Anthropocene as Capitalocene

Abstract

If the Anthropocene designates humanity’s environmental footprint, the Capitalocene underlines the economic and political premises of the current climate crisis, tied to long-term colonial dispossession and exploitation of ‘cheap nature’. The current article explores the matrix of violence embedded in the Capitalocene as it is appears in the research-based critical art projects produced by Romanian artists Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán. I show how, focusing on devastated or fabricated landscapes, as well as on contested sites of conflict from the Global South that are often camouflaged or disguised under eco-veils, Benera and Estefán’s art practice rethinks post-socialism from a planetary perspective. I also claim that their body of work, which employs archival and cartografic formats of visualisation, proposes an alternative epistemological matrix, directed against the global exercise of environmental and political violence.