrap he- aps of the age of Man whilst remaining fully aware of the stabilising function of governmental discourses of emergency preparedness, disaster resilience, and individualising prepper cultures.
Peak Panik appropriates fragments salvaged from the collective écriture of our moment – manuals, manifestos, inventories, rumours - to draw partial maps, not only cognitive but material, for navigating crumbling anthropogenic landscapes precariously held in place by a metastasising techno-economy of identi cation, security and control. Along this journey we might just lose the Self and find each other.
