A PROJECT BY TOM BURKE

In the age of all extremities, what can we learn from the experience of communities living in extreme environments? How can music and the means of the music industry be used as a medium to interrogate human futures at the end of the world?

From Here We Go Extreme began with a headline from the Guardian newspaper on 5/10/2018: ‘Earth’s climate monsters could be unleashed as temperatures rise.’ In the context of the Anthropocene, a geologic moment in which human activity is actively modifying climate and the environment, Tom Burke is critical of the ‘monstering’ of climate. The collective mediatized figure of the ‘climate monster’ represents climate as something that happens far in the extreme environments of deserts, rainforest, and ice caps, and perpetuates a dualistic division between nature and human.

Building upon ongoing research developed in collaboration with Tom Burke’s wife, Chilean architect Carla Aldunate, into contrasting geographic imaginaries between the global north and south, From Here We Go Extreme investigates climate not only as of the weather but as a set of entangled economic, industrial and cultural relations.

With a research focused on the ‘Comunidad Agricola de Penablanca,’ an agricultural community in the Coquimbo region of Chile whose land was transformed from a fertile wheat growing territory with plenty of surface water, to an arid zone unable to support crops over the last twenty years;  desertification and climate change is presented as vivid and vastly dispersed. While nearby Lithium extraction diverts and pollutes water resources, Lithium batteries are deployed in a global green narrative of fossil fuel free electric cars.

From Here We Go Extreme is a music film, an archive of sound recordings, photographs and interviews, and a series of workshops that use the means of the music industry to find collaborative ways of representing climate that aim to move beyond western environmentalism and the ‘climate monster.’