-by Lorena Tabares Salamanca

© Lorena Tabares Salamanca & Marko Marković

Symbiocene accelerated: the reverse of the Capitalocene at hundreds of terrestrial translations.

It is said that in the "ókrugo" or district of Zlatibor, there will be new transformations: possibly in the vast mountains, on the banks of the rivers and lakes of the area or in the recent history that reaches us through the echo of the air and some old photos of the squares and buildings of this part of western Serbia.

In a summer as hot as 2022, from Užice, through Požega and Jelen Do, to the peak of Kablar, neighbors, colleagues in this residence and activists tell us that the local media are flooded with news of new sources of jobs and opportunities for its inhabitants. These announcements, which at first appear to benefit their quality of life, are, in fact, part of publicity strategies that create speculative expectations to promote the entry of large mineral extraction companies as well as to reinforce arguments for the construction of new dams and wind farms. Similar news circulates in northern Spain or in Covas do Barroso, Portugal, and messages like these have become normal in Bolivia, the country with the world's largest lithium reserves and which began to face its devastating consequences several years ago. Transnational groups such as Rio Tinto or Savannah Resources promote a new era of energy transition in Europe based on solar panels, electric cars and sustainable living technology while basing their industries on the same fossil fuel and mineral extraction processes that for decades have polluted waters, unbalanced the environment and poisoned animal, mineral and plant habitats. Their processes clearly continue the exploitation of polluting energies. Another part of its corporate strategy is "corporate patience" combined with government support to repress and imprison those who dare to protest against megaprojects. Rio Tinto acknowledges on its official website that it has conducted studies and interventions since 2008 in Serbia.

The Anthropocene (a geological era of the Holocene extinction at human hands), Capitalocene (the era of capitalism) or Eurocene (the era of Western European primacy) refers to the processes of degradation of the entire world caused by human actions and technologies. The next step in this new era, homonymous with the extinction and collapse of the planet, is the mineralisation and solarisation of life. This era will see even the most remote natural landscape transformed by the search for lithium, gold and "rare minerals" and the field of large wind blades and solar farms. The world of global capitalism is the starting point from which we begin to think about the events surrounding the rural areas near Užice in order to transform their corporate language into a joint and collective semantics that will allow us to complexify human actions in relation to the sun, water, plants and minerals in a balanced, shared, common consciousness, between liquid and fluid relations, and in the construction of non-hierarchical spaces of coexistence.

The use of minerals as well as sun rays, although ancient in the history of mankind, is even more so in the formation of living and diversified ecosystems in which other gaseous formations rest among the rocks and the sophisticated system of photosynthesis appears in the plants. Today, its use is part of a large global corporate movement that intensifies the acceleration of the Anthropocene and the move into another geological period; scientists call the next era a "New Cretaceous". As societies, we are in a transition from the natural photosynthesis of large devastated forests to a non-productive, non-pollinating artificial photosynthesis exemplified by solar panels.

As the accelerating Anthropocene continues to raise seas; determine the disappearance of terrestrial spaces; drive up temperatures and desertification of the entire earth, in parallel circumstances, prototypes are being created to encourage life on other planets through ideal atmospheric capsules, of course, such migratory movements are exclusive and selective. At the other end of the scale, it is foreseen that migratory movements on the planet will be marked by fires and droughts due to the climate crisis: the production of high levels of toxic gasses, the lack of air-transforming forests, the overheating of the earth due to solar parks, large excavations, the lack of fertile land and the excessive use of water for purposes other than consumption, now inscribe other cartographies and maps of the movements of all kinds of living beings.

The Anthropocene thought of as a uniform effect based on science and modern truth, defines the human being as the sole transforming agent of history while at the same time placing him as a being of supreme powers capable of saving the environment through megalomaniacal architectures (controlled re-engineering for the recovery of terrestrial instability). However, the construction of worlds goes beyond enlightened, industrial and capitalist modernity and can be seen as a prism of complex life forms. What about the active role of all the other beings that make up this world, and is there an urgency to change the relationship of humans to other living beings? Amongst the many ideas that overflow the human presence are those that consider the anthropocene as only a short period of an extended geological existence and a simple hierarchical structure for understanding the intricate relationships between living beings, or for that matter, the anthropocene is a reduction of a lifetime to human time: a confusion of technologies with machines and active agents with rational beings. From the perspective of a Symbiocene, the world is a relational system (symbiopoesis) that can take on non-hegemonizing characteristics in "how it is inhabited" and "named". José Luis Brea said before his death in Absolute minerality our destiny is nothing other than the mineral kingdom. So, in our voice, his voice says something like this: "In the most solid state, there is a tendency to liquid... In thought itself, there is an unforeseen mobility that leads us to a dark hole in the core of matter... Even in that core light is thrown, synaptic sparks incur unpredictable evolutionary directions... It is, above all, a loosening of structures, which makes everything that seems to tend maximally towards stability, homeostasis, self-restraint from all play of leaks and drifts—ultimately meets dynamics of erosion or internal, structural transformation, which liberate it from a way of being that would make no great difference in its way of not being". From time to time, our inconsistency reminds us of a forgotten minerality, one that will be part of our future condition as we disappear from the logic of the apparently living: the clumps of dust that we will be are scattered in a web of relations.

Exploration and destruction are advancing rapidly; on the contrary, the earth's accelerating rotation is resulting in a shortening of time—26 July this year saw the shortest day in 19 years. Speed versus time is one of the decisive causes for our ability to name to shrink so that we perceive the lack of words of expressive formations that turn feelings into actions. Naming the unnamable to induce action. The capacity to generate new relations between beings implies a forceful structurality that can describe emotions and other forms of groupings.

Lorena Tabares Salamanca is a researcher, curator and writer, who focuses on the study of the intersections between fiction and reinterpretations in performance art, as well as the effects of rewriting its documentation and unarchiving of body. Currently, she is studying a MA in Communication Sciences and Arts at Nova University and is co-founder of the cultural association Colapso Plataforma Flutuante in Lisbon.

MIGRATORY ANTHROPOCENE. Reflections #3