THE PERSONAL IS GEOLOGICAL
– Claire Colebrook
How should we name the era we will all die in?
Epoch Wars is an immersive, participatory live artwork camouflaged as a symposium, where Pony Express challenge the naming of the ‘anthropocene’ to explore who is really responsible for the state of our planet.
Earth’s history is divided into massive slices of time called ‘epochs’. The Anthropocene Working Group, a team of 34 geological scientists, are responsible for advancing this name.
They are promoting the name “Anthropocene”, which means human era, the era defined by human impact on the planet. A surge of debate has accused this name of being weaponised and toxic, and so we are waging a war to kill it.
“Anthropocene” blames all of humanity for earth’s circumstances, obscuring the fact that it was specific people with specific power and specific names and addresses that are actually responsible for the worst ecological crimes.
Who is really at fault, and what epoch name will help us create a future worth fighting for? Are we living in the capitalocene, or manthropocene, or perhaps the symbiocene, the gynecene, of the terrametacene?
Epoch Wars has commissioned contributions and propaganda campaigns from diverse international and local artists, scientists, and visionaries, asking them to imagine alternative worlds to the “anthropocene”. These counternarratives are built into a speculative symposium, featuring keynotes and deep-play panel talks with the goal to radicalise our audiences into epoch warriors.