The topos of the "world as theatre" is very ancient, and the metaphor inspires the name of the series Antropocenica, in the sense of stage-arena-place of human scenes, suggesting the humanities that acted — and act — in the transformation of the World; therefore, forces that operate in the construction of their own landscapes and represent this dominion. The theatre is the ambience in which the scenic temporal narrative flows through human representations. One acts upon territory through time, the latter understood as the geographical place where, in a given era, dynamic processes are located which ultimately characterise historical time: hence our ability to speak of narratives, both in the sense of the expressive outcomes of this acting, and of the memories inscribed in inhabited and lived landscapes, including those of ruins.
The theatre, in its classical architecture — originating in Athens in connection with the cult of Dionysus (Διόνυσος) — is the exemplary form for an always collective ritual. And one of cosmopolitical potency. It is a place invested in the rituals of commutation, scenic liturgy par excellence, in the staging that thereby establishes other spatio-temporal dimensions, ephemeral as they may be, even though the plot explicitly provokes in the rite's participants senses that are more perennial or timeless: whether on the stage or in the cavea, all beings present are enveloped by the dramaturgical sphere, which establishes this encompassing dimension, in a transitory communal experience that often reveals deep, existential realities. It deals in masks, revealing them as such, amplifying the essence of what is represented. The masks invested with anima on stage are like mirrors for the social cavea. To perform within this ritualistic dynamic exposes politics itself and lays bare the human as conflict, arising from the rite-as-staging. This is why the theatre, in its essence — before its consumption by the entertainment industry — is the propitious place for the art of catharsis and trance. In the present time, revisiting this ancient metaphor helps us to reflect upon the scenes of the human drama in the theatre of a changing world, and to act in a struggle against the forces of capitalism that exploit and devour the Earth and its beings, in the full extractivism that reduces it to a mere theatre of (capitalist) operations — a military expression.
In Portuguese, the neologism Antropocênica — from Greek anthropos + scenic (i.e. the being in its scene) — incorporates the theatrical dimension, and also the perspective of human trance, and further gestures towards the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), by Abraham Ortelius — a work published in Antwerp in 1570 (the editio princeps is recognised as the first modern atlas) — and to its frontispiece, with allegories of the continents under the aegis of Europe: a symbolic representation of imperialist domination, in the century in which colonisation spread on a global scale, by maritime routes to the territories that were progressively ravaged and technically mapped.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro