Excession is a slide film constructed using generative AI techniques. It embarks on a journey through political concepts—with the waxing and waning of power as its central subject.

Embodied by Greek sculptures, ministers and supernannies—as well as marmots and coyotes—it narrates concepts developed by Greek historian Polybius and political theorist Helen Thompson in her book Disorder, which are increasingly relevant in the current epoch of crumbling democracies.

The film unveils how aristocratic and democratic excesses, mapped through the rise and fall of civilizations increasingly punctuated by environmental catastrophes, shape our geopolitical landscape and societal decay.

"The idea of democratic and aristocratic excess is introduced by Polybius, the Greek historian writing in the second century BCE about the rise of the Roman Republic. He thought that regardless of their external vulnerability, all states were subject to internal decay, and that this decay produced a sequence of change between forms of government: In the beginning there is chaos, then monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally the mob rule of ochlocracy, before out of the chaos a single demagogue claims power and the cycle starts again."