Shia LaBeouf Helped People Get Their Feelings About 2016 Stress Out

Over the weekend, ever-evolving actor-artist Shia LaBeouf turned to performance art once again with his partners Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner for a project called #ANDINTHEEND, keeping with the team’s tendency towards hashtag branding and public involvement. This time, the trio camped out at the Sydney Opera House for two nights as, one by one, visitors delivered a message to them starting with the cryptic phrase “And in the end…”

“As 2016 draws to a close, we are all too aware of the pervasive sense of foreboding that has come to define the year,” LaBeouf and his collaborators expressed in a statement. “And yet, we still yearn for some greater truth, for the utopias of our distant horizons, expressed through art.”

The messages from the visitors were streamed online and on a giant digital screen outside the Opera House. In the over-seven-hour video, LaBeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner are seated—mostly silent—onstage, where they take notes. A shaggy-haired Shia intermittently runs his hands over his head. Sometimes, he speaks.

“And in the end, Bukowski’s poetry saved me,” he announces at one point.

Participants seemed to appreciate the cathartic opportunity to express themselves.