Video Credits: Found Footage cut by Omsk Social Club to Fatboy Slim remix “Right Here Right Now” featuring Greta Thurnberg (2020)

Donna Harraway wrote a book in 2016, it was titled “Staying with the Trouble” we guess most of you will have read it or at least heard of it. For those who haven’t her key concept - staying with the trouble - requires us to learn to be present. This means we must not fade away into horrific pasts of apocalyptic futures but instead be here, right here right now. Much like the producer Fatboy Slim Ibiza anthem released in 1999 who’s video coincidentally starts 350 billion years before and maps the evolution of the human being in 3 minutes and 48 seconds. This evolutionary composition is set to the euphoric beats of a classic late 90s rave ethos score, where lyrics were often repeated as framing beats rather than storytelling tropes. This reduction of spoken information frequently meant that the words sang become a social incantation on the dancefloor and over people’s personal stereos, interestingly in this vein last year, Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim re-mixed his original song with the climate-change activist Greta Thurnbergs speech - adding to the entanglement with Haraway’s construct.

This been said we wish to focus on the original song, which is made up of solely the lyrics “right here right now” and “waking up to find your loves not real”. Now anyone who has gone to a rave dropped E and fallen in love over sweating, wide-eyed kinetic limbs can concur with his lyrics as the dawn of reality hits home. However, what is interesting is those lyrics fall on dancefloors in real-time during those fateful moments of connection. The song literally destabilises reality it becomes both the oracle warning us and the enchantress for us to fall in love catalysing the morning realisation. It is Chaos. And so as a thought experiment, we proffer that love is staying with the trouble.

To clarify the love we are talking about is indeterminate of genders and genres. It is Chaos. It is also plural and collective, it cannot be determined by exclusivity and opposites must attract for it to be seductive as a political action. This love requires us to believe there is a point, to not strive for something other than what is in front of us right here right now. To practice, this love we must let fate be our matchmaker and reject the oracle knowing retorts, that every love story is a ghost story. If we believe there is a point to this coupling we will keep going, if we do not we will seek other divine bodies that we may never reach.