Rehearsing Disaster Pre-Enactment Between Reality and Fiction

Rehearsing Disasters proposes a hypothesis of pre-enactment as a performative practice to both exercise and exorcise risk. Through discussing various examples of rehearsals and drills in disaster preparedness and contemporary art, it defines pre-enactment as a simulation strategy that operates through predictive memorialisation. Staged according to perceived dangers, pre-enactments provoke experiences and create ‘memories’ of future events to guide and predict behaviour: they operate at the border between fiction and reality to develop the human ability to respond to threats. If not always effective in practical terms, pre-enactments attempt to act as emotional vaccines in an increasingly risk-aware society: injecting small amounts of fear to generate immunity antibodies.