Art and the Climate Crisis: How We Imagine an “After the End”

Today it seems easier to imagine a life on Mars than to project a future on Earth. From our crystalline screens, we watch in awe images of possible ancient rivers and robots traversing the red planet in search of life. Discourses take shape that turn Martian exploration into an almost certain imaginary, while our existence on Earth is increasingly threatened.

At the same time, those same screens return to us dystopian images of ever more ubiquitous catastrophes: disappearing glaciers, drying rivers, megafires, floods. These figurations document an existence in a constant state of collapse, an everyday life marked by recurring catastrophes that are no longer confined to the glow of our screens but break into our lives and territories. We have a sharp image of this devastating present, yet it seems impossible to imagine an “after” on Earth.

The crisis once announced as a future possibility is today a continuous present. Donna Haraway, a feminist philosopher, reflects on the urgency of thinking this crisis in the now. She proposes going a step further, urging us to “stay with the trouble”, facing present difficulties rather than seeking quick fixes. This implies recognising the interconnection of environmental and social crises. The narratives through which we inhabit this collapsing present are bound to our everyday practices and to how we relate to the world. And there, art emerges as a possibility.

Andrea Soto-Calderón, a Chilean philosopher, reflects on how dominant discourse has imposed empty, homogeneous representations that reinforce the perception of a foreclosed imaginary, incapable of opening onto meaningful alternatives. It seems we have lost the capacity to imagine a future that establishes “other” relations with the territories we inhabit. In this context of environmental collapse and loss of imagination, it is urgent to seek

There are artworks that return to us a gaze that resists collapse and that allow us to articulate narratives that do not require life on another planet, narratives that allow us to inhabit the earth “after the end”. I think of the waters of Claudia Müller; the rays of figured suns of Catalina González; or the possibilities of interaction with the more-than-human of Elisa Balmaceda. The work of these artists, and of many others, allows us to understand our relations beyond our borders (or mental limits). In some way, they reveal what Soto-Calderón calls “other ways of doing”, other critical modalities of existence and other forms of life that remain latent.

The challenge lies in integrating these ways of doing into our everyday lives. These latent potentials must be reactivated to mobilise alternative possibilities for imagining and inhabiting the world.