Speculative Fictions for Post-Human Futures: Paula Gaetano Adi's Robocalyptic Manifesto

Abstract

Critical posthumanism has questioned the category of the human by putting in tension the abstract ideal of man (male, white, bourgeois, Western), by rejecting the human exceptionality and the supremacy of the species, and by proposing an assemblage between humans and non-humans, between the organic and the inorganic. Speculative fictions have made it possible to think of alternatives to a racist, classist and heteronormative present and to try out possible worlds that escape both the apocalyptic and the euphoric gaze about the future. In this article we will focus on the visual work Robocapocalyptic Manifesto by Paula Gaetano Adi, which will allow us to inquire about the future from a posthuman consideration, the one that escapes the linear and progressive characterization of modern temporality (capitalist and colonial) in order to approach the future from a multiplicity. Additionally, we will consider the Manifesto as an onto-epistemic liberation and reconstruction project that aims to expand the imagination beyond the heteronormative corset of humanism. This proposal implies, on the one hand, a critique of humanism and anthropocentrism, and, on the other, a recovery of the strategies and policies that envision the creation of a new human and the decolonization of robots