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Fake & Extinct



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Developed with the support of Centrale Fies and premiered at Live Works 2025

With sound/music/live sensory percussion by Cameron Graham








Fake & extinct is an intermedia performance work that uses the discovery of a broken rainwater

pipe in the Dolomites as a departure point to explore the complex and volatile intersection of the

different temporal regimes written in phantom ink into our present moment.




Conjuring ghostly sites of infrastructural sovereignty—some nourishing, some extractive, some

both and neither, some material, some ethereal—the work creates a sensual enactment of what

legal historian Natasha Wheatley calls 'chronocenosis': the coexistence of competing timescales

within single moments.




Combining sensory percussion, song and music, digital hand puppetry, simulated worlds and

spoken word, the piece traces and palimpsests connections between local water systems and

global histories of colonial extraction, legal violence, and environmental monitoring. Through

amnesia, nostalgia, and longing, it navigates the beautiful monstrosity of temporal hybridity.




The performance moves through chimeric landscapes: a turn-of-the-century Austro-Hungarian

hydroelectric power plant disguised as a Neo-Gothic castle; the maritories that acted and

continue acting as watering holes for Western colonial forces; data centers in rural China

supporting vast computing empires; vending machines installed at thoroughfares, gauging and

fulfilling the needs and desires of passersby.




Proposing performance as a multimodal methodology for historical thinking that is both

rigorously researched and sensorially embodied, fake & extinct renders palpable the spectral

governance that shapes contemporary infrastructure—revealing how power persists through

curated processes of strategic habits of forgetting and remembering across the hybrid

materialities.



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Featuring the Waste Paper Opera Chorus (volunteer chorus)

In a performance of a new arrangement of Li Xian Lang’s ‘Moonlight on the water’ (李香蘭 - 河上的月色)

by James Oldham and Cameron Graham. With words from George Bataille’s ‘Accursed Share Vol III’




Also featuring the voices of

Meili Li (countertenor)

Gary Zhexi Zhang (speaker ‘Hans Kelsen, the Cat’)



With thanks to Sally O’Reilly

And Hot Bodies <3



Running on Cargo