This incisive book invites us to rethink culture during the development of fossil modernity. Between the creation of the steam engine during the 18th century and the global warming that haunts and conditions us today, Jaime Vindel analyses, from a new critical paradigm, the relationship between the energy transformations driven by the Industrial Revolution, the hegemonic social imaginaries and the acceleration of the eco-social crisis.
From this starting point, this essay sets itself the task of plotting a political ecology of the history of art, visual culture and cultural imaginaries of the Anthropocene, and does so beyond its explicitly ecological expressions. For this reason, the account does not deal solely in representational terms with the presence of fossil energy sources (above all, coal and oil) in the forms and institutions of art and culture, but describes how they have constituted a kind of cultural unconscious that subtly and persistently conditions the socio-political processes of the last two centuries. As with any ideological expression, the relationship between culture and fossilism is all the more effective where it is not evident.
This book is charged with delving into these blind corners of our historical unconscious with the intention of contributing to imagining and embodying a post-fossilist culture.
The audio of the presentation can be listened to at the following link.
