EGENIS/GSI seminar: "Un/doing Time in the Anthropocene", Fiona Schrading (Art Academy Düsseldorf)

At the same time, it is a situation that 'we' cannot leave, that knows no 'afterwards': rather, 'we' live in the midst of all the endings in which 'we' are entangled. This ending does not end, it continues - there is no “moving beyond” this. So what does this mean for a rethinking of past and future in the Anthropocene? With the notion of "un/doing time" I want to refer to two things: first, I understand it as an intervention in and question of an "undoing" of a progressive-linear time that irreversibly advances into an open (albeit threatened) future, cutting off and leaving behind the past. And second, the term aims to re-address a time that is often enacted as a seemingly neutral, resupposed, underlying background time as a material-political matter – and to ask how time matters and comes to matter in the Anthropocene. The epochmaking concept of the Anthropocene, I suggest, serves to perpetuate a universal, anthropocentric, ‚inclusive‘ time of a "one-world world" (Law 2011), which posits itself as the Time and whose progression into a 'shared future' continues to be based on the violent exclusion of non/human others.

Bio Note

Fiona Schrading is a media cultural scientist and is working on her PhD on the topic "Un/doing time.

Re-Localizing Past and Future in the Anthropocene." Her research interests include: anthropocene

and conceptions of time, temporality studies, (queer)feminist new materialism, feminist STS,

pluriversal ontologies and post- and decoloniality. She is currently working at the Art Academy

Düsseldorf where she is doing research in the BMBF funded project "Wasteland? Rural Areas as

Affective Spaces and Cultural Education as Pedagogy of Situating".

Register here

Venue: Byrne House

Virtual: via Zoom