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It’s an absurd scene, three comfortably emerging millennial artists, sipping drinks in a gallery while exchanging bootleg survivalist jargon, indulging a dire paranoia under the veneer of our casual social context, but I guess that’s exactly what the “discussion around the collapse of civilization” looked like for us at the time.

It’s easy to condemn the toxicity of “prepper” culture: its patriarchal violence, its absurd delusions, its submission to the logic of necro-capitalism. But at the same time, we all hear the same alarms bells ringing. So we set out to make a show that digs into some of the iconography, jargon, materiality and sensory worlds of “prepper” culture, hoping to satiate our own curiosity and examine some of its bizarre contours.

With each iteration of the show, I used my project resources to learn a new so-called “survival skill”, exploring it deeply through research, training and paraphernalia in hopes of achieving some level of expertise, explored through my artistic practice. This has been my pretext to acquaint myself with many skills I was curious about, like water distilling, trap building, marksmanship, etc, honing them through a critical and often collaborative artistic process. By entering a dialogue with these practices, I hope to make space for more people to join in, so we can create our own narratives of collapse.

It has been a deeply strange experience keeping this project alive in this moment when the subject matter is so urgent and our individual perspectives so irrelevant. Every human on earth knows more about prepping and survival, whatever that means, than they did six months ago.

I work actively to penetrate the macho veneer of survivalism and make space to insert my own queered, pluralist fantasies.