Peter Salera

My project, titled “a bowl of spinach, an orange, and two slices of bread,” imagines a post-capitalist, post-Anthropocene world through a symbology of a personal allegory. Double-jumping in time, my project presents an imagined future as the past, contextualizing a series of objects as part of a museum exhibition in an even more distant future. My project envisions an emergent world created after a general societal collapse brought on by the climate crisis of the early 2050s. This world is populated by a civilization governed by Renunciationist ideology that mandates the full repudiation of negative human impact on the planet. Renunciationists are split into two distinct ideological sects: Excavationists and Object-Oriented Transcendentalists. Excavationists adhere to anti-extractive principles of making and building by constructing spaces entirely from electronic waste that was accumulated in mass quantities during the Anthropocene. Object-Oriented Transcendentalists believe in ritual practices of memorial-making designed to untether the body from the markers of state-imposed identity by uploading the self into an immaterial consciousness. Excavationist artifacts are presented in an imagined domestic space while those from the Object-Oriented Transcendentalists are presented as a site of memorial for an uploaded being. Both sets of objects are contained within the context of an imagined museum exhibition that explores this period in future-history.