I sought to illustrate “Earth as it is”, and the trajectory on which humanity, and industrialized, individualistic societies in particular, has been on to create and perpetuate our current ecological and social condition.
It is our prerogative as members of the global North to become aware of how our obsession with material accumulation and our ignorance of global interdependence enables incalculable sacrifice; and to become detached from the our belief that this lifestyle to which we are wedded is the only way.
In order to mitigate our destructive impact on the world upon which we rely, humans must come to terms with a “New Anthropocentrism”. This recognizes our unique creative and destructive capacity as humans, while also contextualizing that our very existence is contingent upon the health and stability of the entire, interdependent world system.
My action project was my attempt at encouraging disillusionment from the idea that our current way of life, one that encourages incalculable inequality and sacrifice of those who fall out of the circles of identification constructed under our current order, is the only way to live.
I attempted to convey how our obsession with individuality over ecological interdependence comes at our own detriment. That material accumulation and market worship (the arrow that bifurcates the eyes and brain (consciousness) of humanity from its roots in the wider global system represents the arrow of market exchange) distracts us from the world upon which we rely to sustain us, and that we destroy with our negligence.
Indeed, the skeletal form denotes how our society is already dead. We are on an unavoidable collision course with instability and climatic catastrophe fueled by our belief that indefinite consumption is possible in an ecologically and spatially limited world.
The clock depicts that our current lifestyle spans only 5 seconds of human history. This lifestyle rose and destroyed quickly and violently; but there do exist other ways to organize ourselves.
The ripple effect reminds us that our actions may be individual, but they accumulate; and in a society which is already so vastly unsustainable, any change moves us in a more compassionate and inclusive direction for our global system.
We might not be able to save ourselves, but we may be able to mitigate further destruction of invisible “others”: the poor, the unborn, and the myriad of non-human organisms that constitute the world system to which we owe an incalculable debt.