Martina Menegon, *when I am close to you I shiver,* installation shot by Georg Mayer, MAK, Museum of Applied Arts, Wien, 2020

MASS SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE EMERGENCY

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Currently exhibited on VRAL as a machinima, Martina Menegon’s when you are close to me I shiver was originally conceived as a live simulation. Presented as an installation featuring tablets, large screens, and an immersive soundscape designed by Alexander Martzin, when you are close to me I shiver is a multimedia experience bringing together the artist’s key concerns: the body as a site of conflict, self-representation as a political act, and climate change. Menegon imagines a future where humankind is close to extinction, a realistic outcome considering half a century of complete dismissal of climate change by the worlds’ governments. In this live simulation, the world is completely submerged by water, like in a Ballardian nightmarescape.

The survivors converge on a small island to die. Naked and vulnerable, they simply wait for the inevitable end. Such a scenario is both uncanny and familiar: after all, it was inspired by a powerful scene in David Attenborough’s Our Planet (2019) depicting more than 100,000 moribund walruses as they gather onto a small stretch of coast in Northern Russia in 2017 (“20 kilometers of a never ending walrus gathering”, as scientist Anatoly Cochnev described it). Some of the most graphic scenes show walruses falling from cliffs, evoking the image of a “falling man” jumping to his death as New York’s Twin Towers were about to crumble. The walrus gather on this place because of the melting ice in the Arctic: having nowhere to go, they choose death…

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Matteo Bittanti