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Helge Peters and Johannes Büttner’s “Peak Panik” afford one an encounter, through a collection of works of performance art, with the question of subjective life in the context of ongoing crises – whether economic, political, existential, or environmental. Through the intersection between aesthetics and politics; and their mutual production of subjectivity; Peters and Büttner raise a set of questions that serve as heuristics in order to avoid further succumbing to those vague discourse that circulate around terms such as ‘anthropocene’ and ‘crisis.’ Peak Panik asks: what are we to do, identify or utilize? Is the task to identify the motor of history or to utilize it? To identify one’s gender or to weaponize it? To identify with peaceful non- violence or to understand that no side of our ongoing civil war holds a monopoly on violence?
Their answer to these questions is clear: don’t identify, utilize! Sift through and salvage what you can from the junkyards of anthropocenic/digital capital so that you may be able to breathe in the toxic air of our future collapse and be capable of waging a war upon the wastelands that remain. As they state at the outset of their piece: “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 identification, security and control. Along this journey we might just lose the Self and find each other.” The analytic and pragmatic resources one can expect to find here are numerous: coal as the motor of history; how oil becomes a class traitor; the pleasures of insurrection and why we need to rekindle a love for the passions; the digital trap of opting for identification instead of utilization as seen through the 56 gender options, courtesy of Zuckerberg himself.