Heidegger's Indiana is 12-part digital music-theatre-video-philosophy project, created for release through The Exponential Festival. Videos may be experienced individually as they are released December 1, 2020 - January 20, 2020, as an edited single work on January 28, 2021 at 9pm, and together via a playlist on PPL's YouTube Channel afterwards.
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKHomiSa1mMys7t9XkrVJ4hG1bwTrf5Kx

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Martin Heidegger was a German metaphysical philosopher in the idealist tradition, predominately inquiring into what “being” means, what it means to be, and how being unfolds. During Nazi occupation of Germany, Heidegger acted as a sympathizer and maintained his University position. He also had an affair with his student, Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher of mind and meaningfulness, who theorized relationships between fascism and metaphysical conceptualizations of nature, self, and society. Understanding and debating Heidegger’s philosophical ideas are the basis of this project, though positions are read through Arendt and driven by attempts to understand base metaphysical problems both as “transcendent” and as “empirical,” inherently connected with political ideation, geography, and subject-located fears, memories, decision-making faculties, mentalities, and meaning-makings.

Indiana is a US state mapped across Pawnee, Miami, Piankashaw, Potawatomi, and Wea territory. The area has been occupied by a steady stream of German colonizers, migrants, and refugees, from Amish and Anti Baptists (Mennonites, Quakers, Brethren), fleeing massacre, through German Catholics. In the 20th century, Jewish refugees were prevented from settling in many small Indiana towns, especially those which have been known as “sundown towns,” with historic municipal laws that prohibited Black (and sometimes also Chinese, Latinx, and other POC) residency or even entrance. Indiana is a “red state;” Mike Pence was the governor before becoming vice president under Trump. The lead conceptualizer of this project (Esther Neff) grew up on a small organic farm outside of Goshen, IN (historically a sundown town) and is of German (Brethren) and Jewish descent. Although Brethren (like Quakers) are fundamentally pacifist, the author’s grandfather broke with his family’s values to fight in WWII, where he was severely injured in a vehicle accident.

In form and intent, Heidegger's Indiana emerges as a disintegrated treatise on the desirata of conceptualizing meaningfulness and connecting philosophical beliefs with behaviors.

Through layers of found footage, stacks of citations, and the dense physicalities of social isolation, the videos mark and unmark passages, stare (back) into the arbitrary terror(ism)s of Midwestern rural whiteness and Euro-phallic philosophy, and theatricalize disessentializing (Verwesung, decomposition + deposing of the suprasensory world and its "essences") towards (non)enduring in particular, ethos-and-eros-driven ways. Of particular deconstructive focus is Nihilism, which Heidegger calls "a historical movement, and not just any view or doctrine advanced by someone or other. Nihilism moves history after the manner of a fundamental ongoing event that is scarcely recognized in the destining of the Western peoples." (Heidegger, Martin. 1977. "The Word of Nietzsche" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row. p. 62)