Remembering the Future: The End of the World Survivors and Contemporary Brazilian Imagination

Abstract

This paper explores the connection between a contemporary global catastrophic imaginary and an imaginary of a Brazilian territory impregnated with the future. It attempts to shed light on the epistemological tie between current ecological, social, and political devastation, on the one hand, and a colonial, industrial, monumental, and extractivist order, on the other. A spatiotemporal imagination has emerged in contemporary aesthetics that questions the basic tenets of Western modern epistemology through survival and material remains. Focusing on the film Serras da desordem (2006), directed by Andrea Tonacci, and the novel Dentes negros (2011), by André de Leones, both centered on the figure of the survivor, I argue that this figure and the materiality of what remains after the “end of the world” enable an anachronic and nonbinary vision of time and space—the basis from which to refute the epistemological core of the modern and colonial project.