The Rotting City: Surrealist Arts of Noticing the Urban Anthropocene

Abstract

This article develops a surrealist approach to researching and writing about the urban Anthropocene, as a critical contribution to existing literatures on “arts of noticing” and “staying with the trouble.” Drawing on psychogeographical explorations of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon and distancing itself from conventional modes of academic writing, the article presents a montage of surrealist images of this (post)apocalyptic metropolis. Iquitos emerges as a palimpsest of the wreckage of repeated resource booms, strewn with the ruins of a stillborn modernity and incubating an uncanny fusion of apocalyptic and utopian elements observable in the everyday practices of its subaltern inhabitants. Just as Paris was the capital of the 19th century for Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, so the interpretation of Iquitos as an extreme metaphor for our combined and uneven apocalypse designates it as the capital of the Anthropocene.