On February 1, 2021, Khing Hnin Wai, an aerobics instructor from Myanmar, posted a video on Facebook Live in which she did an exercise routine in front of the avenue leading to the country’s parliament. A minute and a half after she started the broadcast, as she continued with her exercises, a caravan of armored vans including anti-riot tanks and some motorcycles began to pass by in the background towards a police barricade. While Khing Hnin Wai was doing aerobics to the rhythm of “Ampun Bang Jago,” a famous Indonesian dance song, General Min Aung Hlaing was overthrowing the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, a democratic icon and civilian leader of the country. Hnin Wai claimed not to know what was going on and said that she had recorded the video as part of a competition. Within hours it became meme fodder around the world showing the aerobics instructor photoshopped on top of various political massacres.
The image is eloquent to the point of surrealism: one of the cruelest coups in recent memory takes place and a woman continues doing aerobics in the street. Seen from the other side of the screen the image is even more interesting: the world is collapsing and we are all still glued to our cell phones. Or maybe the world has already collapsed, maybe it has been unsalvageable for decades, and meanwhile we have carried on with our daily lives.
This was partly the feeling that led me to write Caviativá (0.16). The world has already ended and we have been raptured into a hyperreal bubble:
And thus, lost from the grip of our father’s hand, wallowing in disappointment and ecstasy, we have survived the Apocalypse without realizing it. We have gone beyond our destiny without a scratch.1
This is what Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés calls the posthumous condition: “the aftermath of a death that is not our actual death, but rather a historical death produced by the dominant narrative of our time.”2.
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