Since the great explosion, we no longer have any notion of
time. What is the use in counting the years, when it is
impossible to discern day from night? A perpetual cloud of
smoke blocks the sun's rays, casting the planet in an infinite
darkness. The seasons are lost in a continuum of cold colours
and dark temperatures. The origin of the great explosion is
unknown, with some saying it was an instant nuclear war
between now forgotten powers, others claiming divine
punishment or even an extraterrestrial attack. Whatever the
explanation is, it will not change our situation.
What we know for fact, is that the Earth shivered for many
minutes as the sky was flushed with thousands of flashes of
electric lightning before being replaced by this cloud of grey
cloudy dust. Some died instantly, others languished for days,
their skin quickly crumbling. Those who died in the first hours
were the luckiest ones, because they did not need to survive.
They didn't have to tear down to fix things, they didn't have to
abandon to advance, they didn't have to murder to live. We die
a slower death, doomed to err on the side of what the ruins of
late capitalism have left us. Overall, we have to live with the
memory of all that we will never experience any longer, of all
those faces that we will never see again.
To protect ourselves from the day that never ends and the
vampires that dwell in it, we have found refuge in what seems
to have been a junkyard. Metal is an essential protection
against this invisible harm that corrodes our skin and stains our
eyes red, an evil that gradually burdens us. In this heap of
useless metal, in this clatter of sheet metal and rubbish, we are
safe from the dangers of the world. The prowlers do not come
to trouble us in this filthy gloom. Away from the chaos, we build
the outline of a new universe, the genesis of a future that will be
written for us by others, the hybrid forms between a civilization
to come and one that is no more.
In this scrap metal workshop, we are reminded that we are the
waste of a system that has failed to renew itself, we are the sick
excrescence of a common error, we are the haggard residues
of machines that no longer work. This metal that protects us
today is the same metal that led to our downfall. Before the
great explosion, we were pulling minerals from the ground,
smelting and mixing them with other minerals. We had
machines for everything and anything, polluting our
environment. One day, long before the big explosion, we were
told that the Earth had nothing more to offer us, so the
economic crises, pandemics and wars began. This is how the
end started.