Can we change the Capitalocene?

“I Am the Product of a Capitalist Economy of Growth”

Hannah Göbbels

Five landscape pictures developed from a description in human language with the AI system “DALL-E 2” and one photograph, printed on fabric, 190 x 270 cm, mounted on steel poles, 200 x 370 cm, 4’25’’ audio

 

Our capitalist consumer societies live in alienation from the landscape. Resources are exploited, livelihoods are destroyed. According to the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the main problem is “dynamic stabilization” (the escalatory logic of modernity and its consequences) and capitalist growth society that lead to a lack of what he terms “resonance”. The goal of these capitalist consumer societies is to constantly optimize its resource situation. The landscape is one of these resources. A transformation of the relationship to the world to an intact resonance relationship is impossible in this modern society. According to Rosa, the opposite pole of this intact resonance relationship is alienation.
I Am the Product of a Capitalist Economy of Growth questions and critiques the Capitalocene. The protagonist feels used by a capitalist industry and experiences an identity crisis. In her monologue she reflects on her current situation on an industrial mountain and wishes to be part of a different landscape – a landscape in which she can be herself, identify with her surroundings and experience herself in resonance.

A project made in the course

Reading Landscapes: Sites, Representation and Histories of Contested Spaces

How do we understand and represent landscape today, almost 50 years after the famous “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” show at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York? The Guardian discusses this influential exhibition, in a review from 2010, as a show that rewrote the rules of landscape photography back in 1975. The works on display saw landscape for the first time strongly as man-made, as transformed, and contested spaces, against the tradition of nature photography that Ansel Adams and Edward Weston aspired to, which aimed to envision nature as an eternal, untouched place of contemplation. Contemporary artists and theorists like T.J.
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