DESCRIPTION/RATIONALE

Ever since billions of years ago when those first cells developed a way of recording for prosperity their recipes for success, ever since we made that first tool or used that first club, man has been destined to progress, to evolve. From single cell organism to beyond space – we’re somewhere in between.

Yet one would think that, whereas with ‘animals’ evolution seems to be a process of unconscious positive adaptation based on the dictates of their given external circumstances, our unlikely transcendence of an ‘animal’ level of consciousness, if you will, would have endowed us with the good sense to take at least some of the variables of our evolutionary process into our own hands. On the contrary, sometimes it seems as though we’ve lost the point somewhere along the line. That we’re stuck in a state of limbo, suspended permanently in consciousness between things that have happened such as technological/biological advances and their consequences and/or practical applications. Sometimes it seems as though we haven’t evolved at all or, at the very least, that we’ve taken a couple of wrong turns along the way. But then again, in the same way that our mothers never said that life was going to be all peaches and cream, no one ever said that the twist in the cocktail of evolution was going to be a positive one. Perhaps everything is perfect as it is and whatever twists may come were meant to be. What is more than certain is that no one is near being ‘in control’, no one except perhaps that human animal incarnation, greed. And, on the sixth day, greed gave birth to blind pursuit in the western colonial mould that has opened the door for a cultural and human void perhaps best described by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Californiacation as follows: Space may be the final frontier but its born in a Hollywood basement.

Why do we bother to hold events like the `World Summit on Sustainable Development (aside from its function as a large-scale business party for high-level oil execs)? Well certainly the weather can’t. For even love is questionable in the days of our lives where value systems are increasingly based on media stereotyped materiality and model citizenship defined by material wealth and good looks. How do we fail to see that we live in a closed system where the pain of our fellow woman/creature is our own and where taking must be replaced, very smartly, with giving and nurturing if we are to survive?

Against this backdrop, Project Apology is a video work in progress that involves the documentation of an undertaking to apologize, in person and as a self-appointed representative of the human race, to members of all of the non-human animal species on the planet that are being adversely affected by human activity. Obviously such a mandate includes every last livi ng creature and, as such, presents a very tall order, the unmanageability of such an undertaking becoming a big part of the content of this piece – in pushing for a greater degree of acknowledgement of damage done and acceptance of the urgent need for responsible change. Once completed (in the course of the following week), we would hope that the project will be successful in its use of satire as a means to hit home a message, whose seriousness is evident in National Geographic’s estimation that 17 species of plants and animals are becoming extinct every hour, and the fact that the adverse effects of human industry that we are currently experiencing are as a result only of damage done up until 40 years ago.

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