Antropocenica 3

Portugal and Cape Verde 2024

ANTROPOMƎTRIAS

Unmeasuring the Human in Times of Bias, Hubris and Trance

Imagined Speech Act

✴︎

PORTUGAL

————— 24 October 2024 —————

Lisbon

Amphitheatre 1

Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon

 { event open to the public }

10:00 - 11:00

ANTROPOMƎTRIAS

Dirk Michael Hennrich

ANTROPOMƎTRIAS, with the subtitle Unmeasuring the Human in Times of Bias, Hubris and Trance, is an Imagined Speech Act (Sprechakt / Speech Act), also composed of a series of exhibited images, conceived and presented by philosopher Dirk Michael Hennrich at Amphitheatre 1 of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon on the morning of 24 October 2024. The word Anthropometrias—which brings together in its orthography Anthropo, Metria and Trias—points in its writing to the human who considers itself as the measure of all things, in its vertigo of measuring all things: those that exist insofar as they exist; and those that do not exist insofar as they do not exist.*

In the presentation of ANTROPOMƎTRIAS in 2024, such measures are exemplified by commemorations of three significant moments in twentieth-century colonial history: 120 years since the beginning of the Genocide of the Herero and Nama Peoples (1904); 100 years since the Expedition to the Ronuro River (1924), carried out by the Commissão de Linhas Telegraphicas Estratégicas de Matto Grosso ao Amazonas, which included photographic and cinematographic services conducted by Luiz Thomaz Reis, an army captain at the time, amongst which the film Ronuro, Selvas do Xingu, documenting the survey and exploration studies of the Ronuro River, including scenes of anthropometry applied to various indigenous peoples; and 90 years since the 1st Portuguese Colonial Exhibition (1934), with citations of ideological bias from the book Estudos de Antropologia Colonial: o que temos feito e o que precisamos de fazer (Studies in Colonial Anthropology: what we have done and what we need to do), the inaugural conference of the 1st Section of the 1st National Congress of Colonial Anthropology (1934), delivered by Joaquim Alberto Pires de Lima in the city of Porto.

This Speech Act takes up the relationship between Geometry and Melancholy, humanity's profound depression faced with the impossibility of measuring in continuous struggle against its will to measure the world, planet Earth understood as pure matter, as object of the most diverse apparatuses and devices, of microscopes and telescopes, of primitive measuring instruments and of the most sophisticated machines orbiting the globe. The Human Being, in its unmeasure, suggests that this measurement is almost completely concluded, with only a few unmeasured areas remaining, such as the ocean depths (physical and metaphysical, material and immaterial) immersed in the darkness of the unknown.

In synthesis, ANTROPOMƎTRIAS underscores the imminence of initiating and realising a radical paradigm shift, amongst which, and perhaps principally (alongside the abolition of a thousand practices and preconceptions), the destitution of the prevailing economy of time to establish an authentic ecology of time, giving value and meaning to an ancient trias (τριάς), which has always, in its an-archic dynamics, known how to transgress all measures: Kairós, Eros and Poíesis.

* Phrase by the sophist Protagoras (c. 490–420 BC)

Πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἔστιν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστι, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστι.

Man is the measure of all things: of those that exist insofar as they exist; and of those that do not exist insofar as they do not exist.

Images from the recording of the Imagined Speech Act by philosopher Dirk Michael Hennrich at Amphitheatre 1 of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, on the morning of 24 October 2024. In the final image, the projected representation of the so-called Vitruvian Man can be seen, in a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci (c. 1490). Images: Silvio Luiz Cordeiro.

Production

Dirk Michael Hennrich

Recording and Editing

Nômade

Silvio Luiz Cordeiro

Images

Silvio Luiz Cordeiro