We have been saying for many years that we as a human race are going too fast. We are cutting too close to the Earth’s boundaries, diminishing biodiversity, and changing the climate. We expect the pH of the oceans to change more in the next eighty years than it has in the last fifty million. Glaciers and permafrost that have been intact for thousands of years are predicted to melt in the next eighty years as well. We have to slow down to avoid a total catastrophe. In my book On Time and Water, I ask this question: If we are sensible creatures and we know where we are heading, why don’t we stop? But never in my dreams would I have expected the world could be stopped so fast in such an extreme way.
When the corona virus hit Iceland the premier of my documentary film directed with Anni Ólafsdóttir, The Hero’s Journey to the Third Pole was cancelled. This was quite a disappointment but then we wondered. Why not go out and capture these times – possibly the most historic times we will live. Cameraman Andri Haraldsson joined us and we went out to ask artists and philosophers a simple question. What’s in the air? We wanted to research the deeper meaning of this great pause – the Apausalypse. We wanted to capture the empty spaces but instead of just filming the emptiness, we used the empty spaces as stages for our artists, to perform where they might never have access again like the empty runway of Keflavik Airport.
For more about this production see this multi media piece by Andri Snær Magnason and Anni Ólafsdóttir in Emergence Magazine:
Apausalypse is in production, hoping to finish in 2020.
Directed by Anni Ólafsdóttir and Andri Snær Magnason
Music: Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir
Editing: Sighvatur Haraldsson, Eva Lind Höskuldsdóttir, Anní Ólafsdóttir
Produced by Elsku Rut, Ursus Parvis and Ground Control Productions.