TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Paraphrasing Lenin, one might ask what is to be done in and with the Anthropocene? Scholar Simone Bignall expands on Félix Guattari when she proposes three ecosophies for the Anthropocene: environmental governance, indigenous expressivism and continental posthumanism. At the same time, some Indigenous artists and scholars reject the notion of the Anthropocene altogether. For example, artist and curator Léuli Eshrāghi talks about “Eurocentric ungenerous doomsday perceptions as the Anthropocene and other untrained constructs of spiritually voided Western knowledge systems,” pointing towards an epistemological economy which privileges white Francophone philosophers over a multiplicity of Indigenous knowledges which go beyond the logic of radical temporal breakthroughs.

            My presentation will respond to the theme of the conference with a case study of Matthew Barney’s 2021 collaborative intermedia performance Catasterism in Three Movements commissioned by Basel’s Laurenz Foundation specifically for their signature Schaulager combined art museum, research and archive, and featuring, amongst other performers, Bigstone Cree Nation performer Sandra Lamouche. In this way, I seek to foreground art’s capacity to produce concepts and critically interrogate the concept of the Anthropocene itself through material and immaterial inscriptions, such as dance, sound and gesture. As will be argued, Barney’s collaboration with Lamouche, itself a restaging of the Cosmic Hunt myth, performs a transductive encounter between differing cosmological visions underpinning technics, ultimately going beyond the Messianic conceptual logic of the Anthropocene.