Overlapping Narratives: Self-Representations of the Anthropocene

The exhibition “Anthropocene: Burtynsky, Baichwal, de Pencier” has codified a visual imaginary consciousness of the Anthropo-cene that demands further discussion to enlighten the peculi-arities of the “view from above” that characterises most of the project’s images, and to lift the debate to a more fruitful level. This article takes a new look at this topic in light of the catastrophic nar-ratives, the myth of flight and the intrinsic link with the imagery of the metropolis, opening the debate up to a different point of obser-vation. Therefore, some subtexts of the discourse come into play (such as the sublime, the uncanny – in the dual meaning of weird and eerie – and the multispecies narratives) that broaden the reflection on the agency of the Anthropocene and that can poten-tially defuse the aestheticising paradox that, by monumentalising the image, compromises its effectiveness.