Patches of Survival in the Anthropocene: Melancholy and Ecstasy within Go_A’s 2021 Eurovision Song Contest Performance of “SHUM” (ШУМ)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the Ukrainian electro-folk band Go_A and their multimedial performances of “SHUM” created for the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. We highlight how Go_A’s performances feature an aesthetics of ecstasy and melancholia despite ongoing damage within Anthropogenic late capitalism. We compare two versions of the song, exposing critical contexts for the group’s local, transmedial, and international reception. Informed by musicological, eco-critical, post-humanist, historical, and feminist frameworks, our analyses meander through exploratory patches employing concepts such as borderland epistemologies, interspecies connectivity, the gaze, and hyperobjectivity. These juxtapositions reveal how, rather than the sensorial experience of radioactivity as hyperobject, “SHUM” promotes ecologically attuned survival strategies such as the re-integration of “wild” singing styles and ecstatic rituals. “Survival” is understood hereby as a form of resistance that evades the pitfalls of neoliberal resilience. Ultimately, through a participatory aesthetics, Go_A’s multimedial performance of “SHUM” invites audiences to imagine a regenerative ecology of survival in the damaged post-apocalypse.