Editorial. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene

#8 2025 Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 1 DOROTA SAJEWSKA, JULIA SCHADE Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene Anthropos Anthropo(s)cene Scene Performative Arts Performative Strategies Transformation More-than-Human Agency Decolonial Ecology Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 2 In her long-term performance Motherboards (2020–ongoing), the artist Selma Selman stands in front of a stack of electrical items – old computers, CD and VHS players – that have ended up in a dump because they are no longer needed by a very particular manifestation of the human – homo economicus. The performance begins when she enters the space with three male assistants and starts pulling cables and hitting the devices with hammers, drills and an axe. In this confrontational piece, the audience is subjected to a sensory assault: an overwhelming noise and unpleasant dust emanating from the smashed devices, along with the waste generated by destroying items that were already considered rubbish. However, it is not only second-rate objects that are destroyed here, since the goal of the destruction is to extract gold from electronic waste. The performance is also a self-reflexive act that critically and affectively refers to the artist’s own identity, her origins and family, the status of Roma people in Western society, as well as the position of men and women in the Roma community – it is no coincidence that Selma Selman crushes electronic debris to extract a valuable metal with the help of her male relatives (her father, brother and cousin).1 FIG. 1–4 Selma Selman, Motherboards , 2023–ongoing, performance documentation for the 18th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey. Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 3 Their daily work involves dealing with waste – mostly car scrap. By drawing attention to this practice, she emphasises the lack of recognition for the sustainability of her family’s labour in society. She also draws attention to the extractive nature of artistic practice, as she transforms waste into an art object that can circulate as a commodity within the art market. By addressing the question of what actually falls into the categories of ‘life’ and ‘value’, Selman’s work hints towards a problem inherent in discourses about the Anthropocene. As many critical approaches have underlined, the term – which was developed to mark a paradigm shift granting humans a special evolutionary position – implies a re-essentialisation of an organic and undifferentiated universal humanity. This universalising viewpoint, however, “neatly erases histories of racism”,2 as Kathryn Yusoff emphasises. It also disregards histories of colonial dispossession and extraction which were based on an ontological division of matter into life and nonlife, into valuable life and the inhuman.3 By bringing waste, scrap and technological residues (back) onto the scene, Selman reminds us of the processes through which particular bodies and places are classified as redundant and worthless, thereby implying that maybe waste rather than the abstract and politically neutral idea of anthropos, is “the planetary mark of our new epoch”,4 as Marco Armiero has argued. Selma Selman’s performance provokes a critical reflection on Western modernity as a project that excludes specific communities – notably non-white and economically disadvantaged ones, who are marginalised within their own traditions. She uses her origins as a starting point to critically examine racist and classist discrimination against Roma people, as well as the strong patriarchal structures within her own community, which manifest in arranged marriages and a lack of education for girls. Selman’s work focuses on the transformation of value between her family’s recycling labour and her own work as an artist within the art industry. In Motherboards, the artist challenges both racial stereotypes and patriarchal domination by announcing the creation of a tooth for her mother made of gold crafted from e-waste. In the process, Selman transforms several motherboards into a golden nail representing manual labour itself, thereby creating a new piece of art in the process: Motherboards (A Golden Nail) (2023). “The waste is not waste,” she admits, “it is a potential material that can return to its first phase once it has lost its functionality. But the point is that the material is a value that transforms capital itself. The material’s value does not only change symbolically: it has a real change from one form to another, from one value to another, forming an open cycle”.5 In this passage, Selman articulates the concept of the indeterminacy of matter, positing that matter is not confined to a fixed shape and is capable of perpetual transformation and selftransformation. Selman’s work thereby evokes an essential question for this issue, which deals with Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene – namely she stages the dialectics of extracting, discarding and othering which generate an ontological ambiguity towards what counts as human and non-human matter in the Anthropocene. Thinking with and through Selman’s work, we ask in what Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 4 ways the entanglement of capitalism, colonialism and environmental injustice demand a transformation of this concept. With our focus on Anthropo(s)cenes, we6 add an ‘s’ to the equation of the Anthropocene and its powerful discourse on the human as a destructive geologic force to ask how ‘scenes of the anthropos’ are constituted: which powerful knowledge paradigms, epistemologies and visual regimes set the stage for the anthropos to appear in the first place and how can its decentring look like? Transformative Acts For Selma Selman, the notion of transformation is key: “I am not a performer; I am a transformer”. In the context of Motherboards, the concept of performance cannot be explained in terms of a simple act of doing or accomplishing an action. It is also not reducible to a repetitive act (of internalised behaviour), an act of endurance, or an act of resistance. Selman’s long-term performative work, which culminates in the transformation of event to object and a radical alteration of matter, demonstrates that the focus of analysis in contemporary performative arts should not be solely on how individuals perform on stage or how human actions are shaped as voluntary or unconscious acts. Rather, the question is how the concept of the human being – the anthropos – should be transformed in the context of new social, political, ecological and technological conditions and challenges, and in relation to other existing beings and entities. This significant shift implies a questioning of anthropocentric agency and movement from a single act (understood as an individual action or sequence of actions) towards relations and relationships within an ever-branching structure of actions and human as well as more-than-human entanglements. Action and agency can thus no longer be considered in subject-centred terms but must be understood on a planetary level and as a relational entanglement; instead of linear-causal connections between individual actions, “planetary action is determined by the interaction of many actions”.7 As demonstrated by Małgorzata Sugiera in her essay “After the ‘Blue Marble’: A Trans-scalar Scene of the Earth as Seen from the Cosmos” in this issue, new forms of agency represent alternative ways of living on and with the planet. They emerge through the mobilisation and combination of particularly situated, trans-scalar alter-histories, which are presented in a decentred and self-reflexive manner as “scenes which critically engage the planetary perspective”.8 In this journal’s issue, we discuss those forms of interactions between different forms of agency that create new connections and configurations between human and more-than-human actors. We ask: instead of the human being, if the main actor in current transformations is the Earth itself – now a living stage that seeks to interact with multiple entities – how should we change our research methods? We therefore propose that the focus should shift from the Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 5 term perform to the word transform. This allows for change to be considered with regard to the redefined conditions under which a performance occurs and is perceived, as well as to the more-than-human entities (trans)forming part of those conditions. Contemporary performative art reflects this ontological ambiguity, which is a necessary condition for the new understanding of the anthropos. This enables a radical openness that does not simply turn against the idea of the human, but rather seeks to rethink or, more accurately, transform it. The focus is not on the abstraction of the anthropos as a new concept, but on the materialisation of the anthropos in the context of transformed living conditions. This emphasises the significance of matter in the Anthropo(s)cene, as it is at the core of transformative processes. In this issue, the performativity of matter is explored, as manifested in the ‘scenes of the anthropos’ that emerge in contemporary artistic practices, places of colonial violence and extractivist landscapes. Scenes of the Anthropos The idea of the anthropos is of course not ahistorical. At the beginning of the tragedy, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyranno, the anthropos as a ‘Man’ and subject (both historically imagined as male) first comes into being. As a protagonist who emancipates himself from the mythical cosmos and withdraws from its complex relations, the anthropos is now ready to stand independently over and against nature, to assert rights and to apply reason, as Jörn Etzold shows in his article “The Nambikwara Case”. As such, he enters the visual regime for the first time as he becomes an “object of the gaze”9 who is defined by the very fact of being seen and who paves the way for the modern formation of the subject. The scene of the anthropos is thus embedded in a complicated visual paradigm which defines what is being seen – and therefore understood as human – and what is not. The concept of the anthropos, as evidenced in Western art and philosophy, is predominantly conceptualised as the rational self and political subject. Within this paradigm, the anthropos opens the ideological “space of otherness”, which is – as Denise Ferreira da Silva states in her analysis of Sylvia Wynter’s writings – “represented by bodies and territories subjected to colonial power”.10 Wynter emphasises how key colonial concepts and distinctions, such as the Native, the Black, and the Third World, are the result of the ongoing exploration and reproduction of the question of what it means to be human. The Westernised reproduction and overrepresentation of ‘Man’ as a political subject is thus embedded in racialised logics and representational regimes, which have been naturalising colonial relations and legitimised domination. This ambiguity in viewing the process of decolonial emancipation through a European lens, which leads to the reproduction of the idea of ‘Man’, is explored in depth in Fabienne Liptay’s text “Scene of Contamination. Pasolini’s ‘Appunti per un’Orestiade africana’”. The author argues that, that Pasolini’s unfinished cinematic project Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 6 reflects both a genuine political solidarity with anti-colonial struggles and an inescapable entanglement with the legacies of colonial thought. The universalising discourse of a threatened and self-destructive humanity in the Anthropocene not only reproduces the idea of a homogenous humanity as such, but it also revives the figure of the anthropos as a mostly white, male imaginary of ‘Man’. This ‘Man’ is both responsible for earthly destruction and is also entrusted to save humanity from the threatening catastrophe through progress and technology. The goal of saving humanity justifies all means and thus systematically ignores all socio-political and historical inequalities, as well as the fact that for many colonised peoples “the paradigm of ‘no future’ has already taken place”.11 They have long been, as Macarena Gòmez-Barris argues, already “on the other side of colonial catastrophe”.12 By ignoring all those critical, feminist, decolonial, sociopolitical and philosophical approaches that reject the notion of a homogenous humanity – and that instead highlight relational, intersectional dependencies, exclusions, colonial and more-thanhuman entanglements – this imaginary of the anthropos ends up reessentialising the idea of the ‘Man’ rather than questioning it. In her text “‘Don’t extract it, don’t consume it’. Decolonial Ecologies and Liquid Dramaturgies”, Julia Schade draws attention to these forgotten – or rather deliberately marginalised – critical theories that have long questioned the existence of ‘Man’ from a feminist and decolonial perspective. She focuses on feminist performance works dealing with the aftermath of extractive violence by turning towards liquid dramaturgies as a performative mode of engaging with the entangled relations between water, bodies, gender and contamination. In “Dancing with the shaker in the hand. Cosmopolitical performances for a burning planet” the artist Amanda Piña reflects on Indigenous forms of knowledge and world making practices in her latest work To Bloom () Florecimiento (2024) which envisions the ocean as a living archive of ancestral knowledge. In “The Garden as Scene of the Anthropocene: Heterotopia, Queer Ecologies and Green Archives”, Friederike Nastold analyses the garden as a scene of (neo-colonial) narratives of violence and sheds light on the concept of queer ecologies as a means of dissolving hegemonic binaries and offering alternative world designs that no longer centre the figure of ‘Man’. In order to critically examine and differentiate this universalising and neutralising discourse of the Anthropocene, a number of concepts have been developed in recent years to explicitly address different forms of violence: racial Capitalocene13, Plantationocene14, Negrocene15, patchy Anthropocene16, Wasteocene17, and many other -cenes. These critical responses to the Anthropocene emphasise the entanglement between colonial and extractivist histories of violence, racial matterings, and the interconnected violences enacted on genders, species and environments. They also consider the certain “potential violence” of “any kind of unified ‘we’”18 that presupposes humanity within the discourse. These manifestations of a violent ‘us’, as well as the Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 7 potential to disrupt the anthropocenic regime – which seeks to explain complex nature–culture phenomena from a unified, universal perspective – are examined in Mateusz Chaberski’s “Spoiling the Anthropo(s)cene. Between Rewilding and Grounding” and Mateusz Borowski’s “Feral Violence in ‘Acid Forest’: The Anthropo(s)cene and its Media”. Chaberski introduces the concept of spoiling in relation to the agentionality of matter – that is, its capacity to shape and transform anthropogenically altered landscapes, focusing on the performative strategies of rewilding and grounding associated with polluted rivers. By contrasting the notion of the Anthropo(s)cene with the more commonly used concept of the environment, Mateusz Borowski demonstrates how specific forms of representation can challenge established rationales and open up spaces for alternative approaches, allowing us to attend to the wellbeing of more encompassing networks of multispecies life. In her essay, “Wild Scene: Andris Eglītis’ ‘Savvala’ as an Experience of the Non-representational”, Dorota Sosnowska argues for another concept of a scene that exposes the limits of representation and exists independently of human presence or interpretation. She proposes the concept of a ‘wild scene’ as a nonrepresentational, performative environment that challenges thinking about the Anthropocene by foregrounding abjection, embodiment and the loss of humancentred meaning. As we interrogate the dominant knowledge frameworks, epistemologies, and visual regimes through which the anthropos is represented, we likewise understand Anthropo(s)cenes as sites of new relationality that “decentralise the role of the anthropos in environmental interdependencies”.19 The idea of the “earth as a living stage”20 implies acknowledging other more-than-human ways of knowing and being. Anthropo(s)cenes thus do not simply reject scenes of the human. Rather, they emphasise the challenges that manifest with the latest epistemological shifts to the more-than-human, to Indigenous epistemologies and the recognition of other-than-Westernised-ontologies. The promises, assumptions and desires at play in the search for non-Western thought are explored in Leon Gabriel’s contribution “‘Ancestrality’ as an Answer to the ‘Anthropo(s)cene’”? which takes into account the ambivalence of visibility as a core element of the Anthropo(s)cene. He brings together several scenes in which the resurgence of ways of thinking long overlooked by those living in colonial metropolises intersects with political struggles. In the context of the Anthropocene and the scene of the anthropos, he emphasises the importance of critically questioning visual regimes as well as the desires at play in the search for non-Western thought. Anthropo-Not-Seen The relationship between violence imposed by colonial epistemes and the invisibility of non-Western ontologies and epistemologies is a particular focus of anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena, whose work has significantly Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 8 influenced the conceptualisation of this journal issue. In her text “Uncomming Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen” published in 2019 she introduces the critical notion of the anthropo-not-seen, shifting the focus from examining the temporal dimension of the anthropos’ destructive impact to investigating the spatial distribution of power between antagonistically disposed collectives – the nation state and Indigenous peoples. By adding not-seen to anthropo, however, her “intention is not to evoke the invisible of a visible realm under which it exists bearing the duress of power. In fact, the not-seen does not mainly refer to a regime of visibility. Rather, it aims to make reference to what is within a historically formulated hegemonic condition of impossibility, and hence, included in the anthropo-not-seen are antagonistic partners and their antagonistic relationship.”21 The concept of the anthropo-not-seen can thus be understood as a “condition of impossibility” that emerges within the (modern) process of world-making, resulting from the ontological distinction between human and non-human realms. Taking Indigenous struggles in Peru as her starting point, de la Cadena characterises this condition as antagonistic, arguing that it encompasses the destructive will of the anthropos, who invented this distinction with the intention “to eradicate all that disobeyed mandates to be ‘human’” – meaning, all those disobedient collectives that exceed the boundaries of this constructed hegemonic binarism. On the other hand, it includes those who operate within collectives whose entities defy classification as either human or nonhuman. The most intriguing aspect of de la Cadenaʼs concept, which addresses the complex issue of visibility, is her assertion that the two opposing actors are not merely invisible, but exist within the domain of the not-seen. One seeks to destroy this realm in order to establish itself as a political agent, while the other engages in collaboration, perceiving it as a constituent part of the broader community of non-human entities. Moreover, she demonstrates how this antagonism has undergone a transformation over time, also referring to the extent to which it has been visible in the public sphere. During the early colonial period, the conflict against the realm of the unseen was conducted in an overt manner, justified by the necessity of combating barbarism under the banner of Christianising peoples. Contrastingly, in the context of modern secular politics, this was pursued in a more covert approach, framed by the rhetoric of progress and modernisation. Despite her conviction that contemporary politics perpetuates war on the anthropo-not-seen, even with less visibility and greater acceleration, de la Cadena attempts to identify moments of interruption within the dominant discourse: “I propose that the moment the anthropo-not-seen, as the destruction of worlds , seems to have acquired a might and speed that early extirpators of idolatries and nineteenth-century explorers (turned rubber and sugar plantation investors) would envy is also the moment when, from Dorota Sajewska, Julia Schade Editorial #8, 2025. Transforming the Anthropo(s)cene INSERT Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries 9 the other side of the coin—the anthropo-not-seen as worlds defending themselves against their destruction —stories emerge that may bring into existence a public that does not yet exist.”22 De la Cadena urges for a more detailed examination of how these alternate worlds react to present-day extractivist practices, particularly within the context of the Western world’s extensive destruction of peripheral territories on a global scale. In this journal’s issue, we follow her suggestion by paying greater attention to the stories developed and told by collectives – both human and non-human – who have been exploited by the capitalist system and extractivist politics. In their disciplinarily diverse contributions, the authors demonstrate that these stories have the potential to challenge the hegemonic narratives that shape our understanding of existence and what we consider to be life and non-life. By exploring the concept of the Anthropo(s)cene as a space for unseen and untold stories, they facilitate an “ontological opening”23 that allows for the possibility of envisioning a world where humans and non-humans coexist. The Notion of the Scene Building on de la Cadena’s concept of anthropo-not-seen, as proposed by Marisol de la Cadena, we seek to demonstrate that our notion of the scene transcends the limitations of the theatre stage, often regarded as a specific setting for human activity. Instead, we propose an exploration of the dynamics between scene, seen and not-seen, between performativity and visibility. A scene, we argue, invariably engages with the intricate interrelationship between action, image, and text. An image may be created as a result of a particular act or event occurring within a scene. However, an image or a text may also initiate a series of acts within a scene, thereby establishing a novel relationship with the preceding and subsequent scene. Scenes are autonomous units which demonstrate a disposition to interact with other scenes. In other words, scenes attract each other. They reflect the fragmented and incomplete nature of an action, and can be considered ongoing, nonlinear and porous phenomena in themselves. Scenes are deliberately used in various media and arts – theatre, literature, painting, photography, film, video – basically to frame events, processes and situations. The act of framing and mediating, which seems fundamental to the construction of a scene, takes place both at the moment of production and at the moment of reception; therefore, both areas must always be considered in a reciprocal relationship. A scene is thus perceived as a dynamic structure comprising virtual, material and symbolic elements, which unfold their performative impact in the moment of perception, thereby aiming to elicit a specific reaction from the recipient.24 A scene can only be constructed as a scene if the perception is already imagined and appears as part of it. A scene doesn’t have to be created by and