Toward Eternal Peace (Perpetual Peace / Zum ewigen Frieden) is the only video in the portfolio received from Mu:p that was filmed in a single shot with no cuts. Captured from a camera mounted at the top of the performance hall, the 15-minute video shows the entire stage in view. The main sequence unfolds as follows: A man enters the stage carrying a ladder and attempts to climb it. He sets the ladder against thin air and takes a desperate first step. Naturally, the air offers no support—the ladder collapses, and the man stumbles and falls to the ground. Soon, workers dressed in white appear and begin constructing a structure beside the fallen man. They lift him up—though he appears to have been lying there far longer than he actually was—and gently guide him onto the completed structure. The man's ladder becomes a passageway leading to a bathtub placed at the far edge of the structure. Lying in the tub, the man finally enjoys a moment of rest(?). For even greater comfort, a headset and a cup of coffee are served to him. One almost expects the headset to be playing a message: "We wish you a pleasant time."

The body collapsing from lost balance. The unreachable ladder. Caught between the two, the man's repeated gesture of falling seems to embody the anxiety and instability of neoliberalism—a world where grand narratives and shared values no longer provide support. The title Toward Eternal Peace appears to refer to this man, who seems to have found final rest in a world turned upside down. Indeed, he looks peaceful. The structure built by the workers lifts his fallen body and places it in a space where he no longer needs to fear falling. The man will no longer have to struggle to climb anywhere. He simply needs to remain in the bathtub—and never leave it.

This documentation video is filmed in a wide shot from above, overlooking the stage without any cuts. This means that throughout the entire runtime, both the fallen man and the workers constructing the installation beside him remain simultaneously visible. While the man lies motionless, completely absorbed in the act of collapsing, the workers are equally absorbed in their construction, seemingly indifferent to his presence. Between the movements of the workers and the dramatically fallen body of the man, there exists a peculiar dissonance. If the former enacts the construction process as a performance on stage—thereby expanding the notion of choreography—then the latter falls into a more familiar category of choreography, where the performer’s gestures carry specific symbolic meaning. Although they share the same stage without any walls or boundaries, they seem to belong to entirely different worlds. It's a dissonance akin to watching two films of entirely different genres projected at once. To me, this framing strongly symbolizes Mu:p’s identity as a collaboration between choreographer and architect, and it feels like the moment that comes closest to the kind of humor always present in their performances. Or rather—it’s not exactly humor. It's a moment that elicits laughter but also denies the comfort of actually laughing. A discomfort that makes you question whether you should be laughing at all. Could this kind of unease be called “Mu:p-style” humor?

While searching for traces of past performances by typing “Mu:p,Toward Eternal Ruin,” I came across a post on Mu:p’s social media account featuring images from the show—and this peculiar caption: "New Release from Mu:p Medical Instruments! Mu:p Medical Instruments launches its Mental Care Circulation System (MCCS), a prosthetic device constructed through physical imagination for the purpose of eternal peace." Encountering made-up terms that resemble a kind of fictional universe is not unusual in Mu:p’s performances. But since I had already been thinking about their particular brand of humor, I couldn’t just scroll past it. According to this caption, the installation built by the workers for the fallen man is both a medical device and a monumental prosthetic—a Mental Care Circulation System. This is, in part, true (after all, the structure is actually being constructed on stage), but it’s also an outrageous joke. The caption presents the stage installation as if it were a commercial product, clearly a parody, and no one would mistake it for reality. Yet the joke feels oddly serious—too serious to laugh off. This blatant fiction seems to be inverting something. But what, exactly? I still find myself wanting to laugh, yet unable to. It provokes a strange kind of resistance to laughter—an impulse to push back against it.

Returning to the stage, the man still lies collapsed while the workers are busy with the installation. There is no actor performing slapstick comedy, no stand-up comedian addressing the audience with cynical jokes. The one thing that can be said with certainty is that this scene feels profoundly unfamiliar. Mu:p often—if not frequently—creates scenes we have never seen before. (And they push these moments to the very end. The audience either eventually finds some exhilaration within the scene or is left unable to fully enter it. Mu:p’s performances always carry a boldness that gambles on the audience.) This unfamiliarity means that the performance’s effect expands by counting the totality of relationships that stick and separate between two alien worlds, with curiosity neither resolved nor diluted. While the fallen man lies still and motionless, the workers assemble planks, take measurements, and grind coffee beans. These are the moments that caught my attention in Mu:p’s work. In The Moment of  beingTwo, performers occupy the lobby while children watch with unfamiliar eyes, and museum staff cleaning the space move in strangely synchronized rhythms with the performance. In Mu:p’s work, humor is not merely a device to provoke laughter but a concept encompassing effects that arise in environments where chance and improvisation can overlap with performance. It is better described not as the act of producing humor, but the act of welcoming it.

Henri Bergson, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, argues that laughter is typically accompanied by a certain “indifference.” He claims that nothing is a greater enemy to laughter than emotion, and that indifference serves as the natural ground where comedic qualities can be perceived. “Approach life from the standpoint of a detached spectator, and many dramas will turn into comedy. For dancers to suddenly appear ridiculous, it is enough to block one’s ears in the ballroom and not listen to the music’s melody.”^{[ 1 ]} For comedic effect to be fully realized, a momentary state akin to numbness or detachment is necessary. This means that comedy appeals primarily to pure intellect. In the following chapter, Bergson discusses the contrast between the living and the mechanical, arguing that all events arising from the gap between the two are comic. According to him, any behavior or arrangement of events that appears alive yet reveals a mechanical pattern inherently possesses comedic quality.^{[ 2 ]}

A man who falls after trying to climb a ladder leaning against empty air. A man who seems completely drained of will. Naturally, if someone were to appear on stage at this moment, we would expect them to act toward the man—perhaps shaking him awake or trying to restore the ladder’s purpose. Indeed, by the end of the performance, the workers do lift the man and integrate his ladder into the structure. But at first, they appear indifferent to him. They focus entirely on their installation, as if the fallen man is invisible, placing him off to one side of the stage. Precise measurement and construction take precedence over the man’s wellbeing. The workers’ movements, absorbed in their task without regard for any dramatic development, unmistakably convey a “mechanical arrangement.” So the event can be reinterpreted like this: perhaps these workers willingly become machines themselves to save the man. If they were to empathize with his suffering, worry for him, or try to lift him up, the man’s despair would become real and undeniable. But by treating him with detached indifference and embracing mechanical precision, the entire event—including the man’s fall—can be transformed into comedy. Within this comedy, the gestures of despair are structured as comic devices that elicit laughter through their contrast with mechanical order. Just as the workers complete a mental-care system that leads the man to peace by using the very ladder that caused his fall, comedy reconfigures our overwhelming helplessness into elements of humor that allow us to endure pain. Of course, parody phrases like “Mu:p Medical Instruments” and “Mental Care Circulation System” can also be read as self-mocking responses to an era where concepts like eternity and peace are no longer easy to approach optimistically. This comedy clearly carries pessimism and ridicule toward the world. We cannot freely burst into laughter before this scene. Yet, if this comedy’s operation depends on instrumentalizing the impossibility of the world and deliberately introducing exaggerated detachment to sense its comic nature, might it also embody a proactive optimism—the belief that the world can be reconstructed?

The title of the performance Toward Eternal Peace is taken from the book of the same name by Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that eternal peace is not a mere fantasy or hope but a goal that political philosophy must strive to achieve. He opposed all wars and believed that true peace is not a temporary ceasefire but a legal state maintained through structural conditions. Mu:p’s style of humor structurally challenges our perception of the world. Their performances create a space that welcomes humor—not allowing it to dominate the entire show, but opening the event to the possibility of humor’s effects. This humor is not a one-off burst of laughter; rather, by transforming neoliberal anxieties into conditions for comedy, it offers an optical illusion close to “eternal peace.” Just as laughter can deceive the anxiety within us, we can also fabricate reality itself.

Afterword.

After sending the completed text, I received a reply from Mu:p. They pointed out that I had mistakenly written the performance title as Toward Eternal Ruin instead of Toward Eternal Peace, but somehow they liked it that way and suggested leaving it as is. During the writing process, I kept accidentally writing “ruin” instead of “peace,” repeatedly correcting it—yet some instances remained uncorrected. Mu:p’s proposal to keep these “mistakes” felt like a kind of humor itself, so I agreed. What meaning might lie in this recurring error? Perhaps unconsciously, I had been pessimistic about peace, equating it with ruin. The two words share the same initial consonant in Korean and, while similar in form, seem opposed in meaning—yet this opposition only deepens their entanglement. When placing “peace” and “ruin” side by side, I recall a photo from the anti-expansion protests against the US military base in Pyeongtaek, where someone raised a flag reading “peace” atop ruins of demolished houses and buildings. This paradoxical image seems to embody the very conditions under which peace can endure today—the inseparability of peace and ruin. The simultaneous sense of pessimism and optimism I felt in Mu:p’s performance is likely connected to this paradox. Humor sometimes serves as an exacting critique of reality.

^{Translated by ChatGPT}