This is a culture that talks endlessly about initiatives, new beginnings, fresh ideas and startups and knows little about the end. (The luxurious pettiness and small-minded obsessions with safety.) A culture of the end knows mortality is a great gift; speech is a tool for enlivening the present time; and trust comes from action not coercion. What it is unprepared for, blind to, and ignorant of, what it avoids, obfuscates and decorates is this. It doesn’t say ‘no’ to the always new, which means it doesn’t know how to say ‘that’s it, that is what I want’. The options are not endless. Stop counting. It is preferable for this news to come from elsewhere, somewhere, away from here, imposed by far away conditions. The logic of ‘far off gain’ justifies today’s disgraces. This wanting is someone else’s. This end will be insignificant as such for it may only ‘herald a brighter future’. If it ends, it ends because the hand was forced; there was no choice. Nothing will have been intended. It submits to this endless procrastination as if it were real and in so doing gives up. It gives up, it doesn’t stop.

(Excerpt from the text “How to End it” by Eleanour Ivory Weber)

Philip Poppek. ‘How to end it’. May – June, 2024, CCC Gallery, Copenhagen