A Plurally-Determined and Sustainable Other-World: Omsk Social Club and Alexander Iezzi’s ‘Fucking Hardcore Self-Divinization Weekender’

Give Rise To ist a collaborative performance series by Omsk Social Club und Alexander Iezzi. Inspired by French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, the project merges the recordings of a two-day live-action roleplay (LARP) formed into an immersive installation and activated by apocalyptic performances by Dylan Kerr several times a day over a weekend in June. The work is an expanded form of architectural narrative, powered by speculative materials, extraterrestrial choreography, LARP techniques and recursive vocabulary in tandem to provoke a critical form of cosmic imagination.

Taking Artaud’s philosophy of disrupting the relationship between audience and performer through strong physical gestures, non-harmonic sounds and effects, Omsk Social Club and Iezzi wrote a script set within a fictitious sunken continent named Mu. Immersed in this mystical world, sixteen participants wearing black headphones depict eight characters, one role played by two actors—splitting the voice and body across different people over a two-day LARP. This changing of identity architecture creates a complex network of embodied parallels by engaging in many temporal registers through shifting scales and repeated rhythms.

Each day in Graz, a sonic performance resembling a mystical initiation rite for this weekend series opens the video installation. Hymn-like with suspended and elongated syllables, rhythmic chanting and non-sequential singing weave together to create a melismatic ballad — every note an opportunity to induce a hypnotic trance in the listener. Sound carries a whole range of possible knowledge — spatial, conceptual, affective, temporal, experiential, scientific, acoustic, and speculative threads can reside within. Embarking on a kind of sonic pilgrimage, Nubus, a character from Mu performed by Kerr, leads visitors from a central square through the streets of Graz and into the exhibition, circling the installation once before disappearing into the night.

In this vibration of characters, each participant creates experiences for the others, guided by the Artaudian script. Designed with branching storylines that intersect throughout the action, episodic alignments between characters emerge as they choose how the story unfolds. “Mu is a time pocket of its and your own making,” declares the narrator, whose voice is loud and imperious. During the LARP, the camera is used as a tool to facilitate analysis and contemplation of the action. Only sound recordings were made on the first day of the roleplay, and on the second day, only film without sound. The recordings made of this LARP are the basis material for the immersive installation on exhibit in Graz — collaged together to form a portal into the action.

This resulting four-channel video, Fucking Hardcore Self-Divination Weekender (2022), unfolds across four large screens in a circle suspended from the ceiling of Halle Für Kunst Steiermark. Eight bean bag chairs rest on a felt circle in the centre; I sit down on one, knowing the viewer’s commitment is crucial to the work. Blank screens at first, then transmission sounds come in, scratchy and electric, as though broadcasting from far away. This is a new continuum. You enter it: a spectrum of extraterrestrial locations and posthuman actors connected through sonic threads emerges with a wide-angle shot of an abandoned indoor swimming pool filled with pale yellow-brown sand. The characters — Tatum, Charlie, Angel Jaylin, Asa Fischer, Indigo Lennox-James, Salem, Amari Gavyn, and Eden Dagon — improvise their archetypal roles in various scenarios in this decrepit pool, at first timidly emerging from the surrounding changing rooms and then slowly making their way into the pool’s sand-filled basin.

The artists chose these characters from a tarot pull, they tell me. In the LARP, a single bell begins a series of eight “decadence sessions” — one for each steward to stage improvised actions across eight aeons — collectively decoding fragmented information from the instructor. The narration is sparse, and the stage directions surreal. The artists propose a complex system of cyclical stages through which aeons pass, each characterised by specific forms of social and artistic activity. As we enter this cosmos, the instructor muses, “how can the end already be in the middle of the beginning?” In asking this question, the cyclical imagination unfolding before me offers itself as an interpretative mechanism, a provocation in thinking aside, underneath, and beyond chrononormative understandings of time.

Here, off-world breakouts, side-quests and sub-plots create embodied ruptures where the characters energetically, mythically, and corporeally explore their agency. In making a new possibility-world, OMSK Social Club and Iezzi introduce themes of repetition and reformulation to leapfrog and zigzag away from time’s imposed linearity. Fucking Hardcore Self-Divination Weekender blends epic lengths of time with dystopian presents and new materialist futures, where sand and sound come together as fellow travellers through alternate temporal ontologies.

An entrancing sonic state emerges within the spatiotemporal fiction unravelling across the four screens in front of me. The narrator informs us that we are entering the first aeon and Tatum’s decedent session, stating, “this is your benevolent instructor speaking. Inputting code begins…” In these apocalyptic scenes, the formal structures of time collapse, pulsating to become loose and granular like the sand that blankets the pool’s stage. The voiceover continues, “TATUM THIS ONE IS FOR YOU…” impressing that each person (this time Tatum) are co-architects of this multimodal fiction. All the eight aeons serve a character arc, set in motion when the pedagogue exclaims, “THE DECADENCE SESSION IS NOW OPEN.”

Reality and all its attendant authenticities is an oppressive space-time compared with this roleplay’s flight of the imagination. In LARP terminology, the word “bleed” represents a gray zone between fiction and reality, and Fucking Hardcore Self-Divination Weekender takes place in this textured space. The entire roleplay forms a cycle: each aeon—a small fragment of Mu’s time pocket—returns to the beginning. Repetition and circulation, in which one aeon leads into the other, produce a kind of improvised play with no audience and no end. Characters perform and mirror repeated yet unrehearsed actions: sweeping sand, chewing gum, moving sand with hands, looking through binoculars, dancing, jogging in place, walking, and wrestling.

In this sand-filled pit, narrative objects aid and abed the codification of the aeons. Around the game area, a white jacket hangs; in the sand sits a drum, fake white flowers, an umbrella, an iron, a white stool, a wood basket, a black suitcase, a red chalice, and a purple giraffe stuffed toy. These items symbolically constitute specific elements in the story world—labelled by the instructor as unique objects “for circulation and exchange as well as mass exhibition and collective reception.” Having now entered the fourth aeon, it is Asa Fischer’s, a cosmic magician, decedent session. “THE DECADENCE SESSION IS NOW OPEN.”

From birth, we become locked into a calendar’s date or a clock’s time. We function in a standardized time-keeping system using Google and Microsoft Teams calendars. Bureaucratic scheduling, linear temporality and obedience to digital and mechanical clock time are the norms. These dominating constructions of chronological order have enforced an understanding of time as outside of the body. The mechanics of this LARP alternatively embody time-spaces as omnidirectional, “as things that are inside us and in relation to the world in which we are situated.” It is a thinking and a practice geared toward equitable and sustainable socio-temporal models.

In the cadence and tone as before, the narrator repeats, “this is your benevolent instructor speaking. Inputting code begins…” We enter the eighth aeon; this one Eden Dagon’s, “THE DECADENCE SESSION IS NOW OPEN.” In this last aeon — as with each one that came before it — repetition and reformulation function as pedagogical methods of resistance against notions of a linear, progressive, and globally-synchronized time. Slippages between what’s to come and what hasn’t yet imploded fold upon each other — an eternally recycling present slides between bodies and across signs, contributing to a more plurally-determined and sustainable other-world. Meaningful explorations and their explorative research findings begin for me exactly when employing these mechanisms.

The feeling of a new bodily language emerges through each character’s maze of gestures, postures, airborne cries, gyrations and turns. These combine to affect emotion and the unconscious — much like a dream. Upon leaving the space, I bend my head to look skyward, realising that the cosmos of this work is not just in Mu but here within us.