"In Terracene, Salar Mameni shows how the racialized construction of terror in the Western political imagination and critical discourse concerning the threat of anthropogenic climate change have developed in conjunction with one another. Through the logic of the Anthropocene, ecological catastrophe has become enclosed within state discourse on terror, and natural disasters, viruses, pollution and other "non-human" dangers have been conflated with the threat of political violence by the "less-than-human" racialized other. Terracene challenges this false equivalence by examining how West Asian artists and knowledge producers confront the "weaponized ecologies" of their homelands and discover ways of living with what Mameni calls terrans-"the mountains, wetlands, viruses, smoke plumes, mutated cells and crude oil" that make up our world"--
Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction.
In Terracene Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires radically new engagements with terra (the earth), whose intelligence resides in matters such as oil and phenomena like earthquakes and fires. Drawing on the work of artists whose practices interrogate histories of settler-colonial and imperial interests in land and resources in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait, Syria, Palestine, and other regions most affected by the war on terror, Mameni offers speculative paths into the aesthetics of the Terracene.
