WASTEOCENE. GUERRILLA NARRATIVE AND THE EMBODIED STRATIGRAPHIES OF
TOXIC CAPITALISM Talk by prof. Marco Armiero Humans may live in the
Anthropocene, but this does not affect all of them in the same way.
How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in
the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere,
that is, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the
environment? Strata of toxics have sedimented into the human (and more
than human) body, arriving, according to the most recent studies in
epigenetics, to be inscribed into the genetic memory. Perhaps, looking
at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the
Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene, the Age of Waste.
Necrocapitalist wasting relationships are so pervasive because they
come together with a hegemonic narrative which does not even allow to
see the contamination or speak about it. But while official accounts
have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships,
another kind of narratives has been written in flesh, blood, and
cells. The body becomes the archive of stories without a history,
where clues are embedded under the skin. As a sophisticated portable
device, the body registers what remains invisible in the making of the
Wasteocene, but as with every narrative, this bodily one does not only
compile symptoms and tropes but it also has a performative character.
In this talk, I will present our Guerrilla Narrative project Toxic
Bios as a counter-hegemonic exercise aiming to dismantle the Toxic
Narratives of the Anthropocene while prefiguring alternative
socio-ecological politics.
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18/10/2019 Last update