Stephanie Kayal & Abed Kobeissy’s Galactic Crush 2 wins ZKB Patronage Prize

We zijn ontzettend trots om aan te kondigen dat Galactic Crush 2: Into the Cold, de ruimte-odyssee van Stephanie Kayal en Abed Kobeissy over liefde, mislukking en het verlangen om te ontsnappen aan een wereld in puin, de ZKB Patronage Prize heeft gewonnen tijdens het Zürcher Theater Spektakel. De prijs ter waarde van 30.000 CHF werd toegekend door een internationale jury bestaande uit Alia Alzougbi, Ophelia Jiadai Huang, Jessie Mill, Fatima Moumouni en Veronika Skliarova. Zij omschreven het stuk als een “collectief onderzoek van onze verantwoordelijkheid”. Hieronder kun je hun volledige verklaring in het Engels lezen.

We loved “Galactic Crush 2: Into the Cold” for its honesty about the fatigue and rage of wartime. It is a retrofuturistic exploration of memory and hope in the face of perpetual failure. On board a DIY spaceship, Stéphanie Kayal and Abed Kobeissy take us on an exercise of shared reckoning to an imagined future of coldness and solitude. The artists show us that distance is a privilege when people live not only in different levels of risk, but in fundamentally different time and space dimensions.
The science fiction and comic genre sits in deliberate contrast to these heavy inquiries. Along with their android companion, Stéphanieand Abed offer playfulness and complexity in a timeloop without escape, watching catastrophes unfolding from space as resources grow scarce.
The piece withdraws from direct images of nightmares in favor of sounds, fragmented memories, and humour, a strategy that acknowledges the difficulty of continuing artistic practice when homelands are being abandoned and lost. Galactic Crush 2 addresses the turbulence and atrocity unfolding in the world, but it does so from a planetary perspective that extends beyond borders. What if we all were aboard this one spaceship, together, facing an uncertain future?