Seeing the Anthropocene through Montage

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Environmental changes and the age of the Anthropocene demand new ways of seeing. This article contends that montage serves both as form and as argument in representing the modern Western experience of human-nature relations in the supposed Anthropocene. It suggests that montage resists a single narrative of the Anthropocene and allows for modified readings to address race and capital through alternative notions such as the Capitalocene and Black Anthropocenes. Montage in relation to the Anthropocene is exemplified through two works by contemporary British artists that visualize agencies and legacies of human interventions into fluvial geographies, the sea, and whales: the touring film installation Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah, and the site-specific intervention BERLINWAL (Berlin Whale) (2018) by Elizabeth Price at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. Both works, though differing in medium, use montage as a structure to hold different materialities and multiple spatial and temporal scales, affording integration as well as confrontation. Their multifocal perceptions and multiple perspectives challenge ontologies and afford a decentering of the viewer toward de-exceptionalizing the human.