On Chris Korda’s LP “Apologize To The Future”
by Lili Reynaud-Dewar
I’ve been a fan of Chris Korda’s music and Dadaist performance work
since the early 2000s. So, I used my 5 minute video and Korda’s latest
song, “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock,” from her LP Apologize to the Future,
to speed through a 20-year chronology of my views and influences
regarding the huge subjects of procreation, ecofeminism, pedagogy, and
performative activism.
Korda is a techno musician, an environmental and antinatalist
activist, has identified as transgender since 1991, and has been the
Reverend of the Church of Euthanasia since 1992. The Church of
Euthanasia is (or was? I don’t know how active the Church is now) “a
non-profit educational foundation devoted to restoring balance between
Humans and the remaining species on Earth,” and its founding ideology is
“Thou Shalt not Procreate.” The Church has produced a vast array of
political activism material: sermons, street propaganda, protests,
tracts, participation in TV shows (like The Jerry Springer Show,
for instance) and a website that, very early on (for the internet, that
is), was used as an educational and proselytizing media platform, with a
quarterly PDF journal, videos, music, interviews, etc.
At about the same time I got to know the Church, I read Donna
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” In its style, I found strategies similar
to that of Korda’s: emphasis, exaggeration, exacerbation, theatricality;
all were put in use in order to de-essentialize, or de-purify, or
complicate gender and political activism. In its rhetoric, I also found
parallels with Korda’s blurring of borders between species. I also read
Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive,
with its critique of “reproductive futurism,” its embrace of
negativity, and its refusal to see the child as the bearer of innocence
and rejuvenation. In 2013, with Petunia, the feminist
publication I founded with Dorothée Dupuis and Valérie Chartrain, we
curated “Pro-choice,” an exhibition dedicated to Frankenstein and Mary
Shelley, and a critique of the particular type of procreation imperative
that weighs on women in neoliberal societies. All the while, Chris
Korda had disappeared: from 2003 or 2004, she stopped making music, at
least publicly. I remember a 2017 conversation with Claire Van Lubeek, a
former student of mine, on the set of Beyond the Land of Minimal Possessions,
the film we were shooting in Marfa, Texas. Given the subject of this
comedy – the deterioration of land and the distortion of life by art and
gentrification – we wanted to have Korda come and sing “Save the
Planet, Kill Yourself.” But we decided against disturbing someone who
had decided to move away from art production.
Korda returned the year after, in 2018, which is also the year I read Petrolio, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s complex, queer, and ecological “fable,” published 19 years after his murder. At the beginning of Petrolio,
Carlo, the main character, is divided into two male protagonists: both
of them will transform into a woman and back into a man over the course
of Carlo’s voyage through capitalism, oil exploitation, corruption,
degradation, and violence. Pasolini considered capitalism to be an
advanced form of fascism: a cultural, emotional, and ecological
genocide. He developed this parallel in his famous text Disappearance of the Fireflies, using provocative, performative strategies of exacerbation also typical of Korda’s work.
I continue to explore Petrolio with my students: together we
are making a long film, divided into many episodes, about groups of
young people reading Pasolini’s book and sabotaging the emblems of
ecocide capitalism that, together with a mountainous and imposing
natural landscape, surround Grenoble, the high-tech and industrial
“smart city” in which I live. The film describes forms of contagion
between those groups, who repeat the same actions of sabotage –
sometimes done more for theatricality than for actual destruction – one
after the other, over and over again. The film will be signed
collectively under the name Gruppo Petrolio. We would like to ask for
Chris Korda’s permission to use her song “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock” as
the soundtrack of the film: “Just a thin layer / Of oily rock / Is all
we’ll be / If we sleepwalk / So wise up fast / It’s not too late /
Respect the future / Don’t procreate.” [Granted! -CK]
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