How To Become A Fossil presents the DIS collective’s major new work — Everything But The World (2021, 38min), with a site-specific installation and outdoor sculpture.
The film, ‘Everything But The World’ was conceived as a TV pilot plotting new narratives for new histories. A multi-genre docu-sci-fi, the series departs from the premise of a nature show by turning the camera onto nature’s least natural invention: us.
Connecting the repetitive movements of today’s warehouse worker to activities some 10,000 years ago, when many of our ancestors switched from hunting and gathering to farming full-time, ‘Everything But The World’ challenges post-Enlightenment notions of “progress.”
“This is the story of what happens after your property and after your progress. It’s over. And baby, you didn’t survive.“
— Narrator, Everything But The World
In this first episode, the castle becomes a stand-in for private property and subjugation: from the Caetani Castle, once possessed by Pope Alexander VI, to the legal term Castle Doctrine used in the United States to justify defense of one’s home, to an existential rant from a White Castle fast-food drive-thru employee. Breaking civilization’s fourth wall, ‘Everything But The World’ investigates what it means to be human through the long histories of labour, gender, race, and technology—riding through the rifts in scales between humanity’s global existence and the smallness of our individual lives.
These questions and speculations are tested by the show’s not-so-reliable narrator. Playing a shock jockchatty podcast host, Leilah Weinraub’s character is gleefully loose with the truth. She seems to be informing the viewer directly while also challenging easy paths to knowledge—or the possibility of knowing—at all. With a sense of humour about the present and its possibly apocalyptic outcomes, each (at times, flippant) tidbit she delivers might be its own grand history if only she could keep from moving on to the next part of the incompletable puzzle. With a sublime mixture of sense and nonsense, speaking from at once the recorded past and the speculative future, her verbal overlay reveals that we are all victims of our moment, limited in our powers by what we think we know and what truths we have access to or choose to believe.
The transgression of Homo sapien to humanity: As Prometheus’s incendiary theft of fire from the gods is the mythic tale of society’s origin, Western humanism’s faulty origins serves a launching point to conceive not only how history happened but how “history” is made up and in service of what or whom. However, today’s media seems saturated less with origin stories than tales of end times. But is speaking of beginnings and ends not what’s gotten us into this threat of civilization-ending mess?
An end requires a neat narrative, often indifference to moral coercion, consolidated power, or at least the construction limits. Denying clear truths and generic conventions, ‘Everything But The World’ reminds us of our limits and potentials. It refuses to contort time into a line. While it might be hard to see from the perspectives of our puny lifespans, history is not a story of progressions and constants, but of changes and revolutions. If we realize that this is not the world, but a world among many possible, what worlds might we see come, after the end?
Toggling between forms and formats—from straight documentary to YouTube tutorial to prestige TV; from standard-def square to widescreen to the iPhone’s vertical 9:19.5—’Everything But The World’ demonstrates the blurriness between reality and fiction. Voices vary: a seductive Italian tour guide and a suited lawyer share screen time, while the seemingly authentic video types create a multimedia whirlwind out of the cacophonous images we consume, often thoughtlessly, every day.
Such civilization-bending projects can’t be realized alone, and ‘Everything But The World’ features myriad collaborators: the unreliable narrator/podcast host (Leilah Weinraub), an early sapient (Omayhra Mota), the friendly-threatening de-extinction enthusiast host Branch (Ryan Trecartin) and his inevitable-fossil compatriot Banter (Lizzie Fitch), a drive-thru orator (Brontez Purnell), and legendary civil rights attorney (Ron Kuby); writers including Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Casey Jane Ellison, Leah Hennessey and Emily Allan; and contributing directors like artist Abdullah Al-Mutairi and filmmaker Theo Anthony have been woven together by editor Anthony Valdez with an original score by Fatima Al Qadiri.
