The Exhaustion Project is a long-term indisciplinary inquiry that thinks through the choreographic as a site for collective research towards the proposition of dissident forms of trans-individuation that refuse the threshold of exhaustion. It understands exhaustion as an enforced affective state that the hegemonies of control and extraction that structure our lives constantly produces in the bodies of those it renders its subjects, to foreclose possibilities of relation and political action. These hegemonies systemtically keep us exhausted, constantly inventing ways in which our lives may be turned into value and currency, squeezed from us and placed in circulation. The exhausted body is individual, rung out, fully extracted from, and rendered compliant, unable to any longer imagine liberation. This all seems quite familiar, no doubt; after all, haven’t we been discussing burnout, and proposing ideas of radical rest for some time now? And it is here that my approach within the Exhaustion Project depart towards a decolonial dissident cosmopoetics: I argue that strategies of retreat, even when conceived of as collective, largely remain within a conception of a unitary body whose being unfolds within linear (colonial) time. There is, after all, no retreat on an exhausted planet. How then do we, the exhausted, imagine our collective liberation? In this continuing research, I work towards strategies for  inhabitations of non-linear time, and through the many ways in which we become multiple, and multitudes become us, always co-constitutively. It is an experiment in entangled ontological deviance, in living as time bends into itself, eating its own tail: it is not an imagination against exhaustion, but rather a with and through. The choreographic here is, therefore, understood not only as a field of knowledge practice for the production of performative works, but rather one that allows us to experiment with possibilities of embodied becoming. It becomes the space from which to imagine and produce horizons beyond exhausted life. 

 The Exhaustion Project exists as a nomadic and iterative platform for research and practice, that produces colleaborative works in performance, workshops and collective lab formats. Over the years, it has worked in collaboration with artists and thinkers such as Eisa Jocson, Padmini Chettur, Eglė Budvytytė, Thanapol Virulhakul, the Rice Brewing Sisters’ Club and others, as well as with activist and dissident communities. Previous iterations of this project have been held at the Forecast Festival at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2018 (Occupy Exhaustion) and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul in 2019 (There Is Still Work To Be Done) as well as presented as part of festivals and performance programmes such as Wollae and  Judson Drama in Seoul (Supply Lines) in 2020.