Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing

"In BEYOND THE WORLD'S END art theorist and critic TJ Demos argues for an intersectional approach to issues of environmental and social justice, where questions of indigeneity, race, and settler colonialism are thought together with those of ecology. He advocates for what he calls creative ecologies, and he explores how artists are engaging with climate change, racial capitalism, and neoliberalism. He shows how these art practices need to stretch beyond the conventionally recognized bounds of artwork. Throughout, he considers the visual politics of climate change and a range of artistic practices that provide compelling radical propositions for changing our current climate and cultural predicaments. Chapter 1 considers the visual politics of climate refuges through an analysis of John Akomfrah's film Vertigo Sea. Chapter 2 is about contemporary extraction: its visual cultures as well as the politics and aesthetics of emergent forms of resistance today. The responses of migration to a network of forces such as economic conditions, social factors, and governmental legal frameworks are outlined in chapter 3. Chapter 4 describes ecomedia, exploring the hidden potentials of environmental media and political aesthetics. In chapter 5 Demos discusses a theatrical enactment comprising a 90-minute courtroom performance designed by Laura Gustafsson and Terike Jaapoja to address the question of the legal rights of nonhumans. The trial constructs an imaginary juridical system that grants animals legal standing, thereby questioning why animals have no representation or intrinsic value in real courts. Chapter 6 considers two ideologies that speak to the conditions of the Anthropocene. The first is a futurist vision of the Anthropocene where humans are able to use climate engineering to stabilize temperatures, and the second is Afrofuturism and the imagining of a co-existence of equality, love, and peace. Both future modelings offer an expedient comparison and startling contrast between the current techno-scientific rationality of climate-change response and the socio-environmental justice concerns around racial capitalism. The book ends with a chapter on Trumpism and the state of emergency that the world finds itself in with the rise of post-democratic authoritarian capitalism while fossil-fueled climate change continues to affect our world. Demos ends by concluding that, in order to enact a paradigm shift in fundamental values, it will take nothing less than the building of entirely different cultures, empowering diverse allies to be participants in transforming the world as we know it. This book will be of interest to artists and art critics as well as scholars in art, environmental humanities, globalization, and cultural studies"--
In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.
T. J. Demos explores a range of artistic, activist, and cultural practices that provide compelling and radical propositions for building a just, decolonial, and environmentally sustainable future.