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'Big Beat Disaster' by DIS at Project Native Informant, London

Big Beat Disaster is a misquotation from Britney Spears’ 2013 classic “Work Bitch,” which Leilah Weinraub references while singing, speaking and ranting in the 2021 DIS film, Everything But The World

The original song is a delusional meritocratic anthem for Soulcycle moms, young gays, sigma male grindset hustlers and twitch streaming egirls who think anyone can just work their way to a Bugatti, a hot body and a mansion in France. But given he conservatorship, “Work Bitch” becomes less a message of self-emancipation and more an echo of the jeering words of Britney’s masters, words repeated until they became a refrain of her own unconscious. In the film the song is reimagined by the narrator, as an early human [1] enacts repetitive movements of labor throughout time. 

Big Beat Disaster presents a group of images taken during the filming of Everything But the World: a pilot for a docu-sci-fi series about humanity’s obsession with our place in a world which “doesn’t even know we exist.” Prepare for scenes of neolithic abandon, White Castle employees turned aggressive rogue activists, and BDSM witchcraft guided tours of Medieval Italian castles, all of it edited into a surreal narrative filtered through the prism of the internet, an infinite reservoir for apocalyptic thought––just like the Bible. 

The derangement of scale [2] caused by the huge gap between the immensity of humanity’s global existence and the smallness of your own private everyday life [3] are like the post-its [4] strewn across the photographs. Thoughts so important we can’t forget, but not so important that we won’t toss them in the trash. Like a remnant of our egoistic apocalypse fantasies, the hurricane shutters that encase the images may have resisted the 2500°C flames they were subjected to, but not without getting burnt.

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1. Early Human played by Omahyra Mota in mud paint designed by Donna Huanca
2. Timothy Clark essay “Derangements of Scale”, Published by Open Humanities Press, 2012
3. Daisy Hildyard, “The Second Body”, Published November, 2017
4.  Like embers after a fire, the post-its nonchalantly bear witness to what was once urgent and immediate. Some were made by Leilah Weinraub, the film’s prophetic narrator, and are featured in the film, others are from the writer’s room held in 2019 with DIS and collabo- rators Leilah Weinraub, Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Nora Khan, Rob Horning, Huw Lemmey, and Adrian Samuel Massey III. 

— Ada O’Higgins 

1.3.23 — 1.4.23

Project Native Informant

'THEIR VOLUMES, WORKS FROM THE CRISTELLA COLLECTION', Curated by Treti Galaxie at

'Soft Armor' by Garance Früh at In extenso, Clermont-Ferrand

'Of new monsters, Earth created more' by Olga Paramonova and Nika Peshekhonova at

'1000 Regrets' by Nicola Genovese at Lokal-int, Biel

'Fragrant Tissues', Group Show at beacon, Munich

'Like a Moth to a Flame' by Luca Florian at Atelier 35, Bucharest

'Social Agony Conscious Healing' by Jack Kennedy at Forth, Nottingham

'CELESTIAL POETICS', Group Show Curated by Liam Denny at Greenhouse Off-site, Mel

'GRAFT' by Amitai Romm at VEDA, Florence

'Terrapozzoli' by Martina Kügler at Mountains, Berlin

'Un perfume sin soporte, un gasto puro' by Marina Glez. Guerreiro and Raúl Lorenz

'Misty’s Tears', Off-Site Show by Gitte Maria Möller in Unitarian Church, Cape To

'Meditations on Entropy' by X Breidenbach at NIGHTTIMESTORY, Los Angeles

'Plague Expo Show', Group Project at Plague Office and Sasha Shardak's studio, Ka

'Re: Recover; Don't make angels dream of' by Yamamoto Shohei at Ritsuki Fujisaki

'Peel' by Stian Ådlandsvik at Van Etten Gallery, Oslo

'Figures of Speech', Group Show Curated by Dobroslawa Nowak and Nicola Nitido at

'Wet Wishes' by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín at Britta Rettberg, Munich

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