Anthropo-scenes:
Restaging climate dramas for [environmental justice]
This year’s lab, Anthropo-scenes, will be an experiment in ecodramaturgy, bringing together speculative ethnography, Black geographies, decolonial thought, landscape architecture, and community-based theater to reimagine forms of agency and relationality in the wake of climate collapse. As anthropologist, novelist and decolonial theorist Amitav Ghosh has argued, the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Recognizing the urgency of moving beyond dominant narratives of crisis and recovery, this year’s lab will experiment with new ways of staging, witnessing, and engaging with climate realities. We will explore creative forms of non-extractive relationality that respond to the everyday challenges—and anticolonial histories—of living otherwise on a damaged planet.
On our screens, we regularly witness climate crises around the world as media events aestheticized via familiar cinematic phantasmagorias and as challenges to be strategized through survivalist gameplay. These dominant techniques of representation and simulation mask ordinariness and predictability in extraordinariness (Mike Davis), the actual imperceptibility -by humans- of the scale, temporality and interactional complexity of anthropogenic climate change and, of course, the continuous predicament of their aftermath. Climate drama also sets up a repertoire of responses that - in the so-called West - seems to inevitably prioritize certain kinds of expertise (bring in the engineers, not the social researchers, the artists, the movements), priorities (back-to-business, rebuilding rather than unbuilding), infrastructure (‘gray’ rather than ‘green’ or ‘blue’, technologies rather than technics of commoning) and timeframes (immediate action rather than pausing, moving on rather than re-collecting).
How might we restage contemporary climate dramas? What would this entail? Could we flip the script from ecocide to ecojustice? Might such exercises in living-otherwise ‘make a difference’ toward en-acting more livable, inhabitable, inclusive futures?
On our screens, we regularly witness climate crises around the world as media events aestheticized via familiar cinematic phantasmagorias and as challenges to be strategized through survivalist gameplay. These dominant techniques of representation and simulation mask ordinariness and predictability in extraordinariness (Mike Davis), the actual imperceptibility -by humans- of the scale, temporality and interactional complexity of anthropogenic climate change and, of course, the continuous predicament of their aftermath. Climate drama also sets up a repertoire of responses that - in the so-called West - seems to inevitably prioritize certain kinds of expertise (bring in the engineers, not the social researchers, the artists, the movements), priorities (back-to-business, rebuilding rather than unbuilding), infrastructure (‘gray’ rather than ‘green’ or ‘blue’, technologies rather than technics of commoning) and timeframes (immediate action rather than pausing, moving on rather than re-collecting).
How might we restage contemporary climate dramas? What would this entail? Could we flip the script from ecocide to ecojustice? Might such exercises in living-otherwise ‘make a difference’ toward en-acting more livable, inhabitable, inclusive futures?
To address these questions, this year’s lab is organized into two thematic clusters:
- The Caribbean-Mediterranean: Transoceanic Encounters
The first cluster seeks to reframe climate change through a decolonial perspective by thinking with Kathryn Yusoff’s framework of the Black Anthropocene to examine the historical and ongoing entanglements of ecology, race, and extractive colonialism in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Differentially shaped by histories of transatlantic slavery, colonial extraction, capitalist exploitation, and forced displacement, these regions provide crucial insights into how racialized ecologies are created and sustained within global systems of power and capital. We will explore the Caribbean-Mediterranean as a conjunctive place (a kind of undercartography [Tom Western]), by tracing the situated strategies of political, cultural, and ecological resistance and struggle that animate intersecting spatial imaginations of and between these two geographical assemblages. This exploration invites us to think with the anticolonial sensibilities of Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott alongside Katherine McKittrick’s Black geographies—the spatial practices of Black life and struggle, from maroonage to contemporary activism. It also draws inspiration from initiatives like dëcoloиıze hellάş, a nomadic platform of academics, researchers, public scholars, artists, activists and civil society actors who are contributing to the global decolonize movement by advocating for an urgent public (re)view of the place of modern Greece in relation to geographies and genealogies of European colonialism and capitalism. By linking environmental violence to resistance and adaptation, this cluster thus aims to foster a decolonial, transoceanic dialogue. The Caribbean-Mediterranean, then: How might we imagine such a place, and to what ends?
- Floodscapes and Futures: Dwelling in the Amphibious Zone
The second cluster responds to our recent experience of a local catastrophic flood event and the ensuing collaboration among anthropologists, architects and artists as part of the interdisciplinary team at the University of Thessaly, “Torrentscapes,” and the Floodmarks exhibit-event to be held at the Museum of the City of Volos in April, 2024. Drawing on landscape art and architecture, feminist environmental studies, and decolonial ecologies, we seek to hold open the space of the amphibious zone—the torrent bank, the coastline, our water-bodies—as sites of precarious subjects who have “weathered” past floods, embodying climate’s living archives (Astrida Neimanis, Natalie Diaz, Christine Sharpe). Against the rigid nature/culture divide enshrined in Western epistemologies—and reflected in “anti-flood” engineering that pits humans against nature while treating land as an extractable resource, private property, and tourist commodity—in this cluster we will experiment with “living maps” (Frédérique Aït-Touati) and geopoetics (Kenneth White, Édouard Glissant) as ways of re-staging the climate drama, unsettling dominant narratives and opening new forms of relationality, memory, and resistance.
