Lake of Fire

"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."
-Aldous Huxley

Lake of Fire is a fertile, fascinating and multisensory work of video montage about the excesses of the Anthropocene. By creating a dialectical collage that interweaves the words of religious preachers with images of our stressed environment, Neozoon provides a much-needed reflection on the ecocide unfolding before our eyes, in which we are all complicit. Making the repurposing and remapping of images gleaned from the web an integral part of their artistic approach, the collective manages to capture something of the zeitgeist of our current world, always with a deliciously caustic sense of humour. Neozoon mobilizes the vast field of iconographic representations associated with hell to illustrate the fanatical discourses of these devotees, who paint us a portrait of this place of all torments. Their dualistic vision of our world seems childishly absurd at a time when the death knell of our own extinction has never sounded so loud. At a time when the signs of irrevocable climate change seem so obvious, how can we engage in dialogue with those who cloak themselves in wilful blindness fuelled by religious obscurantism? What are the bases for discussion? "No need for a grill, hell is other people", as Sartre once said... Perhaps it's simply Man himself. When we look at the desolate results of the devastation we have caused, we have to admit that we are creating our own hell.

 

Jason Burnham
Tënk editorial manager