Memento mori

“Doubtless the catastrophe of the Anthropocene is by no means as recent as we would like to imagine. The narcissistic man-made destruction of the planet is age-old. We know this from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s great poem, Ozymandias . . . We also know human vainglory through the Dutch vanitas tradition. The list is endless” (Jamal 2024, 26).

“Art that addresses the great acceleration [the surge in human activity during the twentieth century] must . . . contend with moments prior to human thought as well as the idea of a time after humanity itself. Necessarily, it will traffic in the rhetoric of memento mori” (Samman 2014, 37).