- Shagufta Bhangu
- Owen Gaffney
- Johannes Lundershausen
- Agata Marzecova
- Prajal Pradhan
- Susanne Quehenberger
- Marija Uzunova
- Helge Wendt
Anthropos
Humans are declared to be the most massive force of geophysical change in the Anthropocene. Yet this category is much underarticulated—what is this “Anthropos” of the epoch? How is it united/divided? How can it be understood? How is it affected by the massive impacts of the Anthropocene? How does it contribute to it? Starting from these questions, we challenged the idea of “the subject” as agent within a human collective on the planetary scale, as well as the imagery of Anthropocene Anthropos—how might this image differ from that previously attached to the image of “Man”? Should we understand this version of Man as an alteration of bodies, as cyborgs, as hybrids, or as subalterns of an emerging superhumanity?
Who is Anthropos of the Anthropocene?
We began with a rainbow of associations typical of a group process. Unable to decide whether Anthropos was simply the villain agent, the “fossil burning man,” as Donna Haraway puts it,1 or if indeed he had some ecological self-awareness, we came to the solution of a simple stop-motion movie that encompasses a historical process. Humanism’s classical Vitruvian Man with his particular proportions to the world is the first picture of Anthropos. With the nuclear strap-on, Anthropos goes through a cyborgish transformation and recoding of gender. His limbs start to dance like the atomic clock, the birth of the Astronaut, who soon after watches the age of United Nations multiculturalism and its reference to the globe. In the final image, the rectangular frame slides away, as a post-human monster crawls on top of the sphere and starts a Shiva-inspired dance—balancing and unbalancing the globe at the same time.
