Mine Kaplangı
i stand in the middle of a ladder
between two infinities
i don't know if i am in this world
or into its mirror
Etel Adnan, The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage, 1990
Perhaps this is somewhere close to where Choreographing the Apocalypse began for us: in the middle of a ladder, somewhere between worlds rather than at the end of one.
For the past few years, I have been researching queer and trans imaginaries of the apocalypse through curatorial projects, exhibitions, conversations, workshops, writing and radio. I keep returning to a relatively simple proposition: what if the apocalypse is not something waiting for us in the future? What if it has already happened, is happening, and will continuously? And if we begin there, what kinds of worlds, relations, practices and ways of imagining become possible?
Oxana Timofeeva's writing [1] on the end of the world gave me a language for something I already felt close to. Her understanding of apocalypse not as one singular event, but as a cyclical and continuous condition, became a core part of this research. I began applying this understanding to queer and trans imaginaries, thinking about how queer and trans communities have long created ways of living, relating and imagining beyond what the normative world makes available to us. I became interested in apocalypse not simply as an ending or catastrophe, but as an opening: a space from which other worlds, relations and possibilities might be imagined. Queer and trans perspectives felt particularly generative here, not because our lives are defined by crisis, but because imagining otherwise is already so deeply embedded in how we make and remake our worlds.
This also became methodological. Thinking about apocalypse as something ongoing, uneven and experienced across different temporalities required forms of research that could remain attentive to simultaneity, repetition and return, rather than searching for a single chronology or narrative. I became increasingly interested in how knowledge travels through friendship, memory, bodies and sound; in listening to what repeats and what returns; and in witnessing tiny details as they shape everything around us.
World-building, in this sense, does not only mean imagining worlds elsewhere or in the future. It is also about paying attention to the worlds being made, and still in the making, in the present: what is happening around and between us, what we choose to notice and hold onto, and what we might carry with us into the apocalypses still to come. Witnessing therefore became important as well not as passive observation, but as a relational practice carrying its own weight and responsibility: being present to one another, noticing what might otherwise disappear, and recognising that the smallest details can hold histories, relations and entire worlds within them.
These ideas eventually took another form through Choreographing the Apocalypse, a series I was invited to curate for þ thorns þ, the podcast of Rose Choreographic School. Across five episodes, I invited artists, thinkers, musicians and somatic practitioners to think alongside one another through speculative, world-building and radically intimate frameworks. The conversations became part of the research itself: a way of allowing different practices, experiences and forms of knowledge to meet, unsettle and reshape one another, rather than arriving at a fixed definition of what an apocalypse is or how we should respond to one.
I never wanted the series to arrive at a shared definition of apocalypse. I was more interested in what might happen to the word as it travelled between people. What would apocalypse mean through poetry, performance, black holes, improvisation, friendship, nonlinear time, noise, care, translation and the body? What would happen if we listened rather than tried to resolve or even understand it?
Somewhere along the way, my research began asking a very simple question: is there another way? Another way to hold a practice. Another way to encounter each other. Another way to produce and exchange knowledge. Another way to archive something without fixing it in place. Another way of being present without always being asked to become completely visible or legible.
This is where sound increasingly became not simply something included in my curatorial practice, but a method for doing research itself. Conversation, voice, music, ambient recordings, noise, silence and listening became ways of thinking.
This connects to Édouard Glissant's thinking around opacity [2] and the possibility of refusing the demand to become completely knowable. I have been thinking about this particularly through translation. What happens when a visual, bodily or otherwise non-sonic practice is translated into sound? What gets lost? What changes? And what if something simply refuses translation? Rather than treating that refusal as a failure, could it become part of the work?
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift's writing [3] on transfeminist worlds has also accompanied this research, particularly in thinking about imagination and world-building not as escape from the conditions we inhabit, but as practices through which other relations can already be rehearsed and lived.
The podcast became a space where some of these questions could remain unresolved, while continuing to move between different practices, conversations and contexts. Choreographing the Apocalypse itself emerged alongside several projects I had been developing simultaneously over the past year: Queering the Apocalypse, developed with Istanbul-based curator Derya Bayraktaroğlu (co-founder of Jetz.Space); Entanglements of the Apocalypse, [4] a programme I co-curated at VSSL Studio; Pirate Radio: Listenings at the End of the World(s), a workshop I have facilitated in different contexts, including TANC in Barcelona and The Listening Biennial in Berlin; and Apokalypse Dialectics, a radio show co-run with Christian Koutny at Aaja Radio.
Although taking different forms, these projects have continuously fed into and spoken to one another. In that sense, Choreographing the Apocalypse has never felt like a separate project, but part of an ongoing conversation that has been moving between different people, places and formats.
The first episode of the series brought together artists Rohan Ayinde and Suley, who had never met before. Rather than asking the podcast simply to document an existing conversation, I was interested in whether it could create the conditions for a new encounter, allowing two practices to meet and something unexpected to emerge between them.
There were already resonances between their practices through speculative fiction, poetry, collectivity, world-building and the recurring figure of the black hole. Rohan is an anadisciplinary artist and poet whose practice moves across writing, performance and collective forms of thinking, while Suley is a playwright, painter, lawyer and lecturer who approaches world-building as a radical tool of investigation. Their conversation moved between their individual practices and towards what became possible as their thinking came into contact. It was the only episode in which two artists met physically for the first time through the podcast, and witnessing that encounter became an important beginning for the series.
The black hole also became one of the recurring figures travelling through Choreographing the Apocalypse. Rather than simply signifying disappearance or destruction, it offered another way of thinking about what cannot be seen from where we are standing, and about the possibility that an ending might simultaneously contain transformation. From this first encounter, the series moved towards another kind of relationship.
I had admired the practices of Tosh Basco and Wu Tsang for a long time, and their work has been important to how I think about queer and trans imaginaries, performance and the body. I was particularly interested in inviting them into the series together because of the way their practices have developed alongside and through one another, and what their long-term collaboration might bring to thinking about apocalypse.
Their conversation moved through life, death and rebirth, rituals and societal collapse, identity and memory, but also through improvisation, care and the ways we are changed by being in relation with others. What stayed with me was how these questions were not only being discussed, but were already embedded in the ways they make, move and work together.
It made me think about choreography differently: not only as the organisation of movement, but as something that can happen between people; a continuous negotiation and attention to how we exist with and towards one another. I am not interested in choreography here as an attempt to organise the apocalypse, or to suggest that catastrophe can somehow be mastered through movement. I am interested in the movements already taking place within it: gathering and withdrawing, appearing and disappearing, improvising, listening, caring, remembering, refusing, returning. How do bodies move when the ground underneath them keeps changing?
Black Quantum Futurism, the interdisciplinary practice founded by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa (also known as Moor Mother), has been deeply formative for my research.
Their work brings quantum physics into conversation with Afro-diasporic understandings of time, space, ritual, sound and community, refusing the assumption that time must move neatly from past to present to future. Their episode also allowed two parts of my curatorial research to meet. Black Quantum Futurism had recently presented Time Is On Our Side as part of Entanglements of the Apocalypse programme at VSSL Studio . I had begun thinking of that programme as one visual and research-based manifestation of this larger investigation, while Choreographing the Apocalypse was becoming its sonic, conversational and archival counterpart.
Black Quantum Futurism's thinking around nonlinear temporalities and retrocurrences complicated the temporality of apocalypse further. If time folds, stretches, repeats and returns, perhaps apocalypse cannot be placed safely behind us or ahead of us either.
In UMZANSI, [5] Black Quantum Futurism with Mary Lattimore and Moor Mother tells us to “listen to your body deeply.”
I keep returning to that offer. The body carries time differently. It remembers what chronological accounts might refuse. It can hold inherited memories, desires and histories that trouble the distinction between what has happened and what has not happened yet. Listening to the body might therefore also mean listening differently to time. Throughout the conversation, Black Quantum Futurism generously took us through the story of their collective practice, moving across times, cities and histories, and showing how these ideas have been lived, developed and transformed along the way.
There was one person I knew could not be absent from this series. Etel Adnan.
I don't think I could work on the apocalypse without calling Etel in. For another episode, I invited my dear friend and long-term collaborator Naz Cuguoğlu into conversation with poet and writer Steve Dickison around Etel's life, works and The Arab Apocalypse. Naz first introduced me to Etel's work many years ago through our friendship and our work together with Collective Çukurcuma, and Etel's writing has remained close to me ever since. Because Etel is no longer physically here, the episode raised another question: how do you invite someone who is absent into a conversation? Naz and Steve approached this through love and close attention, moving through poetry, translation, sound, the hidden, and the importance of pausing and breathing with the times we are living through. Their care for Etel and her work shaped the conversation throughout.
We also brought Etel’s own voice into the episode through recordings of her reading The Arab Apocalypse. Ambient recordings from a place central to her personal cosmology entered the conversation alongside music. Perhaps this is also what I am beginning to mean when we speak about a living sonic archive. Not preservation as an attempt to freeze something against time, but reactivation. A voice returns when somebody presses play. A text changes when it enters another body. A conversation recorded in one place can be listened to years later somewhere else. Sound disappears as soon as it happens and yet can return again and again.
So when Etel writes: i stand in the middle of a ladder between two infinities maybe an archive can live somewhere there too.
And not everyone I hoped to invite into Choreographing the Apocalypse could participate. I don't want to name those absences or explain circumstances that do not belong to me. But their absence became part of what the project taught me. The apocalypses we witness and live through are diverse. They can be simultaneous, but they are not equal. Across the world, and sometimes even within the same place, we inhabit radically different conditions and realities. The possibility of having the time, space or capacity to enter a conversation like this cannot be taken for granted. Some of the people I had hoped would speak in the series were not able to join, but remained close to the project in other ways: through conversations, encouragement and exchanges. Their presence around the edges of the series has also been part of its making.
It reminds me that apocalypse cannot become an abstract category, separated from the conditions in which people are actually living. To speak about queer and trans imaginaries of apocalypse also means remaining attentive to the very different conditions from which we imagine, speak, listen and make worlds together — and to the unevenness of safety, time, resources and possibility within them. It is also why I hope these conversations do not finish with this series. Some conversations happen later. Some need different conditions. Some perhaps should not become public at all. Refusal can also be a contribution.
For the final episode, Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu is in conversation with Martin Hargreaves, Head of Rose Choreographic School. Xiu Xiu's music has always felt tuned to apocalypse to me. Across noise, tenderness, violence, desire, grief, politics and intimacy, their music inhabits an intensity that feels very close to how I have been trying to understand apocalypse throughout this research. Not as a spectacular explosion somewhere in the distance, but as something excessive, intimate, mundane, terrifying and already here. Their recent Eraserhead Xiu Xiu made that relationship even more present for me.
There is also a particular kinship between Martin and Xiu Xiu's work, so ending the series with their conversation felt right. The series began by bringing two artists who had never met into a room together, and ends with a conversation emerging from an existing affinity. Between those points, many different forms of relation appeared: collaboration, friendship, admiration, invocation, encounter, care. Perhaps relation was always another subject of this series.
In Xiu Xiu's Petite, Jamie Stewart sings of “a world of trouble falling down as snow.” I love and fear that image. Trouble everywhere, almost beautiful as it falls.
I don't think these conversations have brought me any closer to defining what an apocalypse is. If anything, they have made the word more complicated, more plural, and harder to hold still. I think I am glad for that. And somewhere between all these voices, practices, absences, sounds and encounters, we are still asking: is there another way?
Thank you.
Notes
[1] Oxana Timofeeva, “The End of the World: From Apocalypse to the End of History and Back,” e-flux journal, no. 56, June 2014.
[2] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)
[3] Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024).
[4] Entanglements of the Apocalypse, co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton, VSSL Studio, 2024–26 https://vssl-studio.org/Archive
[5] Moor Mother, “UMZANSI (feat. Black Quantum Futurism & Mary Lattimore),” Jazz Codes, Anti- Records, 2022