Art for a future: Planet beyond apocalypse

Abstract

Joanna Zylinska proposes a “feminist counterapocalypse,” which would resist the anthropocentric, technicist perspectives that shape apocalyptic narratives of climate crisis. Like Anna Tsing’s exploration of collaborative survival, Zylinska’s counterapocalypse is founded on the notion of precarity as a shared condition of life in the postindustrial world. This article focuses on art-science projects by Joaquín Fargas (Argentina) and Paul Rosero Contreras (Ecuador) that imagine environmental futures. In contrasting their projects the author asks how they endorse or subvert the anthropocentrism that often motivates the representation of climate change as reversible (humans save the planet) or, indeed, as irreversible (humans destroy the planet). Drawing on the work of Andreas Weber and several Latin American scholars, including Eduardo Gudynas and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, the author suggests ways in which biosemiotic and biocentric perspectives may make a valuable contribution to the counterapocalypse Zylinska proposes. The analysis of Rosero’s work in particular opens up ways in which one might consider other paradigms rather than precarity as the basis for a postanthropocentric counterapocalypse, including abundance, reciprocity, collaboration, and coevolution. These are found everywhere in complex ecosystems and relate closely to the principles on which theories and practices of the commons are founded, both in Latin America and beyond.