Martin Firrell
It Ends Here
2014
Five environments were installed under Waterloo Station examining the conditions for war or peace, for happy co-existence or mutual annihilation. The five underground rooms of It Ends Here each explored an aspect of human nature.

The Abuse & Paranoia Room: Abuse is the great teacher of how to abuse. The paranoiac cannot discern between threat and the condition of her or his own paranoia. These aspects of human nature operate like serpents eating their own tails in an unbreakable cycle of further abuse and further paranoia. 

The Idiocy & Wisdom Room: What seems like madness may be sanity, and what seems reckless may be wise. Idiocy and wisdom may appear as similar as identical twins, and like identical twins, be impossible at times to tell apart. 

The Brutality Room: Brutality is null, blank; its only content is brutality; it leads nowhere other than back to itself. There is no redemptive aspect to the relentless fact of brutality. And yet it is almost impossible, having been brutalised, not to become brutal.

The Resistance Room: To resist our tendency to retaliate is to resist our basest human nature. Resistance is the turn in the road away from hell towards grace. Grace may be as simple as the act of saying 'It ends here...'

What does an examination of the human in crisis tell us about the kind of animal we really are? Without doubt we are a warring and violent species, but we are also redeemed by something else - by our capacity (weak though it is) to see beyond immediate hurts and imagine an alternative to retaliation, by our attempts to live humanely in an over-crowded and tension-filled world. 
Part Of
It Ends Here
Medium
Text, performers, coloured light, haze, darkness, torchlight, found sound
Displayed
The Vaults at Waterloo Station, London UK
1 to 4 September 2014
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156 items
Commissioned by
Twentieth Century Fox
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