Oliver Zahn: Great Acceleration

In the organizer's words:

In autumn 2024, a large-scale, state-organized earthquake exercise took place in southern Germany. Experts from all over Europe demonstrated how to cope with a tectonic catastrophe for a public of journalists and politicians.

Oliver Zahn's performance Great Acceleration takes this exercise, which lasted several days, as the starting point for a walk. It leads along linguistic paths through devastated infrastructure and man-made tragedies, falling through the cracks in the fault lines of state security promises and finding itself back in an unstable landscape. Here, the temporalities of those unstoppable geological processes prevail, which make the belief in civilization's progress and technological acceleration appear as desperate attempts to escape from one's own future. The performer Toni Jessen recreates this movement as a stage walk - as an attempt to bring the human body closer to inhuman temporal horizons.