Eric Holowacz

Eric Holowacz is a cultural engineer, poet, and creativity shepherd originally from South Carolina, and now serving as Arts & Culture Manager for Mildura Rural City Council. He got his start over twenty years ago at the South Carolina Arts Commission, and has been chief executive of a small town arts council, director of a University performing arts centre and gallery, operations manager of the Spoleto Festival, and arts manager for New Zealand's capital city. More recently, he served as founding director of an artists' colony at America's Southernmost community (the island of Key West, Florida), and as director of Cairns Festival in Queensland. He has also managed and toured the world with an alternative rock band, lived and worked in a Trappist monastery, hosted a weekly arts segment for local television, and has enjoyed making a white cube installation based on the coming global apocalypse.


The Fifth World
Eschatology & Entomology

According to the Popol Vuh, the Mayan "Book of the People," things don't look good. On December 21, 2012 of the Gregorian Calendar, as predicted by pre-Columbian prophesy and the Mesoamerican Long Count, our current civilisation will come to an end. The Cholq'ij, the 260-day ceremonial calendar in continuous use by the Maya for thousands of years, has completed the cycle and closed the Fourth World of the Sun. How? Why?

Computer error in Grodno, Belarus results in a massive launch of nuclear warheads to North America and Asia, triggering a global response, a world-wide nuclear winter and catastrophic radiation event. Floods, earthquakes, fire, famine and disease will follow. Human life is wiped out after a post-apocalyptic decade of horrific struggle.

It is the year 2112, and the earth's landscape is barren and bleak, littered with military devices, useless machinery, and cheap Chinese toys made from petro-chemical bi-products. Plant and animal life has been decimated, and the seas are corrosive and uninhabitable. Two creatures have survived the Mayan apocalypse, and now compete for resources, food, and attention.

A giant race of cockroaches has evolved from the ruins. They are brutish and unpredictable, and dominate the destroyed landscape. Each is driven by its own demand for sustenance and an inherently Darwinian need to repopulate the earth. With them, a species of mega-grasshopper also proliferates. Slow and deliberate, the grasshoppers show signs of order, decision making, and cooperation. They are curious and inquisitive, and also driven by an innate need to advance their species.

Solar collection towers, built in the final years of human existence on earth, continue to power parts of the new landscape. They are the last lingering signs of humanity's presence-becoming like the Wacah Chan, the Mayan Tree of Life that grows between the underground world of demons and the dead, and the celestial world of the gods and heavens. Noted British-American archaeologist, Norman Hammonds, writing in his book, Ancient Maya Civilization, has this to say about pre-Columbian ritual:

"Wacah chan is the portal through which the beings of one world accessed another. The souls of the dead fall down wacah chan to Xibalba (the Lowerworld, translated as 'Place of Fear'). Her trunk provides the path for the sun, moon, stars, and planets on their daily journeys. The wacah chan could be materialized through ritual anywhere in the physical or spiritual landscape...created within the shaman in ecstatic trance states, becoming the living representation of the central axis connecting all realms."

The trance-like state of earth's last surviving life forms reminds us all-in a simple post-apocalyptic way-that the Tree of Life grows within us, even as we look upon a Perspex cube and ponder mythological eschatologies and imaginary entomologies. Watch them scurry, rove, vibrate, hunt. Behold the future, and welcome to the World of the Fifth Sun...