Anthropocene Hells

Abstract

This article represents a cross-reading of Philipp Quesne’s 2016 performance Night of the Moles – Welcome to Caveland with the eschatological implications of the Anthropocene discourse. It traces different modes of understanding and performing ‘hell’ that shift between subterranean materiality and metaphysical implications.

By presenting a subterranean ecology of huge furry mammals on stage, the performance addresses urgent ecological issues and updates the question of the human-made end-times. The changes brought about in the earth-system caused by humanity, as expressed in the term of the ‘Anthropocene’, not only raise questions of human and non-human relations, but, more broadly, force their reconnection to questions of eschatological meaning. Caveland resonates within a post-apocalyptic as well as an infernal imaginary. The performance, though, does this by accentuating the distinctive feature of the Anthropocene: the fact that ecology here is inseparably bound to what happens ‘in the earth’, in the material undergrounds; within the Anthropocene, ‘hell’ is not just a metaphorical figure - the radioactive and CO₂-laden soils indicate that its locus is literally the ‘infernal’, that which is below ground.

By playfully reiterating the significance of hell as underground, Quesne’s moles subvert the apocalyptic vision of the end-times and allow the deep burrows of the earth to bring a redistribution of spatial, temporal and material logics: By ‘staying underground’, Quesne’s work opposes the modernist eschatology of the mastery of the earth and insists on the importance of the non-human undergrounds as a source of ecological world-making as well as a powerful imaginary.