Lea Porre

An intense orange sunset infuses the air, particulate matter spreading over the horizon and hanging in the immediacy before your face suffuses the membrane of your eyes, imbued in tensed inhalations up your nostrils. A colour palette once preserve of the holiday industry now evokes the dread of distant fires, metric tonnes of carbon capture released into the atmosphere, recalling a fateful summer spent in the Swiss alps by the Shelleys, Bryon and Polidori. Tomorrow looms with the possibility that the sunset will have eclipsed those distant hills, horrific fiction becomes reality.

As 2020 closes, contrary forces hold human opinion in a fine homeostasis. Warning signs have developed into literal warnings, sirens, bullhorns and first responders clearing houses, against which the economic imperatives and ingrained belief in perpetual growth force a continuation of twentieth century capital logics. Fattened on Hollywood’s dramatic total wipeouts and a Freudian death-drive, we walk hand-in-hand into a more mundane slow apocalypse, waiting for a catastrophe more fitting with our ideals of the Sublime.