Summertime Stasis (Apocalypse Canceled II)
a short film by Paweł Janicki

"Summertime Stasis (Apocalypse Canceled II)" is a short film by Paweł Janicki, a part of the "Point Nemo" solo show at the WRO Art Center (2020).

A scene from a shoddy sci-fi movie transferred onto the summer sky above an empty, unkempt park, and converted into clouds which move and shift shapes over tree crowns. An out-of-context, erotically colored, silly conversation between two members of a spaceship crew – a beefcake male and a female android that treats her identity as an object of self-reliant engineering experimentation – reveals an enciphered layer of meanings, mutating into a nearly philosophical and, at the same time, poetical dispute on the mutual expectations, evolution, and strained relations of humans, technology, and nature.

The deserted setting suggests that the conversation takes place in the aftermath of an enigmatic annihilation that erased the human presence, yet left the environment in an entirely intact state. Perhaps nature is just replaying its own half-melancholy and half-ironic memories of or observations on homo sapiens sapiens.

The episode originally comes from “Galaxina”, a low-budget sci-fi pastiche directed by William Sachs in 1980. The movie has stirred some interest, mainly among the fans of the genre, and won the audience’s award at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film in 1983.