1. Introduction

Within what can be referred to as the Anthropocene framework, narrating the climate crisis is always an urgency, a necessity, and, simultaneously, a challenge, inevitably a collective endeavor. The crisis's pressing nature amplifies its monstrous scale, making it seem as though humanity is always running late in its response. This tension is heightened by the uncertainty that defines our age, which manifests in emotional responses such as anxiety and paralysis, complicating efforts to engage with the crisis as it unfolds. It is no surprise, then, that narratives oscillate between alarmist warnings, dystopian scenarios, and rhetoric of denial, all struggling to encapsulate the elusive nature of the crisis. Thus, the question remains: how do we actively engage with a present in which the climate crisis is a lived reality?

Within a system that values and stimulates individualist pursuits over the collective, merely creating a refuge from the avalanche of overwhelming scenarios typically associated with the climate crisis is a brave yet challenging task. The emergence of climate change fiction, or cli-fi, responds, among other things, to this societal preoccupation about our possible future(s) as it attempts to entertain the alternatives available to us given the axiomatic quality of the climate crisis. However, many artistic representational approximations to anthropogenic climate change have been criticized for their inability to effectively accommodate a problem of such magnitude within the preestablished stylistic conventions of fiction [1]. Despite this criticism, in recent years, cli-fi has established itself as a vital medium for imagining the psychological and societal repercussions of the climate crisis (Johns-Putra).

Yet, “writing and reading are typically small-scale, individual pursuits” (Lambert 207). This highlights a key limitation of literature as a text-based medium: its struggle to inscribe the crisis within the pages of the present. The problems humanity faces in light of the environmental crisis cannot be eradicated when approached on an individual scale. While fiction helps develop emotional literacy, theatre —especially live performance— engages groups rather than individuals due to its embodied nature and liveness. As Carl Lavery points out, “the ecocritical purchase of theatre might reside […] in its immanent capacity for affecting bodies, individually and collectively” (230).

Through the collective interaction between the audience and actors, time-space handling, immediacy, and the blurred boundary between fiction and reality arises what I believe to be the central issue to our representational approximations regarding the climate crisis. The name of this issue is affect, and it is a key factor in addressing our direct and indirect implications in various social and structural injustices. As Erin Hurley suggests in her work Theatres of Affect, theatrical performance is not only a live art form unfolding in real time but also a sensory experience that affirms one’s presence in the world. As she states in the introduction, “the affect-producing machine of theatre lets us know that we are (by letting us feel that we are here)” (3).

If affect can serve as a stepping stone to turn against this implication, then activating this function requires, in Craps’ words, developing a “greater emotional literacy” (“Guilty Grieving” 327). Advancing in such endeavor necessitates an understanding of both the socio-political backdrop and the affectual modes through which the potential approximations to the climate crisis can be effectuated. In terms of our affectual response, our individual and collective (yet, to varying degrees) implication in destructive processes such as resource depletion and environmental loss is a hard pill to swallow. It is, indeed, emotionally challenging if we exercise what Yves Citton frames as the ecology of attention. As will be shown later, this premise also resonates with Timothy Clark’s chapter “Scale”. Both authors argue that this attentional, even paradigmatic, scalar shift can only occur once the inertia of capital-oriented systems —and their blindness to environmental realities— is disrupted.

Bringing the climate crisis to the forefront of the present, according to Citton, implies a conscious effort to resist extractivist culture by redirecting our attention to ecology. This transition necessitates a reevaluation of our focus, shifting it away from GDP and economic indicators and toward the underlying factors they represent: the environment. The emphasis on what sustains us epitomizes a new cultural paradigm —one that, as Citton argues, we must strive to understand and embrace. Such an embrace would, therefore, imply the opening of a certain egress for climate change to inhabit the present tense, with a distinct emphasis on the immediacy of the crisis. For Clark, thinking on the ecology-informed scale is both necessary and challenging. Since the term environment is now taxonomically employed to refer to everything at once, attentional scales must hold multiple, often contradicting, premises simultaneously. Yet, Clark maintains that this shift is essential for transgressing the pre-established modes of engagement with our emerging reality.

The necessity of such an attentional approach is undeniable, and it is the urgency that the Anthropocene framework demands. Nevertheless, always keeping the crisis present in our attention span has a high price tag for the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals. Following Craps, “a 2017 report sponsored by the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica finds that climate change produces both acute mental health impacts, such as ‘increases in trauma and shock, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compounded stress, anxiety, substance abuse, and depression” (“Climate Trauma” 275).

Eerily ironic in its exploitation of those suffering its repercussions, capitalism as a system demands exponential growth for capital accumulation, either overlooking or intentionally ignoring resource limitations. It exploits the hyperobject [2]-like nature of the temporal and physical characteristics of resource depletion. Unsurprisingly, this cornucopian position is not merely a post-materialist idea but is, in some cases, “financially supported and disseminated by anti-environmentalist industrial pressure groups” (Garrard 18). To remain static in extractivism is thus not only an easy and profitable task. The danger of this scalar derangement is the tendency toward a negation of the reality marked by anthropogenic climate change. It is no surprise, then, that even narrative approximations of the climate crisis are mired in uncertainty, pessimism, or paralysis. While thinking in terms of the climate crisis, we are still enmeshed with the system. To employ an almost proverbial phrase popularized by Mark Fisher, it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (1).

While we still cannot exert an alternative to the current system, this article argues it is within our reach to create new modes of interaction with the climate crisis. In this vein, viewing the predominant modes of engagement with the crisis as inherently ideological situates us within the delicate fabric of affect problematization. The issue lies at the core of not only eco-anxiety and the emanating existential uncertainty but also climate change denial. Therefore, treating our affectual responses as a bridge to connect us with the issue of the climate crisis in more productive terms would necessarily entail touching upon the issue of implication. And this connection, no doubt, can be fostered through representational artistic approximations.

Over the years, significant contributions have been made in the fields of ecocriticism, affect, and theatre and performance by scholars such as Carl Lavery, Vicky Angelaki, Christel Stalpaert, Kristof van Baarle, Peta Tait, Erin Hurley, and Jill Dolan, among others [3]. Despite substantial scholarly interest in affect, as well as the political potential of theatre and performance, it appears that relatively little attention has been given to the issue of implication in relation to the environmental crisis and how this implication is conveyed through theatrical performances. This article thus seeks to approach the question of how some contemporary theatrical performances that treat the issue of the climate crisis can articulate our implication and help to open an affectual egress towards what Stef Craps refers to as a more efficient emotional literacy. By fostering emotional literacy, I contend, these narratives can help integrate the climate crisis into the fabric of daily life, enabling us to engage with it more productively.

Craps understands emotional literacy in the context of environmental damage as the ability to effectively navigate and process complex emotions, such as grief and guilt, associated with human impacts on the natural world. In his paper “Guilty Grieving in an Age of Ecocide”, Craps suggests that emotional literacy around collective responsibility for environmental destruction can be achieved through engaging with various forms of art and activism, taking his examples from literature, documentary filmmaking, and extreme forms of activism. These mediums, so the author contends, can help individuals develop a deeper understanding of their implication in environmental damage and provide channels for expressing and working through feelings of sorrow, guilt, and responsibility. The mediums outlined by the scholar achieve the task by encouraging individuals to confront and acknowledge their contribution to environmental harm through their narrative framing of individual and collective stories, visual representations of environmental damage, employed symbolism and metaphor, as well as their accounts on direct engagement and participation in advocacy efforts related to environmental issues.

The hypothesis of the present article rests on the belief that theatre performances, even though not explicitly addressed by Craps, can also be instrumental in helping individuals develop emotional literacy regarding collective responsibility for environmental destruction. Seeking to further explore how theatrical representations engage with the issue of the climate crisis —and aiming to highlight works that remain largely unknown to the broader English-speaking audience— the study employs as its central example the live performance That Other Place [4], part of a three-volume artistic investigation titled All of This Used To Be Fields [5], staged by Colectivo Nerval and David Orrico in September 2024.

The methodology of this article employs a qualitative and interpretative approach to analyze this living theater piece in order to demonstrate how the affective vector operates in the live performance’s immediacy and shared space, creating a communal experience that drives deeper emotional resonance. This microscale representation, I argue, has the potential to illustrate how theatrical approximations imbed the climate crisis into our day-to-day, reflect our degrees of implication, and promote better emotional literacy. To show this, the article utilizes an interdisciplinary framework, drawing insights from affect theory, cultural memory studies, ecocriticism, and performance studies. The work builds its theoretical foundation upon Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of the implicated subject, alongside Stef Craps’s perspective on the necessity of developing a more nuanced emotional literacy in the age of the climate crisis. Additionally, the article includes extracts from qualitative interviews with the theatre performance creators David Orrico and Nacho Roland. This inclusion aims to provide a better engagement with artistic intent and conceptual underpinnings of the theatre performance. By employing this multi-faceted methodological approach, the article seeks to foster a productive dialogue between disciplines and promote emergent artistic voices.

2. On Implication

Michael Rothberg’s theory of the implicated subject highlights how individuals contribute to and sustain unjust structures, even in the absence of direct perpetration. Structures of injustice refer to deeply embedded social, political, and economic frameworks that perpetuate inequality and discrimination across different groups in society. Implication might extend beyond immediate action, encompassing those who benefit from or passively reinforce historical and ongoing forms of harm. Rothberg’s framework highlights that individuals are entangled in structural inequities, inheriting responsibilities tied to past and present injustices. Whether through economic, social, or political positioning, individuals play a role in maintaining conditions they may not have actively created, yet from which they continue to profit or remain complicit.

Our implication within the destructive forces of structures of violence and inequality is necessarily complex. As Rothberg contends, when it comes to implication, an individual can simultaneously occupy the dual roles of victim and perpetrator. This perspective resonates with a prominent metaphor articulated by Morton in his book Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, in which he depicts the individual as both the detective and the criminal within the recursive process of ecological awareness. Craps, in his exploration of guilt and ecological grief, takes this position further, stating that it is “uneasy [and] corresponds to a difficult tension in the emotional realm” (“Guilty Grieving” 324). In the age of the Anthropocene, human beings are, to varying degrees yet collectively, inscribed with a social responsibility. The central problem for Rothberg is how we feel about this responsibility, for “attitudes and feelings are at the center of political conflicts about accountability for injustice at present” (265).

The core of the aforementioned problem is encountered within the dimension of affect: the way we feel about our responsibility is an ideologically informed notion and thus molds us accordingly. Thence, feeling anxious about the damage produced to the environment and denying the very existence of climate change no longer appear to be notions too separated from each other. They are two (of the many) Matrix pills held out on a single hand of affect. Following Rothberg, who puts implication at the forefront of modern power operation, affect works as a vector of this implication, for its functions either serve to facilitate our participation in injustices or to foster our resistance to the injustices in question.

Regarding the concept of affect, Rothberg does not seek to outline existing definitions to narrow down his own specific nomenclature. Rather, his essay rests upon the investigation of the affect’s potential in supporting accounts of implication and political responsibility. Drawing from the Spinoza-Deleuze tradition, Rothberg maintains the idea of affect as “pre-personal”, using Shouse’s terminology. This implies that affect operates as an unconscious response to an entity, and this response precedes our feelings and decisions, thus equilibrating affect with intensity. However, for Rothberg, affect —following Flatley’s perspective— also has a socio-political rendering, and it thus has a transformative power inscribed to it. Rothberg suggests that affect can reinforce existing structures of systemic domination and inspire resistance against them —precisely the reason it functions as a vector of implication.

The central inquiry of this essay is how theatrical representations of the climate crisis address our implication and, in doing so, foster a deeper emotional literacy. Therefore, it is essential to clarify the functions that affect holds in relation to complicity. As discussed earlier, the first function is its role as a vector —a foundational force through which implication operates. For example, technological progress, often celebrated for its "positive" contributions to society, prioritizes the notions of “more” over “less”: more consumption, more efficiency, more development. Yet, this same progress perpetuates structures of injustices on multiple levels: from the exploitation of natural resources to labor inequalities and environmental degradation, technological advancement often serves as a vehicle for sustaining global disparities rather than resolving them.

The recognition of one’s implication emerges at the second level, subsequently presenting two possible paths for the development of the situation. At this stage, affect is no longer an immediate vector but a “mediated response to a preexisting mode of implication” (273). The response in question might take the form of an active reluctance to acknowledge one’s implication, thereby reproducing and reinforcing the structures of violence and inequality. In this sense, for instance, the climate crisis can be perpetuated and intensified through, paradoxically, the very discourse of climate change denial.

Still, the second level can lead us to the recognition of one’s implication. This process necessarily involves a sufficient level of analysis of the conditions of violence and unjust practices in which we (in)directly participate and that we reinforce. This path is fundamentally linked to attention —the conscious decision to remain on a sensitive scale— and, in the context of climate change, for example, to commence practicing what has previously been referred to as the ecology of attention. In this way, affect impulses our transition into a realm where an action urgency to turn against this implication arises —what can be considered as the third affectual function in relation to implication.

Since the first function of affect might appear rather static, I am most interested in the ambiguity of the transgression within the second function into the third. According to Rothberg’s understanding of these affectual operations, it is within the productive scenario of the second function that a subject enters into contact with the Deleuzian “body”, which begins to mold the definition of our subject’s “individuality” (123). With their embedded nature, the theatrical approximations of the climate crisis harness the potential to be directed at precisely this schism between the static and active to activate the paradigmatic shift that would (if a piece is effective) lead us to contest implication. Nevertheless, that shift does not necessarily translate into immediate action, whether political or otherwise. Instead, it may inspire reflections on the potential for a more just future or contribute to a renewed sense of engagement with the world.

While an affectual impulse to contest the subject’s own complicity in structures of oppression is located at the third level, there also exists a need to construct solidarities informed by individuals’ uneven positions within the socio-political backdrop of the solidarity construction process. As previously argued, the theatrical domain is collective in its nature. This mode is defined by its liveness, where actors and the audience coexist in the same space. Consequently, theatre can leverage the distinctive communal experience intrinsic to live theatre performances to establish an emotional environment that fosters a sense of belonging among participants. This connection enables individuals to perceive themselves as part of a collective, albeit temporarily, during the performance. Hence, the cathartic experience sought and (hopefully) experienced by spectators who, according to Dolan, “come to the theatre not only to witness, not only to passively consume, but also to participate by actively imagining other worlds” (21) might therefore be gained as a communal motivation to resist complicity. This shared motivation, therefore, has the potential to lead to the collective development of a more enhanced emotional literacy.

3. Theatre, Emotional Literacy and Collective Engagement

As previously discussed, the potential egress formed on the second function level of affect in relation to the implication resides within “the most ambiguous zone” (Rothberg 274). This ambiguity might be related to the emergence of feelings sometimes rendered as unproductive [6] on behalf of those willing to recognize their degree of implication in climate injustices. We feel anxious and guilty, we mourn and we grieve the destruction caused to the environment through the implication web starting to grow as we situate ourselves on the corresponding attentional scale. The paralysis these states might lead to thus obstructs the possibility of addressing our implication. To move beyond this stagnation, Craps surmises, we need to collectively address “the importance of fashioning new emotional literacies adapted to the ecological realities of our age that can help us productively navigate the challenges of our complicity in environmental degradation” (“Guilty Grieving” 325).

Therefore, this emotional literacy can be understood as the capacity of individuals to process their affectual states and feelings in more productive terms. It also refers to the ability to acquire a more nuanced understanding of different emotional responses to environmental loss and destruction. To cultivate such literacy, Craps advocates for engaging with cultural forms such as literature, documentary filmmaking, and art that can enable individuals to navigate their feelings and encourage a sense of collective responsibility. By confronting negatively-rendered emotions through creative works, people can foster a deeper connection to the ecological issues at hand, ultimately transforming feelings of guilt and grief into motivation for collective and positive action and thus transcend to the third affectual function elaborated by Rothberg.

Contemporary theatre and, specifically, live theatre performances hold the potential of becoming a cultivating space for such a transgression due to their form and the reconceptualization of the audience as a user of the space, not a subject separated from this space by a fourth wall. Contemporary theatre pieces thus commence to do away with the tradition of space division, altering in this way the functions of the spectator. Morton, in Spacecraft, reflects on the role of the audience in drama, traveling back to the concept of chorus present in ancient Greece:

We often forget that the audience is part of the drama because of the conventional fourth wall that turns the theater into a shop window display or fishbowl that we are peering into. But drama comes out of dancing —that’s what “chorus” means: singing, dancing, “raving” people (78).

The shift in audience engagement is thus necessary due to the imperative existing on the environment-informed scale to dissolve barriers between the human/non-human divide. However, it also appears important to dissolve those barriers among human beings themselves to be able to foster a communal response through the construction of differentiated solidarity. If, according to Flatley’s parallel to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, “to witness is to participate” (386), theatrical performances, through immersing the audience in shared experiences and due to the medium’s liveness, enable not only a collective form of passive witnessing but a participation in a form of collective emotional processing.

Indeed, spectators are not merely passive recipients of a spectacle but active interpreters who bring their own experiences, knowledge, and perspectives to bear on the performance. Jacques Rancière encourages the dismissal of the radical opposition between activity and inactivity, as well as between appearance and reality, by recognizing that watching is also an action. The goal of this emancipation from the problematic divide is not to achieve an undistorted transmission of meaning from performer to spectator but to create a space for interpretation and appropriation. Thus, the theatre performance becomes a mediating object that both links and separates the performer and the spectator.

How can collective emotional processing take place? One possible avenue is through the creation of an affective atmosphere. In a theatrical setting, performances can generate a shared affective space —one that is not confined to a single character or individual but instead exists between and among bodies, permeating the environment. As Anderson describes, affective atmospheres allow us to conceptualize emotional experiences as occurring “beyond, around, and alongside the formation of subjectivity” (77). These atmospheres blur distinctions between spaces, individuals, and objects, fostering an immersive affective experience. Through this affective dynamic, an artwork can establish an intensified time-space that extends beyond the limits of its represented world.

Drawing further on the field of theatre studies, it appears helpful to turn to Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance. The scholar argues that utopian performatives arise when a sense of community emerges from the audience itself. This occurs when spectators perceive themselves as part of a collective, experiencing a shared sense of belonging through the emotions they encounter. According to Dolan, live performance creates a temporary utopian moment in which individuals come together to engage in meaning-making and imagination, potentially inspiring visions of a better world. These initial emotions, such as hope for a better future or love, can foster a communal connection among the audience, which may ultimately translate into aspirations for societal change.

This perspective additionally aligns with Sara Ahmed’s view on emotions as active constructions —practices— rather than states. Developed emotional literacy, it follows, is not a steady phase but a collective practice that can be accessed through active participation, commences through observation, and is facilitated through the embodied nature of live performances with the affective atmosphere it creates. That is why the shift towards the collective is indispensable: as Teresa Brennan states, affects predate the individual but are necessarily social, and we take affect from others. The transmission of affect takes place not only between the viewer and the theatre performance —but between individuals in life, too.

4. That Other Place: Performance, Technology and Environmental Inquiry

That Other Place vol.3 represents a formal scenic inquiry and continues the previously presented series, All of This Used to Be Fields vol.1 and MEME ATEEC vol.2. The inaugural volume examined plants as living-interactive interfaces. In an immersive space where flora responded to the performers, creating a sensory landscape that significantly influenced the dramatic narrative, Colectivo Nerval reflected on the use of technology while exploring potential avenues to reestablish a connection with nature. The subsequent volume expanded into a multi-space scenic installation that explored the displacement of nature in contemporary society, emphasizing the paradox of human self-destruction in pursuit of aesthetic pleasure. This resulting piece took shape as a site-specific journey through four distinct spaces, each activated through various scenic devices, immersive systems, and interactions with other natural species.

Stemming from the collective’s interest in technological development and its possibilities to reflect on the lost natural connections and rhythms, the last volume and the primary concern of the essay, That Other Place, emerged as a 72-hour scenic simulation in the Teatre el Musical in Valencia, starting on the 12th of September and culminating on the 15th of September, 2024. Although the entire triptych was conceptually informed by the scale of the Anthropocene and seeks to envision alternative ways of interacting with the environment, the volume under examination incorporated an additional dimension to engage with the audience. Unlike the previous volumes, That Other Place incorporated textual elements authored by Nacho Roland, which were projected onto the screen alongside the performers’ voices. In doing so, the theatrical performance served two key functions. First, as will be demonstrated later, it facilitated the audience’s comprehension of the action unfolding on stage. Second, it positioned the audience within an affective framework. As Peta Tait argues, theatre often employs the script as a means of evoking emotions in those who may not otherwise know what to feel.

Performance unfolded in two main phases, installative and performative, each, to varying degrees, designed to interrogate human interactions with natural and technological systems. In the initial phase, which spanned approximately 70 uninterrupted hours, the performance participants engaged in a comprehensive series of activities centered around the deconstruction of contemporary technological devices. This process involved arranging and cataloging the components of the e-waste. During this process, the performers maintained a meditative, almost Zen-like energy. The phase was streamed online, providing the audience with insight into how this micro-settlement began to cultivate a distinctive form of refuge. The physical space chosen for this act was the hall of the theatre, with its monolithic gray tones of marble and concrete walls. Low-intensity lighting and elongated, low-frequency sounds created a harmonic atmosphere.

Surrounded by an array of outdated technological devices —including screens, speakers, computers, and wiring— acquired through personal possessions, donations from friends and colleagues, or retrieved from recycling centers, the performers engaged in a gradual process of dismantling these objects. Periodically, the performers would take breaks, stretching on the floor, eating fruit, or reading, all while being enveloped by the carefully cataloged collection of technological remnants. The experience was both captivating and disquieting, offering a rare insight into the intimate, material realities of others’ daily lives. However, this exposure did not feel intrusive, as the audience had been explicitly invited to observe the performance, either by physically passing through the theater space or by watching the initial phase of the performance via a live-streamed broadcast. The stream continued uninterrupted throughout the nighttime, capturing the performers resting on mattresses placed among the dismantled e-waste. The juxtaposition of metal and human presence —still, serene, and asleep— created a striking visual composition.

At the very outset of this first installation phase, three performers initiated the organization of cables and outdated technological devices: cassettes, laptops, and screens, among others. They partook in collective readings and discussions of their findings, conducted in subdued tones among themselves or through the available microphones. As the performance progressed, more participants gradually joined the performance, culminating in 12 performers by the end of this phase. As it appeared, the settlement’s main objective was to create a certain kind of formwork: a block they composed throughout the performance with the pieces and remnants of the objects they engaged in dismantling. These objects —parts, screws, wires, and disassembled computer motherboards— were gradually encased in concrete. The structure itself was positioned on a wooden platform, constructed by the performers.

The theater hall, serving as the site of this action, fostered an atmosphere of tranquility that facilitated concentrated engagement with the process of rediscovering pre-existing elements. This mediative environment was further complemented by minimal soundscapes generated through the performers’ actions.

Fig. 1. First phase live stream: dismantling technological devices. Source: Flako Studio

[Due to format incompatibility, see the PDF version for the image]

The second phase took place on September 15th, marking the final performative act. During this stage, the performance shifted its focus from the microcosm of the settlement to the imposing formwork block. Positioned at the center of the hall, it greeted the audience as they entered at the designated time, while the performers remained fully engaged in the act of dismantling. They were so deeply absorbed in the process of deconstructing the object’s core that they never established visual contact with the audience. It was as if the spectators had become new settlers entering a place of refuge: they encircled the performers, observing them from the periphery of the hall as if getting ready to join the process.

The outset of the performative act was tranquil and deliberately paced. It was interwoven with moments of poetic text that introduced voices from different temporal dimensions, whether from the past or the future. Once a collective sense of meditation within the hall was achieved —enhanced by the interplay of soft lighting and an immersive soundscape— the performers placed their objects of study on the floor. One by one, they rose and, in pairs, moved toward the hall’s lateral sections to retrieve the inventory. They reappeared as scientists, suddenly summoned to embark on their next investigation. Miners, cleaners, and cataloguers were among them. During this transitional phase, much like the language of light and sound —accentuated and rhythmic— the projected texts took on a new form, altering their expression to evoke a distant past. The text read as a poetic reflection on the origins of tools, the emergence of humanity, and our illusory sense of control over stone.

Performers thus embarked on deconstructing this block to uncover hidden elements. Using the available microphones, the performers began to hypothesize the origins of their findings and reimagine their purposes. During this final phase, actions became slower and more exploratory, involving cataloging objects by texture, shape, and material, as well as cleaning and archiving them. This culminating phase emphasized the sense of discovery and reimagined discarded technologies as potential tools for ecological restoration, such as, for instance, rethinking a motherboard as a shelter for worms.

Fig. 2. Second phase live stream: dismantling formwork. Source: Flako Studio

[Due to format incompatibility, see the PDF version for the image]

The performers shifted their focus from a mindful, contemplating state to an ectasis of scientific curiosity, and the light followed along. From flickering, it became stable, diffused, and laboratory-white. This phase was further enriched by a continuous textual projection. It appeared firstly as a long list of minerals and different elements, such as gold, plastic, copper, coltan, and columbite. The later presented narrative moved across multiple scales, invoking other primordial natural elements that humans often interact with. The text simultaneously explored deeply melancholic, intimate dimensions while also articulating concerns regarding the wearing out of the human body in the pursuit of technological progress:

Sometimes,
just as I watch my father operate his mini stereo system,
I imagine the way
that early hominid discovered
the first tool.
I wonder if, at that very moment, while his left hand
—he was left-handed—
struck and shaped the stone,
at some point,
he paused,
looked at it for a moment,
and contemplated what his actions might mean
for the future of humanity.

The glass weighs less than the clay.
The plastic weighs less than the glass.
The carbon fiber weighs less than the plastic.
An e-book weighs less than a paper book.
A digital photo weighs less than an analog one.

And even though we have managed
to make everything lighter,
inside us, everything takes up
more and more space.

As we lighten everything around us,
our bodies grow heavier.
And the burden of that lightness
brings us more fatigue [7].

The piece culminated in the performers leaving their invented laboratory. Gradually, one by one, they would put aside their deciphering archaeological tools: gloves, masks, hammers, cleaning rags, etc. The audience’s attention then was redirected from the human swarm to the half-dismantled concrete block with the subsequent change in lighting to red, hospital-white rapid flickering accompanied by the eerily-loud, immersive sound space.

The final voice was projected over the hanging screen in the center. It offered then a poetic meditation on the very nature of materiality, emptiness, and meaning. Through the act of searching, digging, and scratching at the earth and its concrete, the poetic voice conveyed a yearning for discovery —only to arrive at an unexpected revelation: that true understanding resided not in what was found within the stone but in what was absent. However, this absence was not conceived as an end but rather as a new beginning. The combination of light, sound, and text, as well as the physical presence of the formwork and the e-waste, did not feel dystopian. There was a glimmer of hope within that absence:

I would like that,
when searching within the stone,
when digging, stirring, and scratching
each fragment
of the earth,
there would be nothing to find.

That inside the stone
there would be nothing.
Nothing that truly stands out,
only other stones,
other elements,
other colors and shapes,
other scents.

That along this path,
in this struggle,
one would realize
that, in truth,
the answer
is this:
nothingness.

That this stone serves only to remind us
that after imitation,
after progress,
after impact,
after the hoe,
the stereo,
the keyboard,
the microphone,
the hard drive,
and each and every artifact
we have built,
discovered,
and designed
—this stone
simply reminds us
that within it
there is something deeper,
something weightless,
taking up no space,
bringing comfort,
reminding us
that it will always be there.

5. Performing Implication: Attention, Affect and Environmental Responsibility in That Other Place

And we ask ourselves: what type of space, or rather, microcosm, was created within the performance? While Nerval’s apprehension of immersing themselves quite explicitly within the Anthropocene framework was apparent both through the physicality of the formwork and the textual dimension, how did they translate their attention-shifted understanding of the environment-informed scale to the audience? First, the very title That Other Place, through the implementation of deixis, destabilizes the mundane “here and now”. If the employed deixis indicates the lack of immediate proximity, the place in question remains accessible to enter without any pre-established condition, as the entire performance could be watched online, live-streamed, and the glass theatre doors allowed any passersby to get a glimpse of the actions taking place. In this sense, the access to that other place might be read as a symbolic reconfiguration of H. G. Wells’s The Door in the Wall, yet taken perhaps to what should be recognized now as a universal scale of the world permanently altered by human and technological agency. Thus, That Other Place is not a space problematically aloof from the real; it is an invitation to narrow our attention to the microscale of what constitutes the human relationship with the product of our own manufacture.

In a series of conversations with David Orrico and Nacho Roland conducted throughout the course of November 2024, the artists further reaffirmed the previously presented hypothesis. While Nacho Roland emphasized the collective’s drive to do away with the dystopian end-of-the-world narratives, the artist insisted on the fact that “we do not need to play another, distinct reality”. Perhaps, he supposed, living in contemporary society is per se utopic in comparison to, for instance, how Spanish society (or any other) functioned in the last century. It was precisely then that the conversation shifted into the ambiguous zone of the mere definition of what is real when it comes to the climate crisis. If the performance was not located within the utopia/dystopia divide, how do we define the real we are left with? David Orrico encapsulated this as follows: “We did not play pretend; there [referring to the performance] things were as they are. The performance shifted back and forth in the terrain of hyperrealism, taking off into the realm of something poetic”. Yet, as the performers affirm, while the performative space and the ambiance allowed for the audience to witness both the macro and the micro scales of both individual and collective in the context of the climate crisis, the very conception of what is real decomposed in an instant under a gaze of the observer within the created post-realist realm: “it is the gaze that activates the performance” (Orrico).

If That Other Place functions as an egress capable of being activated through the act of looking or watching, one could argue that the gaze in question stands for precisely the ecology of attention outlined earlier in the essay. Amador-Fernández-Savater and Oier Etxeberria invoke Simone Weil’s reflection on resetting our attention span to be able to acquire something new. For her, so the authors state, this function gets activated once we let ourselves get “humiliated” by the unknown (19). This resonates with the second and third functions of affect in relation to implication.

When the second vector was sketched, I highlighted the two possible pathways within it as proposed by Rothberg: either to go down the rabbit hole of second-order violence through an active resistance of implication acknowledgment or engage in a thoughtful examination of the circumstances surrounding structures of systemic violence and injustice and thus recognize one’s implication. Therefore, the shift towards the second path is only possible through attention activation and the prolonged gaze into the fabric of our implication. As argued previously, That Other Place operates within this second function, as it invites the audience to grasp and acknowledge their implication without imposing a specific recognition or emotional state. To hold one’s gaze, then, is to accept the possibility of not only being “humiliated” by the mere acknowledgment of our implication but also experiencing other affectual states, such as guilt, shame, and anxiety.

What, then, would be the trampoline through which the audience could trace their implication? One possible answer relies on the surface of what this scenic investigation entails. The very hoarding process, an act of accumulation of technological devices designed to store information that can no longer be indicative or telling due to rapid technological advances, can be interpreted as a reflection on the running machinery of the cornucopian system we inhabit. Not only are we implicated in the consumeristic outbreaks, but these fabricated results of the desire of more privileged societies hold sentimental value.

The piece drew the audience’s attention to this value on different levels throughout both the first and second phases. During the installation phase, spectators were encouraged to watch the live stream as well as visit the physical ontology of the theatrical space. This phase was characterized by a process of gradual accumulation, as the settlement expanded not only with the arrival of additional performers but also through the increasing presence of e-waste.

The ritualistic interaction between performers and obsolete technological artifacts —during which audiences could even witness them sleeping among the carefully arranged remnants of these devices— initially appeared uncanny, yet became unexpectedly relatable. This emphasized the mundaneness of the contemporary habits entangled with technological advancements, such as falling asleep with a smartphone in close proximity, a device potentially tainted by “blood minerals [8]” or leaving an e-reader among our sheets, a television screen glowing in the background, or a laptop resting beside us after meeting yet another deadline. I used my laptop to watch one of the performers dismantle an old MacBook —a process I had never imagined to be so straightforward. This act prompted an unsettling realization: my last system backup was long overdue, and the continuity of my work hinges upon the integrity of a few fragile screws.

In the second phase, the contrast between the vast technological wasteland and the smallness of the performers, bent over dismantled devices, was heightened by the theatre’s 20-meter ceiling and concrete walls. Dim lighting deepened this sense of vastness, while the performers’ clothes, featuring recognizable logos such as Subway and NASA, mirrored the mundane commodities of the working/middle-class audience.

Through these images, the performance invited us to reflect on how we measure and accompany our existence with the relics that are, in fact, nothing but a capitalist construct deeply enshrined within our systems of affectual and cognitive processing. The performance additionally furthered this process by including the performers’ personal names along the commentaries revolving around our affective and physical entanglement with technology:

Weronika uses all these minerals to choose a screwdriver,
the same ones needed by her phone’s motherboard
to make a call to her mother in Poland
and turn waves into sound, image, and information.

She needs the same iron
that allows Gabi to receive a WhatsApp
or for his body to produce enough red blood cells
to carry the oxygen he consumes
when he goes out for a run.

Thus, through the visual, atmospheric, and textual dimensions, That Other Place invited us to get closer to our own implication. This process of facilitated recognition was then followed by a code reconfiguration, in which the second phase was converted into an archeological laboratory where the preestablished affective and mental meanings attached to the implication traces were rethought. As outlined earlier, during this part of the second phase the performers dismantled the formwork and, in an audible murmur, tried to interpret the origins of the obtained fossils as if they had never interacted with these objects before. Motherboards became papyrus, parts of screens were crystals, and screws were cataloged as new insect groups.

Another transition-facilitating element within the performance was the corporeal dimension created by the performers themselves. If written literature offers the space to reflect on the degree of our implication and could, as Craps contends, lead to the development of a more efficient emotional literacy, theatre brings a unique immediacy through the human body. Invoking now once again the Spinoza-Deleuze’s point of view, an entity is defined by its capacity to affect and be affected by other entities. Within the performance in question, which narrowed the audience-performance divide, the process the audience underwent was perhaps similar to an extended reality simulation.

In this simulation, the observers were invited to feel somewhat incarnated by the performers, with the latter being activated by the gaze of the audience. In this context, the audience was given an opportunity to develop and recall their affective relationships with the recognized yet unknown action taking place. In this vein, a space was created in which the audience was made to feel at ease, occupying the nexus between the familiar and the yet-to-be-discovered as soon as they opened themselves to this discovery. The corporeal dimension fulfilled its transitional function even through the live stream, with the human body serving as a point of reference to measure the scale of vastness created by the non-functional electronic devices, both during day and night hours. However, it was only in the second phase when the affective atmosphere could truly come to life, as the human body transformed into a facilitator between the e-waste and the formwork —images that, in the absence of the human element and its liveness, would have lost their sense of scale.

The potential egress towards developing a more advanced emotional literacy might reside in what Flatley understands as participatory witnessing. However, how can this collective participatory witnessing help construe differentiated solidarities? That Other Place created a sense of communal solidarity on a multitude of levels. First, it was potentially achieved through the gradual invitation of the audience to attend the action from the macro (live stream) to the micro (second phase). According to one member of the audience, the livestream resembled an experience of watching a reality show. Indeed, there was a clear parallel. The audience was able to engage with individuals whom they had previously observed living their lives under a concealed gaze. This illusory sense of proximity, created through access to the intimate fabric of the performers’ everyday existence, fostered a sense of empathy toward the performers and their actions.

During the second phase, the corporeal dimension and the affective atmosphere created within the piece furthered a process of self-identification with the performers on the part of the audience. This process of self-identification enabled a faster transmission of affect. The meaning-making process, enacted through the deconstruction of the ties leading us to palpate the membrane of implication, did not feel imposing, as the audience was never given an explicit key to interpret the performers’ actions. Let loose in the open fields of their own interpretation, the audience, through observation, became immersed in the process, entitled to assign their own codification to the observed. In deciding never to explain the succeeding events, the performance, I believe, successfully managed to host differentiated solidarities between the performing and the observing participants. As David Orrico and Nacho Roland pointed out, even the members of the collective did not reach an interpretative consensus, nor did they wish to. “We wanted to invite the audience to deconstruct the old and create new meanings with us [...] We cannot undo our actions, but we might perhaps re-evaluate how we interact with the environment. And it is a process —a creative one, for sure” (Roland).

It was only when this differentiated solidarity was achieved —through the invitation to “re-evaluate how we interact with the environment”— that the theatre hall was emptied of the performing human entities. At that moment, the audience was left vis-à-vis the formwork. By doing this, the theatrical piece attempted to foster a collective yet intimate engagement of the audience with the metaphorical result of the intricate web of human implication. At that moment, the observer was given the opportunity to realize that the imprint left by humans on the environment cannot be undone, and this harm is already inscribed in the concrete of things. The remaining parts of the e-waste stored in the formwork resembled the sediments from Crawford Lake in Canada [9]. With this image, the theatre performance positioned itself among other works that made use of so-called icons of climate change: glaciers, emaciated polar bears, images of flooding, drought, and others. According to Giannachi, these images are typically employed to draw attention to the gloomy, dystopian future that climate change is generating.

Yet, this image, created by the Colectivo Nerval in their performance, did not seek to induce anxiety. The final text, along with the physical presence of other audience members, helped to prevent the final cathartic moment from being interpreted as the end-of-the-world message. Unlike recurring political rhetoric pressuring individual action, the final text was read as a message that encouraged a collective embrace of human responsibility in the face of the climate crisis. The radical acceptance of the situation, with an activated invitation to continue living with a sufficient degree of awareness of our implication in the crisis, became a small brick the performance contributed to the supporting wall of the observers’ affective state. And it felt comforting to leave, for all we knew was that the stone would “always be there”[10], even in our absence.

6. Conclusion

The present article, using the live performance That Other Place as its primary example, has sought to extend the understanding of how theatre-embedded representational approximations to the climate crisis can convey our implication in the crisis and contribute to the development of more advanced emotional literacy.

In this wise, That Other Place, chosen as a representative example for the main objective of the current work, construes an immersive affective atmosphere and participatory microcosm where the audience is invited to engage in a deliberate paradigmatic attention shift to navigate and identify human implication in the multi-layered formwork of structures of systemic violence and injustices. By integrating corporeal immediacy, symbolic elements, conceptual ambiguity, and the textual dimension, the performance allows the audience to palpate complex emotional states. Yet, That Other Place achieves this function without imposing specific interpretational outcomes. In the audience, this has the potential to foster a deeper, individual-scale understanding of how emotions might operate once our implication is acknowledged. Throughout this process, the audience is thence welcomed to reflect on and reconfigure their emotional and cognitive ties to structures of oppression and overconsumption. Additionally, the presence of other observers serves as a reminder of —and immediately helps to construe— a sense of differentiated solidarity. All of this ultimately leads to the cultivation of a more efficient emotional literacy —so urgently required by the concrete of time inscribed with anthropogenic climate change.

This article, inherently interdisciplinary in nature, has facilitated a dialogue among various academic fields, including affect studies, ecocriticism, cultural memory studies, and theatre and performance studies. By selecting its central object of analysis, the article has illuminated theatrical investigations that are not widely recognized by broader audiences. Future research could benefit from incorporating systematic ethnographic studies on audience reactions and qualitative interviews with audience members. Such an approach would significantly contribute to the exploration of the affective potential of analyzed performances. Furthermore, this study advocates for the exploration of alternative modes of engagement with the climate crisis beyond the mainstream. Such endeavors, as shown, may stimulate novel ideas regarding collective responsibility for our implication in the climate crisis and promote the development of a more sophisticated emotional literacy.

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[1] As, for instance, by Amitav Gosh in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).

[2] Timothy Morton introduces the concept of hyperobjects in his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) to describe phenomena such as global warming and capitalism. According to Morton, hyperobjects are entities so vast in temporal and spatial scale that they challenge human comprehension, representation, and engagement. These entities can be human-made, like Styrofoam, or naturally occurring, such as black holes. However, what defines hyperobjects is their “hyper” nature in relation to humans and other entities: hyperobjects are dispersed, fragmented, viscous, and are perceived as uncanny.

[6] As, for instance, in Flatley’s “On Implicatedness as a Political Feeling”.

[7] Texts of the performance provided by Colectivo Nerval. Own translation from Spanish.

[8] In 2024, the Democratic Republic of Congo filed legal complaints in France and Belgium against Apple for allegedly using conflict minerals linked to armed groups in the east of the country. For more information, see Ross and Zane.

[9] In reference to the golden spike proposed by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) to designate the new geological epoch.

[10] Alluding to the final text of the theatrical performance provided in the previous section.