About the performance
NAFTA is a performative mosaic that combines lecture procedures, documentary theater, sound installations, and manifest. It is a story about a ready-made called modernity.
The performance explores the intertwined worlds of data capitalism, oil extraction, and radical collective actions. The staging, through two parts, Anthropocene and Pyrocene, draws from an extensive archive where the voices of the subversive podcast (O.I.L.) intersect with the lives and works of members of the artistic collective R.MUTT. The experimental podcast O.I.L, which operated from 2019 to 2023 and established itself as an artwork in a time that continuously erases itself, became widely known with its final episode in December 2023, when the studio and its anonymous host were flooded during a live broadcast.
Oil is a product of geological chance. It is no coincidence that this is also the story of a documentary filmmaker connected to the oil industry, a Russian neurologist torn apart by war, a wealthy Polish anarchist who renounced her past, a German musician who erases his own music as it is created, and a Danish artist whose performance unintentionally enables the rise of actual extremists. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the exhibition transparency opened their lives to public scrutiny. Beneath layers of smog, under the right pressure, the human brain transforms into a lucid force that tries to unravel the present and can potentially break the cycle of violence. In a world controlled by algorithms and data systems, this break can only occur by chance.
NAFTA is a story about refuges in a time of the end of the world, about a utopia in a time that seemingly allows no alternatives. An autonomous zone within a world that is burning and collapsing inward. The dramaturgy of modernity is the dramaturgy of dementia, a story about a time that accumulates before us like a series of catastrophes.
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History accumulates like layers of sand: time is a desert. No one knows what the desert hides. The desert is a territory, but also a living organism that changes its shape. Fragments accumulate with the passing of centuries and millennia. And the desert grows. At some point, in the future, it will spread across the world like a web. The desert grows in all directions. According to some mystical traditions, the desert is the land of God: nothing human, nothing vertical, nothing resists gravity. And deep below, somewhere, under the sand, beneath the unimaginable pressures of tectonic plates, one could say: under the pressure of time, from the death of some past, a substance called oil is formed. A dark and thick substance, formed from the remains of ancient plants and animals: a liquid that acts like an organism, although it is not a living being. Oil possesses a kind of artificial intelligence: an uncontrolled entity that manages history; it powers war machines and human engines, causing them to destroy themselves even faster. This substance was formed as an error in the creation of the world, a black hole somewhere in the layers of the earth, a substance that fills the earth's crust and, like a virus, controls the events on the surface.
No one can stop time. When the Pyrocene arrives, oil will turn the Earth into a sun.
Jan Krmelj
About the director
Jan Krmelj (1995), theater director, writer. Directing works include: Pier Paolo Pasolini: Ubesedovanje (SNG Nova Gorica, 2024); Rrose Sélavy: Razpoka (MGL, 2023); Gregor Strniša: Žabe (MGL, 2022); Falk Richter: Izredne razmere (MGL, 2021); Max Frisch/Jan Krmelj: Požigalci (SNG Drama Ljubljana, 2021); Tennessee Williams: Mačka na vroči pločevinasti strehi (SNG Maribor, 2021); Ivor Martinić/Navid Fadaee Nazer/Mojca Marič: Proslava (SNG Maribor, 2020); Jernej Potočan: Žalostinke (MGL, 2020); Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck/Jan Krmelj: Življenje drugih (SNG Drama Ljubljana, 2020); Antifone (osmo/za, Zavod Delak, 2019); Za praznino: jok kamere (FLOTA/MGLC, 2019); Triadni balet (FF UL/Sokolski dom Tabor, 2019); Milan Jesih: Grenki sadeži pravice (SNG Drama Ljubljana, 2018); Fernando Arrabal, Katja Markič, Tibor Hrs Pandur, Jan Krmelj: UTOPIA, Arheologija raja (SNG Drama Ljubljana, 2016); Roland Schimmelpfennig: Idomenej (AGRFT/MGL, graduation production, 2018); CHORUS (Kino Šiška, 2017); William Shakespeare: Hamlet: Tragedija odsotnosti (AGRFT, Cankarjev dom, 2017).
He has won the Borštnik Award for directing the production Razpoka (59th Borštnik Festival, 2024) and the Tantadruj Award for the production Ubesedovanje. Razpoka was included in the competitive program of the 58th Bitef Festival. Ubesedovanje is included in the competitive program of the 60th Borštnik Festival. The production Za praznino/Jok kamere (Flota, 2019) was selected for the short list of the international program of the Theatertreffen-Stückemarkt 2020 festival. The production Proslava (SNG Maribor) was included in the competitive program of the Borštnik Festival and at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. His debut Relikvije dihanja (Litera, 2014) was nominated for the Jenkova and Veronika Awards. He has also published the poetry collection Uho (Beletrina, 2023).
