The Anthropocene thesis has become both a cultural cipher for any number of all-too-human obscenities and a collider of previously staid disciplinary concerns. So, while International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences continue to debate the scientific merits of a geological reformation called the Anthropocene Epoch, the cultural meaning of the Anthropocene challenges artists, curators, designers, editors and writers to locate the social and ethical significance of this debate in other registers and by other means.

The Showroom hosts a conversation with Lindsay Bremner, Emily Pethick, Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin and Joanna Zylinska to consider how knowledge is being produced through cultural practices in the Anthropocene and how the forms by which knowledge is embodied, shared, and relayed can transform epistemic hierarchies of mediation and authority. Said somewhat differently, we might ask of this epoch of the anthropos: should we make books? art? should we read? edit? curate? What do these practices mean and how do they transform as they encounter mass extinction and environmental collapse? The entangled concepts of knowledge, production, and form will serve as three possible ways of approaching questions of cultural practice in the Anthropocene.

This event launches several recent books addressing these questions, including Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin’s edited collection Art in the Anthropocene (featuring Lindsay Bremner and Anna-Sophie Springer), Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin’s edited exhibitions Fantasies of the Library (featuring Joanna Zylinska) and Land & Animal & Nonanimal, and Joanna Zylinska’s Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene.