CETAPS+ Cultures of the Future Talks - Anthony Galluzzo | In partnership with Zer0 Utopia

CETAPS+ Cultures of the Future partnered with Zer0 Utopia for a series of lectures!
On the second session on the series we welcomed Anthony Galluzzo that presented us the lecture "John Boorman’s Zardoz as Cultural Artifact and Prophetic Vision: From Critical Aquarianism to Degrowth”.
This talk focused on John Boorman’s cult 1974 film Zardoz as an exemplar of what Galluzzo calls “Critical Aquarianism”-a constellation of 1970s-era artists and thinkers who anticipate such present day phenomena as “degrowth” and Kohei Saito’s decelerationist “eco-communism.” Much of the sixties-era counterculture, like the modernist ideologies it superficially questioned, still equated liberation or freedom with endless growth conceived in quantitative terms. Both old and new lefts, for example, wanted more-from the orthodox Marxists’ liberated forces of production to unleashed appetites and unhindered individualism promoted by large swathes of the counterculture. What distinguished the disparate artists and thinkers that Galluzzo is calling “Critical Aquarian” was their focus on limits and self-limitation as key to a more substantive form of liberation. And it should be said that ecology and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis played a significant role in this line of thought, although-as this talk hopes to show in its reading of Boorman’s film and its relationship with the overpopulation panic of the late sixties and seventies-this discourse of limits was distinct from or even opposed to the technocratic neo-Malthusianism, in many ways indistinguishable from neo-colonialism, that dominated a mainstream environmental movement that too often viewed nature (and non-white peoples) as standing reserve or resources to be managed so as to efficiently maximize capitalist growth patterns.
Series hosted by Manuel Sousa Oliveira (University of Porto/CETAPS)
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Zer0 Utopia is a book series published by Zero Books, an imprint of Collective Ink: www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/. Utopia has a bad reputation, suggesting a politics of wild impracticality or vast mechanisms of repressions springing to life to crush dissent. How do we steer between these two extremes and still keep our eyes on the prospect of a radically better world? Which historical and contemporary projects should guide us, which thinkers can enlarge us, which artists inspire us? Zer0’s Utopia series aims to uncover the Utopian in all its dimensions.
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The "CETAPS+ Cultures of the Future" project, through the research strand "Mapping Utopianisms" coordinated by Fátima Vieira, consists of an online cycle of conversations and lectures about issues in the arts and humanities that can contribute to building a better, more sustainable, and more inclusive future. Different topics are addressed with a group of invited experts and, because international cooperation is one of the key ideas that should guide us into the future, in each conversation a partnership with a different international institution is established.
This cycle aims to bring together a handful of experts to reflect on a relevant topic from a socio-cultural perspective: how the literary and cultural academic community can contribute to the betterment of society. Topics such as the importance of museums and the impact of the Digital Humanities, among others, will be the subject of conversation and analysis in this cycle of conversations. The aim of this project is to involve the academic world in sharing ideas and strategic solutions for the development of a society richer in actions of ecosystem preservation and social inclusion with the help of new technological resources.
More about CETAPS+ Cultures of the Future here:
www.cetaps.com...
Financed by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the project UIDB/04097/2020 - CETAPS