The Anthropocene at HKW

Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context explores and contours some of the historical contexts, epistemic settings, and conceptual interventions around the ongoing work of Anthropocene geology. In seven thematic dossiers, contributions from the fields of geochemistry and paleobiology, history and science studies, artistic research, archaeology, literary studies, and anthropology reflect on selected material markers of human impacts on earthly strata.

The Geological Anthropocene on anthropocence-curriculum.org offers a guide to each of the twelve GSSP sites from which cores have been extracted, as well an overview of the official ratification process for the Anthropocene as a geological epoch via a collection of essays, interviews, and field guides.

How could collaboration maintain a habitable planet?

An exhibition by artists Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke explores the scientific and social conditions producing the new geological epoch, the Anthropocene

Facing the future of collaboration in the Anthropocene: How to meet the challenges of a changing planet?

What is the new geological epoch made of? The Opening Days connect the geological analysis of the present with a discussion of the changing scope for social and political agency.

The Anthropocene as a global concept confronts planetary change with highly fractured and even contradictory local situations, conditions and experiences. It is therefore vital to share methods, contexts and ways of life to grapple with this transforming Earth.

How can the Anthropocene be made recognizable on a regional level without neglecting its complexity? Along the Mississippi, material flows, conflicts and stories that have produced and characterize the Anthropocene become condensed. Over the course of a year, scientists, artists and activists, in collaboration with local initiatives in the United States, researched specific local approaches to planetary changes.

The “Anthropocene” – the geological epoch of humans – has established itself as a key concept within a wider scientific and social discourse. In the midst of the dramatic and destabilizing changes wrought by it, new potential for human action upon the Earth demand exploration, asking: Which forms of cooperation could arise from a new awareness of the human role in interlacing nature and technology?

Has the Anthropocene turned the planet into a prison of human design? Carceri d'Invenzione is Germany’s official contribution to the XXII Triennale di Milano by Armin Linke in collaboration with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi, curated by Anselm Franke and hosted by HKW.

Is it possible to grasp the world at the planetary-scale? Between the climatic shifts of the Earth, cultural, political, and economic tumult, the increasing entanglement of human culture, natural environments, and global-scale technologies is difficult to comprehend.

The year 1948 serves as an aperture through which we can rethink the history of the now; the decisive moment when the heap of fragments left by the fury of two world wars began to reassemble into new forms of technological, scientific, and cultural order that inform our contemporary situation. With the atomic age, the digital age and the age of the "hydrocarbon man” taking off, 1948 represents an inflection point for many developments and path dependencies to come.

A new component of the Earth system is emerging today, comparable in scale and function to the bio- and hydrosphere. It is driven by the intertwining of natural environments with vast socio-technical forces and increasingly diverse technological species.

Our notion of nature is now out of date. Humanity forms nature.