Armonía

We conceive the end of the world more easily than the end of capitalism. Today it is easier for us to imagine the total deterioration of the Earth and nature than the collapse of the capitalist system. Faced with the impossibility of seeing a different alternative to this way of life and socio-economic system in which we find ourselves, we are left with the old and well-known slogan “there is no alternative”, which places the doctrines of the planetary north of economic liberalism and the free market as the only way for the development of modern societies.

This has caused us to lose the ability to imagine a future outside of dystopian scenarios governed by the Anthropocene. Now, we can only conceive of futures in which natural destruction and the decline of human civilization is imminent. However, this has not always been the case. In the 16th century, Thomas More imagined a fictional community based on the philosophical and political ideals of the classical world and Christianity, a city he called Utopia. Recently, post-humanist ideologies have been emerging in what Donna J. Haraway sums up as “getting on with the problem”: imagining possible futures based on collective speculative fabulations.

The project Archaeologies for after the end of the world seeks to establish narratives situated in this line of research based on the fictional reconstruction of a world after the ruin. Once we have touched that end of the world, what will be left?

It is an effort to see alternatives to the way we live now, an attempt to see through our fear-afflicted society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even to imagine real grounds for hope.