“New awful changes – the human geological stratum rediscovered”: Allowing art to talk about the anthropocene

Abstract

This paper proposes a confrontation between geology and art, based on the original artistic production made by the author that represents geological concepts related to the new human geological epoch, the Anthropocene, now under discussion. The proposal confrontation draws upon the classical piece of by Henry De La Beche, Awful Changes, from about 1830, which refers to the question of geological time, and also upon Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow (1991), which analyzes this picture, and to Jan Zalasiewicz’s The Earth After Us (2008), which deals with the urban geological stratum as it might be found in the future. The art work thus shows the rediscovery of the geological stratum correlative to the “human event” by intelligent “ichthyosauroid” beings who, in a distant geological future, through stratigraphic analysis, observe the particular characteristics of the episode and interpret the culture that produced it. This paper shows how geological concepts can be adequately represented through creative artistic expression, and how classical geological themes may be of interest for contemporary debate on human geological agency.