Apocalyptic Yesterday
What if future never comes
There is something uneasy about this place. A shredded skin of a capital deity, glass-and-steel carcass, this is once where the prophets of capital and the wizards of algorithm sovereign from behind standing desks and ultra-wide screens. The machines are now stripped, the meeting rooms, each named after a spice girl songs, now displaying a dusty blank whiteboard wall waiting yet again to be drawn on.
The former headquarters of Facebook - or was it WeWork? - were shrines to a serpent that runs over the urban landscapes. They have built the server racks, cable trays on the ceiling, lay down the carpets and install the whiteboard walls in every room they set up. Every new things they purchase, installed is growth, a new venue, expanding empire from overseas to central London WC2H. Hire more people! Occupy more space! We are heading to the moon. When the serpent consumed enough, and grow large enough, when job positions are being filled and office seats are full and there’s still more marketing and business potential, they shred this skin and move on. The void they leave behind is an altar, a stage, a ruin lit by the glow of exit signs, something stirs — artists gather, intent on making sense of the wreckage.
Apocalyptic Yesterday is not a prophecy. It is a realisation that the end has already happened, and we are simply living through its slow-motion aftermath. We exist in the wake of countless endings—colonial, ecological, ideological—each collapse neatly repackaged as transition, each disaster metabolised into just another news cycle. Terence McKenna reminds us that the apocalypse is not impending; it has already arrived for much of the world. We are simply insulated by the mirage of comfort, the illusion of a system still functioning. The walls still stand, the radiator still hums, the coffee machines blink in standby mode—but the empire is already in ruin. Decay, and the unbearable weight of knowing.
Apocalyptic Yesterday is not a eulogy, it’s reclaimant. Over a month of creation, we inhabit the cracks in the system, growing like mycelium through the floorboards, weaving new works of resistance and care. How does one move forward in a world that seems to offer no future? How do we create when creation itself feels like an act of defiance against the inertia of destruction?
This is an archaeology of the present, peeling back the layers of our collective condition. The fragility of empires, the ghosts in the machine, the cold sterility of abandoned boardrooms—all sites of excavation. In the shadows of past ambition, we find the contours of a different way of being. Art becomes the means of haunting, of reanimating, of reimagining. This is survival via forging meaning in the ruins.
Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that capitalism, like the divine right of kings, once seemed inescapable. But power is not immutable. It cracks, it falters, it can be undone. And it is often in the margins. Through art, through gathering, that change begins. If the apocalypse is not the end, but merely a threshold, then what lies beyond is still ours to write. Let us imagine another way, even as the world insists that none exists. For in the end, to make art in the ruins is to resist and remember that we were always capable of more.
Exhibition Times 🖼️ | 19-30 March 2025, 12pm-4:30pm
Venue 📍 | 5th Floor, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue London, WC2H 8AD
Opening Party 👁️ | Wednesday 19th March 6pm-9pm
Performance Day 😴 | Saturday 22nd March 12pm-4:30pm
Zine Launch & Spoken Text Party 🍉 | Sunday 30th March 2pm-4pm
Supported by Bow Arts