Decolonising Landscape and the Entangled Visuality of the Anthropocene

The manifestation of the Anthropocene is conditioned by and a condition of an entangled visuality. The discourse under which the human is ascribed a geological agency, emerges from and is bound to the circumstances whereby the planet is observable, motivating a planetary becoming mediated by the visual. Equally, the temporalities of deep time proposed by this geological ontology and the precarious future for the human stimulated by the materialism of the Anthropocene, asserts a universalism and a grand narrative of anti-progress, suggesting a revised semblance of Modernity. The enterprise to resolve and access the material conditions under review, exemplified by James E. Moore?s Capitalocene, capture an imperative of colonisation in which the temporal paradigm of progress itself is an antagonistic agent.

This paper presents ongoing practice-based research on the category of the monument as contextualised by the discourse of the Anthropocene. The current focus of this research concerns the decolonisation of landscape as categorised under the monument, proposing nonlinear strategies of decoloniality to recalibrate current temporal planetary materialisms, where the act of observing the planetary is complicit with the current conditions of its precarity.