Tessa Rex EVERYTHING’S SHIT IT’S REALLY BAD (2018)

EVERYTHING’S SHIT IT’S REALLY BAD is an online experimental documentary unfolding over COP24, the short name for the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Over 3-14 December 2018 COP24 will take place in Katowice, Poland. Like the preceding 23 elsewhere, it’s a farce. Katowice was founded on coal mining and is home to Polska Górnisza Grupa, the biggest coal company in Europe. Australia is among the largest coal exporters in the world, during COP24 the country will export an estimated 1 400 000 tonnes of coal. In early 2018 Tessa Rex undertook a 3-month residency with The Weight of Mountains, in the remote sub-arctic town of Dawson City, Canada. Whilst there in the winter, the arctic experienced its first 0 degree week (average) on record. For a second consecutive year, the Yukon River didn’t freeze to connect the territories of Dawson. The second in living memory. EVERYTHING’S SHIT IT’S REALLY BAD is a gradually distorted AV feedback loop of the unfrozen Yukon River and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in A-major, the iconic cinematic slow-motion doom-poem (think Nicholas Cage in apocalyptic Knowing (2009), Reagan and Gorachev’s failed nuclear negotiations in The Reagan Show (2016) and even Robin Williams in Mr Holland’s Opus (1995)). Built in, and recorded from Max MSP (a visual programming language/toolkit), the loops are triggered by estimated coal exports and signify the closed feedback loop of corporate-bureaucratic ‘negotiations’ and climate change itself. A nod to Paul Spencer’s iconic line “everything’s crap it’s really bad” in activist anthem ‘It’s Really Bad’ EVERYTHING’S SHIT IT’S REALLY BAD documents the inevitable reality unfolding before us: “It’s really baaaaaaaaad.” Tessa Rex is a documentary artist and video producer based in Sydney.