Diann Bauer (1972 - 2022) has spent most of her professional life in London and Berlin, returning to New York state in the fall of 2012. She was part of the "xenofeminist" collective Laboria Cuboniks as well as the Alliance of the Southern Triangle (A.S.T.), "an initiative exploring how artistic and cultural possibilities can be reimagined in the context of climate change" (text taken from her website). Her practice takes on questions of power, politics, the social, and arts' relationships to these things through a vocabulary of visual force. The work proposes that the current reality of political and economic entanglement necessitates an art that packs an equally forceful and complicated visual punch. To quote architect Lebbeus Woods, "The things to be resisted have not come from nowhere. They have a history built over periods of time, a kind of seriousness and weight that makes them a threat to begin with. They can only be resisted by ideas and actions of equivalent substance and momentum."

XFAST [ laboriacuboniks.net | ast.co ] was produced as an introductory video for her 'If Nature is Unjust, Change Nature' talk at Com(p)host #4, Circolo del Design, Turin, November 2019. Prologue: Politics as Palliative Care, the title of a montage of earlier video works of hers and her collaborators of A.S.T. that she compiled for the exhibition Snow Crash at IMT Gallery London in 2019, addresses the necessity to acknowledge the realities of „Living on a Damaged Planet“ (Anna Tsing et al.): "As we witness the incoming deluge of the climate crisis, how can we mourn at the scale of a species? For a species? On the scale of the planet? What is the duration of mourning at that scale?” (Diann Bauer)

While the catastrophes have long been taking place and their effects are expanding with irresistible force, while species are becoming extinct in the millions, forests are burning, ice is melting, water levels are rising, we should turn to anticipating the end of life as we know it, instead of normalizing and pretending that life in the industrial civilization can go on forever for everybody.