Wasteocene. Guerrilla Narrative and toxic capitalism

Wasteocene. Guerrilla Narrative and the embodied stratigraphies of toxic capitalism
Talk by prof. Marco Armiero

Humans may live in the Anthropocene, but this does not affect all of them in the same way. How would the Anthropocene look if, instead of searching its traces in the geosphere, researchers would look for them in the organosphere, that is, in the ecologies of humans in their entanglements with the environment? Strata of toxics have sedimented into the human (and more than human) body, arriving, according to the most recent studies in epigenetics, to be inscribed into the genetic memory. Perhaps, looking at this embodied stratigraphy of power and toxicity, more than the Anthropocene, we will discover the Wasteocene, the Age of Waste. Necrocapitalist wasting relationships are so pervasive because they come together with a hegemonic narrative which does not even allow to see the contamination or speak about it. But while official accounts have systematically erased any trace of those wasting relationships, another kind of narratives has been written in flesh, blood, and cells. The body becomes the archive of stories without a history, where clues are embedded under the skin. As a sophisticated portable device, the body registers what remains invisible in the making of the Wasteocene, but as with every narrative, this bodily one does not only compile symptoms and tropes but it also has a performative character. In this talk, I will present our Guerrilla Narrative project Toxic Bios as a counter-hegemonic exercise aiming to dismantle the Toxic Narratives of the Anthropocene while prefiguring alternative socio-ecological politics.