Facing The Anthropocene’ is an international call for 8 artists to produce a visual response and guerrilla strategy to the catastrophical global issues described by Donna Haraway’s Chtulucene, on the occasion on the New Shape Forum in Stockholm, which discussed alternative models of global governance in the face of the current planetary conditions of crisis. The artists’ works were distributed en masse and featured in billboards in the city’s streets for the weeks leading up to the conference.
Going beyond the temptation to imagine future utopias or dystopias, Haraway works with the idea of the Chtulucene, a speculative, trans- historical, trans-feminist, multi-force, multi-temporal, post-human and relational space in which individuality and autonomy no longer make sense, but rather, human beings become just living beings, ‘making kin’ with all human and non-human forms of life, assimilating the com- plexity of what we have done, and what happens in the airs, waters, oceans, rocks, and atmospheres.
Climate change, large-scale environmental deg- radation, biological extinction, violent conflict, famines, overpopulation, extreme poverty – based on current patterns and systems, the world is exposed to facing an array of global catastrophic events that the Anthropocene has brought about, challenges which understand no borders, and which cannot be solved from the perspective of the 20th century nation state apparatus. What futures and other possible ways of life – or death – will emerge from the conception and eventual transi- tion to alternative planetary regimes?
With Robel Temesgen (ETH), Han Sungpil (KOR) Pinar Yoldas (TUR), Marian Garrido (SPA), Maggic Mary (US), Mari Bastashevski (RUS), Grupo Toma (CHL), Pablo DeSoto (SWE)
