Whispers and Cries: Photographic Evocations of the Anthropocene

LUP Student Papers, 2018

Although landscape representations in the US-European culture have traditionally been acknowledged as a peaceful ordering of the world or the tool of imperialism, nationalism and private property (sometimes all simultaneously), a new shift in the landscape scopic regime seems to be happening. Produced by the current rise of concerns around climate change and environmental crisis, this shift seems to be related to a specific attention to land use and land value. In other words, instead of focusing on aesthetical conventions and on an idealisation of nature, the landscape is perceived as a relationship between human’s socio-political activities and the nature where they take place. However, it is legitimate to ask how the aesthetical aspects of these new landscapes are constructed and wonder if it is possible to evade such problematic history. In this context, where landscape topic is studied by different disciplines like art history and visual studies but also geography, anthropology and political ecology, the landscape definitions are diverted by activists and artists addressing subjects like the Anthropocene and the commons. This thesis analyses two European artists’ video essays: Deep Weather by Ursula Biemann and Everything is coming together, while everything is following apart: the ZAD by Oliver Ressler. Their works, that have in common to depict peripheral occupied landscapes, are compared and interpreted, with the objective to discuss their different approaches. Applying theoretical tools as Nicolas Mirzoeff’s visuality and Trevor Paglen’s concept of experimental geography, the two artists’ positions will be questioned: from the view from above to the people in the field, from the global to the local, from the observer to the viewer. These two artists offer landscapes, understood as a space and as its representation, that reveal the pointlessness of the war on nature and how communal activities could be a first step to rethink the relationship between human and nature.

In their late work, Deleuze & Guattari posit the need for ‘geophilosophy’, a form of thinking that acknowledges the non-human becomings and forces integral to thought: everything that contributes to thought’s capacities. In this paper I propose matching this concept with the notion of geoartistry, one that traces the non-human becomings in human artistic practice, but that also seeks to map these potentialities as the manifest themselves not only from a human perspective, but from the perspective of the other-than-human entities experiencing them. I argue that it behooves those humans attempting to move beyond the anthropocentric histories of reductive materialization to articulate the ways in which other-than-human entities might ‘experience’ creative and artistic phenomena given that these can be central to each entity’s expansion or contraction of abilities and potential, of their capacity for joy. In other words, understanding with nuance the experiences of beauty generated and taken up by other-than-human entities can help humans understand these entities’ ‘value’ on their own terms.

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow.

2012

Our major cultural artefacts, or at least those endorsed by dominant culture, such as museums, monuments, statues and the like, suggest through their passive advocacy of stainlessness a paradoxical commitment to both permanence and progress. Not unlike their iron predecessors in the late-nineteenth century, whose Jugendstil organicism created a metallic imaginary that provided Baudelaire with the title for his most well known collection of verse, Les Fleurs du Mal, the evils of our shiny, contemporary wish images remain obscure, not least because their capacity to reflect cultural values is necessarily distorted. Whether one is pacing the promenade leading to Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles, cautiously approaching Ned Kahn's undulating kinetic façade that skins the Technorama Science Centre in Zurich, or finding one's bearings among the gluttonous consumption of Michigan Avenue beneath Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park, we witness how our current epoch reiterates a pernicious but pervasive value: metallic surfaces are synonymous with progress. The more polished, refined, expansive and contiguous these metallic surfaces, the greater the representational carrying capacity for our most lauded but least considered civilizational fetish-stainlessness.

This article redresses an oversight in current eco-theory that offers no means for revising still-persistent conceptions of nature and the natural. It proposes an ecologizing mode of analysis as one corrective. Throughout the essay is an attempt to redeem the human, the artificial, and with them, the city. The argument discovers along the way that in order to profess its non-existence, one must name and thus reify nature, a linguistic curiosity that makes clearer the extent of nature’s ideological reach. This reflexive foil should be taken into consideration by those who find the persistence of nature troubling to the future of eco-theory and eco-awareness.

Post-industrial sites are frequently seen as aesthetically sublime, considered as iconic reminders of an ongoing de-industrialization, and interpreted as symbols of the failure of the industrial age. Simultaneously they are also locations to re-imagine, reinvent and recover landscapes as agents for essential, sustainable, and environmentally-just urban transformations. Both understandings mythologize and value such places, employing a fundamentally dichotomic and normative[3] construction of ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ that implicitly relies on the visibility and representational agency of such sites. The most visible discourses on post-industrial urban sites emphasize issues of environmental justice, pollution mitigation, adaptive reuse, and, in the context of urban redevelopment and renewal, benefits and performances based on ecological functions and processes. On the one hand, current concepts such as “landscape urbanism,” “sustainable urbanism,” and “ecological urbanism,”[4] (as conceptual and practical alternatives to the mainstream forces of urban development), suggest ecology as a redemptive agent. Landscape Urbanism in particular emphasizes process over finished static form, positing landscape and place as both results of cultural production and agents for cultural change. They approach intentional environmental change by attempting to engage the inherent open-endedness, dynamic qualities and interrelatedness of human and non-human processes and systems,[5] and include various interests, processes and forces excluded in more traditional planning approaches.[6] Conversely, established and new hegemonial agendas of global development and neoliberal capitalization (with their attendant less obvious and less public discourses) continue to focus on political and economic interests involved in the complex processes of urban renewal, gentrification, redevelopment and rebranding, producing economically, socially and environmentally uneven and unjust conditions.[7]These competing discourses construct post-industrial sites as highly contested terrains, and variously instrumentalize emergent ecologies and “urban nature” Post-industrial sites themselves could then be decoded as physical manifestations (material)- and representations (medium) -of such discourses, ultimately forcing a reconsideration of ecology and “urban nature” from an objective construct of descriptive science (focusing on biophysical aspects) to a contextually complex hybrid, involving cultural, political, economic and biophysical aspects. In this context, this paper analyzes the High Line in New York City, one of the most recent iconic design projects on a post-industrial urban site. It develops a framework that complements the traditional focus on material-physical-capital-ecological performances in the production and reproduction of contemporary concepts of “sustainable” and “green” cities, particularly referencing the current discourses on “landscape urbanism,” “emergent ecologies.” and “urban nature.” It draws on WJT Mitchell[8] who frames city and urban space as “both represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum (…).” Using the idea that spaces operate simultaneously as real place and a way of seeing, as a sensibility and a lived relation, it will be suggested that urban space then is both medium and mediated. Furthermore, it will be argued that the agency of physical and material change in urban spaces extends beyond its economic, functional and ecological performances into the aesthetic-representational practices of “seeing” and “being seen.”

Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université de Nantes, 2021

2017

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. It analyzes contemporary visual culture—popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects—to consider how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. This book argues that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of a neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geoengineering as the preferred—but likely disastrous—method of approaching climate change. To democratize decisions about the world’s near future, we urgently need to subject the Anthropocene thesis to critical scrutiny and develop creative alternatives in the present. https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/against-the-anthropocene-visual-culture-and-environment-today/

Space and Culture, 2023

This article develops a surrealist approach to researching and writing about the urban Anthropocene, as a critical contribution to existing literatures on "arts of noticing" and "staying with the trouble." Drawing on psychogeographical explorations of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon and distancing itself from conventional modes of academic writing, the article presents a montage of surrealist images of this (post)apocalyptic metropolis. Iquitos emerges as a palimpsest of the wreckage of repeated resource booms, strewn with the ruins of a stillborn modernity and incubating an uncanny fusion of apocalyptic and utopian elements observable in the everyday practices of its subaltern inhabitants. Just as Paris was the capital of the 19th century for Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, so the interpretation of Iquitos as an extreme metaphor for our combined and uneven apocalypse designates it as the capital of the Anthropocene. Keywords surrealism, arts of noticing, staying with the trouble, apocalypse, Anthropocene "Nothing can convince me that this merciless putrefaction of the donkey is anything other than the hard and blinding glint of new precious stones."-Salvador Dalí, "The Rotting Donkey"