Andrea Barcaro is an academic, freelance writer, and communication professional with an interest in the intersection between culture, identity, and posthumanism. His work engages with transdisciplinarity and the connection between academic thinking, popular culture, digital media, and visual art.
Medea is an ancient mythical figure who has caught the imagination of artists and authors across ... more Medea is an ancient mythical figure who has caught the imagination of artists and authors across the centuries. In this essay, I focus on Euripides’ 5th-century BC eponymous tragedy and Pasolini’s 1969 cinematic adaptation. Through a posthuman reading of Medea, I propose that in Euripides the heroine sheds her humanity and embraces divinity in her final apotheosis. In Pasolini’s film, on the other hand, we witness a reverse conversion, a journey towards a loss of the sacred and a spiritual catastrophe. In my analysis, I explore how posthuman forms of subjectivity embrace monstrosity to emphasise the divine power of alterity. I propose that, by deactivating normative discourses and making possible resistance to norms, posthuman subjectivities can be a powerful tool to break the spell of the present and create productive alternatives to the seemingly timeless dominance of global capitalism.
This dissertation is a study of identity as a key category of analysis in need of reinvention. Qu... more This dissertation is a study of identity as a key category of analysis in need of reinvention. Questioning late modern approaches to critical theory that see the Other as the constitutive outside of the self, I propose a pluralist-monist approach whereby the self is the Other within. Through the lens of posthumanism, I describe identity as discursively embodied and materially embedded, emerging from dialogue with our human and non-human others. Such concept of identity opens up opportunities for a deconstruction of the binary logic prevalent in western philosophy and humanist thought, highlighting the potential for emerging posthuman identities at the levels of ontology and praxis. I examine this potential through two separate but interconnected case studies. The first part of this text is a speculative experimentation where I “make friends” with an algorithm, the Midjourney Bot, prompting it with quotes by scholars in the field of the digital and environmental posthumanities and other branches of critical theory, to collaboratively develop AI-generated artwork exploring key themes around the emergence of identity. The second part engages with the work of Arca, a Venezuelan singer, music producer, and multimedia artist whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and the human body. Analyzing two of Arca’s recent music videos, Nonbinary (2020) and Prada/Rakata (2021), I concentrate on her use of references to ancient Greek and indigenous Venezuelan mythologies in the construction of queer new visions of identity that undermine the oppressiveness of sexual and gendered regimes. Throughout this study, I make use of the Situationist concept of détournement as a methodological tool to misappropriate, divert, and hijack established truths, reevaluating notions of authorship, agency, and accountability, as a way to shed light on the emergence of posthuman forms of identity.
This article stems from a speculative experimentation combining text with AI-powered visuality to... more This article stems from a speculative experimentation combining text with AI-powered visuality to reflect on the connection between technology and emerging posthuman identities in the context of the postcolonial environmental humanities. I make friends with an algorithm, the Midjourney Bot, and feed it prompts based on quotes by scholars from the fields of posthumanism, postcolonialism, and other branches of critical theory, with a focus on topics surrounding architecture, the human body, European identity, and the relation between technology and the Anthropocene. In my effort to explore how interaction with AI shapes our identities, I emphasise the role of dialogue with human and non-human Others in guiding design practices that inspire ethically charged, productive, and affirmative visions of our world.
Under the reign of global capitalism, migration is becoming a shared condition for increasingly l... more Under the reign of global capitalism, migration is becoming a shared condition for increasingly larger numbers of people across the world. At the same time, nomadic forms of living are often targeted by both left- and right-wing populisms, exacerbating issues around what has been called the “Fortress Europe Syndrome”, and placing significant obstacles along the path of a truly cosmopolitan European project. Inspired by the work of Rosi Braidotti, this paper examines the creation of new posthuman nomadic subjectivities as a possible solution to the deadlock of populism and neo-fascism. I engage with two Portuguese artists, Grada Kilomba and Welket Bungué, whose transdisciplinary work questions issues of racism and colonial violence by turning memory and the performing body into sites of political action. At the same time, in dialogue with Achille Mbembe’s work on decolonisation and Zahi Zalloua’s intervention on posthuman ontologies’ relation to race, I ask whether it is appropriate to theorise on the move beyond the human and into the posthuman, at a time when European colonial history and attitudes to race still need to be further deconstructed. I see Kilomba and Bungué’s work as prime examples of nomadic art, and advocate for more dialogue among academics, artists and local communities, as a way out of the current deadlock, and toward developing a new view of Europe which is free of intellectual, emotional, and physical borders. At the same time, I emphasise the need for a critical, self-reflexive form of posthumanism, tackling not only issues of race and colonialism, but also the Eurocentric foundations of western philosophy.
Medea is an ancient mythical figure who has caught the imagination of artists and authors across ... more Medea is an ancient mythical figure who has caught the imagination of artists and authors across the centuries. In this essay, I focus on Euripides’ 5th-century BC eponymous tragedy and Pasolini’s 1969 cinematic adaptation. Through a posthuman reading of Medea, I propose that in Euripides the heroine sheds her humanity and embraces divinity in her final apotheosis. In Pasolini’s film, on the other hand, we witness a reverse conversion, a journey towards a loss of the sacred and a spiritual catastrophe. In my analysis, I explore how posthuman forms of subjectivity embrace monstrosity to emphasise the divine power of alterity. I propose that, by deactivating normative discourses and making possible resistance to norms, posthuman subjectivities can be a powerful tool to break the spell of the present and create productive alternatives to the seemingly timeless dominance of global capitalism.
This dissertation is a study of identity as a key category of analysis in need of reinvention. Qu... more This dissertation is a study of identity as a key category of analysis in need of reinvention. Questioning late modern approaches to critical theory that see the Other as the constitutive outside of the self, I propose a pluralist-monist approach whereby the self is the Other within. Through the lens of posthumanism, I describe identity as discursively embodied and materially embedded, emerging from dialogue with our human and non-human others. Such concept of identity opens up opportunities for a deconstruction of the binary logic prevalent in western philosophy and humanist thought, highlighting the potential for emerging posthuman identities at the levels of ontology and praxis. I examine this potential through two separate but interconnected case studies. The first part of this text is a speculative experimentation where I “make friends” with an algorithm, the Midjourney Bot, prompting it with quotes by scholars in the field of the digital and environmental posthumanities and other branches of critical theory, to collaboratively develop AI-generated artwork exploring key themes around the emergence of identity. The second part engages with the work of Arca, a Venezuelan singer, music producer, and multimedia artist whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and the human body. Analyzing two of Arca’s recent music videos, Nonbinary (2020) and Prada/Rakata (2021), I concentrate on her use of references to ancient Greek and indigenous Venezuelan mythologies in the construction of queer new visions of identity that undermine the oppressiveness of sexual and gendered regimes. Throughout this study, I make use of the Situationist concept of détournement as a methodological tool to misappropriate, divert, and hijack established truths, reevaluating notions of authorship, agency, and accountability, as a way to shed light on the emergence of posthuman forms of identity.
This article stems from a speculative experimentation combining text with AI-powered visuality to... more This article stems from a speculative experimentation combining text with AI-powered visuality to reflect on the connection between technology and emerging posthuman identities in the context of the postcolonial environmental humanities. I make friends with an algorithm, the Midjourney Bot, and feed it prompts based on quotes by scholars from the fields of posthumanism, postcolonialism, and other branches of critical theory, with a focus on topics surrounding architecture, the human body, European identity, and the relation between technology and the Anthropocene. In my effort to explore how interaction with AI shapes our identities, I emphasise the role of dialogue with human and non-human Others in guiding design practices that inspire ethically charged, productive, and affirmative visions of our world.
Under the reign of global capitalism, migration is becoming a shared condition for increasingly l... more Under the reign of global capitalism, migration is becoming a shared condition for increasingly larger numbers of people across the world. At the same time, nomadic forms of living are often targeted by both left- and right-wing populisms, exacerbating issues around what has been called the “Fortress Europe Syndrome”, and placing significant obstacles along the path of a truly cosmopolitan European project. Inspired by the work of Rosi Braidotti, this paper examines the creation of new posthuman nomadic subjectivities as a possible solution to the deadlock of populism and neo-fascism. I engage with two Portuguese artists, Grada Kilomba and Welket Bungué, whose transdisciplinary work questions issues of racism and colonial violence by turning memory and the performing body into sites of political action. At the same time, in dialogue with Achille Mbembe’s work on decolonisation and Zahi Zalloua’s intervention on posthuman ontologies’ relation to race, I ask whether it is appropriate to theorise on the move beyond the human and into the posthuman, at a time when European colonial history and attitudes to race still need to be further deconstructed. I see Kilomba and Bungué’s work as prime examples of nomadic art, and advocate for more dialogue among academics, artists and local communities, as a way out of the current deadlock, and toward developing a new view of Europe which is free of intellectual, emotional, and physical borders. At the same time, I emphasise the need for a critical, self-reflexive form of posthumanism, tackling not only issues of race and colonialism, but also the Eurocentric foundations of western philosophy.
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Papers by Andrea Barcaro