What does the Scream Know 



Work led by Lili M. Rampre in collaboration with Tessa Hall, Paula Almiron and Julia Rubies
https://www.pact-zollverein.de/en/node/3715





Dear Visitor, 
This exhibition is an event we hope your great-great-great grandchildren won’t have to visit.  It assumes you are one link in the chain towards the human beings we will slowly become by 3115. The good news is, we will survive until then! 

Your great-great-great grandchildren will have produced speech on very rare occasions, as communication will have become unnecessary. Speech will be a luxury art to learn a bit like singing is now. Your great-great-great grandchildren will therefore have suffered from atrophy of the intercostal muscles that will have prevented a deliberate control of contrations and expansions of the ribcage. 

Your great-great-great grandchildren will have been adapted to a decreased nociception. Intense chemical stimuli, mechanical pressure or thermal differences are all rare events in the life of Your human successor. Therefore, they will have been less sensitive to it and will not respond to it. Their bodies will have resolved into such a low state of tension, there will have been no more situations of surprise, attack, defence, or celebration either. They will have reached a state of equilibrium, with no surplus energy, on an individual scale or group - a few centuries of static cohabitation. 

In short, your great-great-great grandchildren will have had no reason to scream, not out of fear, not in a conquering gestuer, not even a festive occasion. Your great-great-great grandchildren will have forgotten how to scream. 

Due to a New Earth Order, all artefacts reminding your great-great-great grandchildren of suffering will have been removed from the archives, annals, records, e-books, libraries and databases. Life on New Earth will have made a scream obsolete - no need for it, almost no memory of it, perhaps just a tingling sensation of something in your great-great-great grandchildren’s guts that was once possible to do prior to this time of genetically inherited adaptations. 

The following few remanis of the future (in picture, sound, movement) are both what we believe will survive and what we would like it to survive. 


Text by Lili M. Rampre