Sunsets: Cosmogonies and Ends of Worlds

The films in the festival, Sunsets: Cosmogonies and Ends of Worlds articulate themselves across four programmes, subtitled ‘How We Ended’, ‘How We Began’, ‘How We Ended’ and again ‘How We Began’. The repetitions here, as well as the choice of beginning with the end, are all intentional in the context of the festival concept’s overall proposition. They speak of the Earth’s metabolic process of transformation and renewal. Over the course of four screenings, the films observe and understand a world as an organisation of forms, lives, spaces and knowledges – all emergences which are nevertheless always and necessarily temporary.

We learn of the rise and fall of magnificent civilisations, or the wreckages of colonial incursion; much is told us by the silence of those forms of knowing and making worlds that have been erased by time, by power or by catastrophe. Yet, when we experience a world from within it, its end may fall outside of the realm of the thinkable. It may be impossible to imagine our world ending altogether. A near-impossible challenge, it would seem: to imagine ourselves –us here, sharing this quiet moment – as belonging to one such world. The certainties that hold our world together appeared stable for a long time. How do we account, then, for planetary and social breakdown, for the kinds of transformations that we are likely to experience in our, or our children’s, lifetimes?

We note the aporia that befalls the scientific community when species extinction, or climate transformation, outpaces the language available to describe it, in other words, the real outpaces its symbolic scaffolding. Simultaneously, in the political arena, the so-called ‘culture wars’ appear to manifest the disentanglement of semantics, definitions and languages from the political realities and struggles of lived life.

What would taking a metabolic view of today’s multiple crises look, feel and sound like? A view that accounts for endings as just one necessary step in a longer cycle of beginnings and endings, all intertwined, all both constant and constantly changing? The films by the collective Selvagem, spearheaded by Indigenous activist and philosopher Ailton Krenak, offer the conceptual infrastructure for this question, demonstrating that Indigenous cosmologies and insights from Western philosophical and scientific traditions share deep truths about the nature of being.