A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

This book is a valuable contribution to socially engaged art formulating a critical imagination for the future of the Anthropocene.

How do architectural elements play a part in planetary imaginaries under the Anthropocene? This book includes authors and architects, theories and practitioners that open up the debate through field research and architectural speculation. The book has an interesting organisation of content with four main sections ‘Earth’, ‘Political Ecologies’, ‘Corporealities’ and ‘Enclosures’ approaching the discourse through climate injustice, control and biosecurity, material effect, posthumanism discourse and case studies. The book aims to present spatial cases and discourses on the Anthropocene and climate injustice through architectural infrastructure, knowledge, materiality and scale. Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary can be a useful source for socially engaged art practices and debates that deal with climate injustice and field research on more-than-human worlds. PT

Ghosh usually writes fiction, but The Great Derangement and the Unthinkable is a non-fiction book that primarily discusses the effect of climate change on our everyday lives. The author’s fictional works deal mostly with relational territories, labour and narratives across planetary existences, while this book focuses on the question of the unthinkable, which I believe is an important aspect to bring to the question of how we imagine the future. The book is centred on a past event, the author’s memory of a tornado that struck New Delhi in 1978, which he describes as ‘a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld’. This pivotal emotional event for him forces us to think of the improbable/improbability of climate change. This book on the Anthropocene has the simplest imaginative discussion of all the Anthropocene books mentioned. It develops speculative imagination in critically tackling concepts such as improbability. PT

The form in which nation-states show their commitment to this common plight is the international treaty. We-the-People of this nation-state agrees to commit ourselves to doing such-and-such to achieve a common future built out of our differentiated pasts and present. I think it is right here that the concept of obligation might disrupt this contractual imaginary and the specific ideology of common and different that underlies it.

In two years we have produced up to twenty-five videos, some of which on very different subjects and with very different aesthetics. And yet we feel we are still learning how to work with complex issues in a short-form video while keeping things formally interesting. That is, how to combine investigative reporting on given political issues while rupturing with expectations about how the form of such informative videos should look like. Unlike other platforms, we are not so much interested in a coherent theme, but in maintaining rigor and formal experimentation in our approach.