“Anti-Gone” at 2020 Sundance Film Festival

In a post-climate change world, environmental catastrophe has become normalized. Cities are sunken, yet the vestiges of late-capitalist culture – consumerism, inequality, social unrest – live on, clinging like barnacles to the ruins of civilization. Spyda and Lynxa are a couple navigating this world frictionlessly. On their sailboat, they glide from shopping to movies to psychedelic drugs. In a damaged world where you can have anything you want, what’s the cost?

Based on the original comic book by Connor Willumsen, “Anti-gone” by Theo Triantafyllidis, the multi-media performance commissioned and produced by Onassis Culture, incorporates 3D world-building, real-time simulation, interactivity and theatricality, transporting us in a world where environmental catastrophe is considered to be normal.

Theo Triantafyllidis incorporates Willumsen’s idiosyncratic narrative and visual style to explore the possibilities and limitations of both theatrical performance and western perception. This medium suits Triantafyllidis’ investigation of the complexities of major universal concerns in that his hybrid theater replicates the disorientation and confusion of our so-called real-life. Characters and their avatars embark on banal isolated activities, games, reading, sex, oblivious of their surroundings. Triantafyllidis’ stage uses all the visual signifiers of paradise, bright colors, palm trees, sunsets, yet is in fact the opposite.