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THE END OF THE PRESENT T This publication draws together critical H reflection, speculative fiction, and collective E research to consider the ‘long crises’ of capitalism and the environment. It explores E the different forms of time in which N financial and environmental crises are D located, and how we as humans experience these massive events. O F Curator and artist Angela Chan and artist, writer and lecturer Emily Rosamond present T their own takes on time and crises, each H in response to the question ‘when does a E crisis begin and end?’ Emily Rosamond’s essay, Swarm Signals, connects astrophysics P to financial markets to question causality R and influence. Angela Chan’s short story, E Blurred Events, takes us to a near future in S which pandemic time blurs world politics. E N Jumping off from The End of the Present, T an online residency with Arts Catalyst, our quasi factual writing runs throughout this publication. Each narrative develops research undertaken by participants in public online co-research workshops where we collectively mapped events across recent and deep timescales. Our texts are a time(un)line of connections, which attempt to unravel cause and effect, and undo linear readings of history. Ruth Beale & Amy Feneck, The Alternative School of Economics 2 T H E E N D O F T H E P R E TIME(UN)LINE S E N The Alternative School T of Economics 3 T PINK ICE H E The Antarctic Treaty System, the post- colonial promise to ‘continue forever to E be used exclusively for peaceful purposes’ A N ends in 2048. It is 27 years until the end of D forever. Is this the point where the absolute chaos of ownership and self interest comes O forward? F The legacy of the ‘Heroic Age’, 1895- T 1914, explored in the book Gender on Ice H by Lisa Bloom, is a perception of Antarctic E polar exploration as ‘integral to the social construction of a distinctive nexus of P white manhood and nationalism’ and R ‘crucial to reifying a particular form of E white masculinity’. B The whiteness of its S endeavour is as white as the landscape. E N In Mesozoic time, the Antarctic Peninsula is T covered in lush rainforest – pine trees, ferns and mosses in the undergrowth, ginkgos and cycads. In summer 2017, meltwater surges through cracks in the Larsen Ice Shelf, and a vast iceberg, A68, breaks free and spirals north. As the iceberg melts, it threatens phytoplankton, and in turn krill, and in turn seals, penguins and whales. After four years, it disintegrates near the island of South Georgia. C Klaus Dodds’ book Pink Ice documents the politics of how – in 1908 and 1917 – the Antarctic Peninsula and wind-blown 4 island chains of the South Atlantic are incorporated into the pink-tinted British Empire maps. In the Handbook on the Politics of Antarctica he and the other authors describe the region as ‘unavoidably a political arena in relation to all activities on and off the ice, rock, air and waters that are assumed to materially compose D Antarctica.’ 1775, South Georgia, uninhabited, is claimed for the King of England by Captain James Cook in HMS Resolution. He leads the first landing, survey and mapping of South Georgia. Whereas colonial practices in more northerly latitudes are largely based on ‘disempowering indigenous communities, establishing property regimes, building fences and hedges and managing new environments’ in the most southerly regions, BLURRED EVENTS harvesting and territorial claims are ‘ends as well as means.’ E Angela Chan On 19 March 1982, a group of Argentinian people arrive at Leith Harbour in South Georgia and raise the Argentine flag on the island. It is occupied and retaken by the British Army during the Falklands War. Two wildlife film-makers, working in an isolated part of the island before the invasion, are evacuated by a helicopter to HMS Endurance. In 2013, teams of Norwegian government shooters and Sami reindeer herders cull all 3,500 reindeer in South Georgia. Introduced by Norwegian whalers in the early 20th T century for food and sport hunting, the H animals are later seen as a pest, damaging E the island’s flora and wider ecosystem. E In a climate similar to the 21st Century, N the Lower Paleolithic era, a huge iceberg D cleaves from the East Antarctic Ice Shelf and into the ocean, causing sea levels to rise O over three meters. As night set in, C settled into their habitual blue light scroll in F bed. Speech – article – report. ‘Escaping the Jaws of Death: Ensuring Enough Water in 2050’... ‘PM Increases Defence T Funding in the Teeth of The Pandemic’... ‘Children in England H Going Hungry with Schools Shut’. Headlines were all that actually E occupied the main webpages, now that only a few billionaires were the key stakeholders of the country’s media, far from P the free and independent press. C felt particularly angry about R tonight’s headlines. The state had just declared an extra £16.5 E billion spending for the defence sector, barely two weeks after S it had finally u-turned on offering free school meals. It took E campaigners months to get the decision overturned, and when N it finally was, the quality and amount was pitiful. C also read T about the state’s cuts to international aid, 93% in Sahel region, 67% in Syria, 63% in Libya, and the list goes on. Aid was already the state’s disguised refusal to apologise with concrete reparations for colonisation, war, extractions, C thought, and now there was no longer even a need for pretence of charity anymore. All this redirected money... to fuel more war? Lately, there was an unspoken realisation that events were happening without endings. The emergence of crisis events didn’t announce themselves with much fanfare – there were so many overlapping at once. Instead, they pressed down as infinitely accumulating physical and mental weights on everyone (except those profiteering through The Contracts). These became known as the Blurred Events, always beginning, staying but never ending. Citizens and grassroots organisers persisted through, despite seeing no end in sight. 6 T It was as if a fog had submerged the road ahead and behind, H and people could only move forward, concentrating on the most E immediate next moments. When they had adjusted to the fog and momentum of travel, their cautionary and outstretched arms would E get tired, but remain on guard to self-protect at all times. They had N to continue to move anxiously towards the unrecognisable future, D where endings to their ordeals never seemed to come. O In one recent case of a Blurred Event, a mental health nurse was F reported to have been fined £10,000 for breaking the Rules, by protesting in a public square against the meager 1% pay increase for T frontline health workers. C felt that most individuals online and H in person chatted about it with empathy and anger, yet exchanges E soon resulted in hopeless sighs as the next Blurred Event came. People asked why there was a scarcity of public sector funds, and P demanded the state to rechannel spending towards adequate wages R for frontliners. Yet again, it became a deadlock of time, energy E of the people and inaction from the state, who aimed to blur the S people and issues away. E N C leant the postcard against their glass of water and tilted the T matte image towards the setting sunlight, as if the shadows could be hiding any clues. All that was printed on it was tomorrow’s date in DD/MM/YYYY format. But nothing else indicated the significance of tomorrow. Although it was named and addressed to C, there was no product or service advertised. C had a hunch that it wasn’t as simple as some brand’s abstract marketing strategy, so they could only wait for tomorrow to arrive. Nothing in C’s schedule tomorrow warned of a potential surprise either. C would be volunteering at the Food Hub all weekend, ticking off the inventory tasks. It used to be a restaurant where they had worked as a part-time chef, before the pandemic hit and they were made redundant. It had been a humble little dining spot, and the only independent eatery hidden behind the angular steel and glass buildings, which tower over every generic city centre in the country. The old boss eventually gave in to the unyielding landlord, 7 T TRADE ROUTES: A SERIES who demanded full rent to be paid throughout the endless cycle H OF COLLISIONS of lockdowns. Like many other family legacy businesses, already E worn down by franchise competition and austerity-pinched purses, The end of the last ice age: The boreal it was declared bankrupt. E forests – found in the northern hemisphere N of Earth, sandwiched between temperate C felt bad for their boss, who had already paid the lease for the D deciduous forests in the south and tundra remaining quarter, and was upset not to have the chance to say in the North – migrate. Certain species in a final farewell to his neighbours. C suggested reshaping the empty O these forests climb and descend mountains, premises, adapting the dining area to organise a safe redistribution F move south and then north again, as the of food to the local community. When the restaurant food stock climate warms. A self-migrating forest soon diminished, small carrier bags of donations helped fill the T clears a route across, one that is easier for fridges and shelves.