Worlds without humans in the time of Anthropos: on David Claerbout's photo-filmic strategies

ABSTRACT

David Claerbout is a contemporary artist working in the field of photography, film and digital animation, employing a range of aesthetic strategies to address shifting ideologies of vision: attention to light and time; the erasure of narrative in cinematic representation. This paper considers the political import of such strategies from an Australian perspective, in light of recent environmental catastrophe and extinction in the Anthropocene, whereby the depiction of worlds without humans occupies a space in the collective imagination signifying ruination. The paper examines Claerbout’s recent works, Olympia (the Real-Time Disintegration into Ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the Course of a Thousand Years) (2016) and The pure necessity (2016). It argues for the relevance of his work to posthumanist writings on extinction; for instance, Claire Colebrook and Joanna Zylinska, whereby the human desire to visualize ‘the world without us’ is problematized as an overtly anthropocentric celebration of human vision. I argue that Claerbout's expanded photo-filmic practice reveals how artistic production might tackle the problem of responsibly providing frameworks to consider the world outside of an anthropocentric viewpoint. Considering his work from such a framework, I ask, what does it take to represent the world without us?

KEYWORDS:

• Ruination
• David Claerbout
• photography
• Anthropocene
• extinction
• anti-anthropocentrism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Oscar

Sara Oscar is a photographic artist, researcher and writer in the School of Design and Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has worked in the field of photographic practice for the last two decades and exhibited widely across Australia in public institutions such as the Australian Centre for Photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Centre for Contemporary Photography and Artspace, Sydney. She has written for Philosophy of Photography, Album, Magazin für Fotografie and The Conversation.