On 20 September, at 3 p.m., MAC/CCB (Lisbon) will host the lecture Fascism in the Anthropocene Era, with Daniel Tércio. This conference is part of the Outros Espaços (Other Spaces) conference cycle, which is a partnership between the Belém Cultural Centre and the School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies (ECATI) and the Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies (CICANT) at Lusófona University-Lisbon University Centre.
This partnership aims to connect academic and scientific production with the community, providing an opportunity for knowledge transfer while serving as a space for plural dialogue.
Luís Cláudio Ribeiro will moderate the conference.
Synopsis
After a general characterisation of the terms ‘fascism’ and ‘anthropocene’, the first question will be whether fascism accentuates that awareness or, on the contrary, feeds on it. In other words, how does fascism relate to the fact that we live in a geological era for whose emergence we are primarily responsible: by erasing, omitting or accentuating the fact? Everything indicates that fascism bets on omission, especially when we look at the political arenas where attitudes of denial of the environmental crisis are generated (Trumpism, Milei, the European far right, etc.).
On the other hand, knowing that fascism coexists well with social and cultural crises and floats on collective crises of conscience, knowing that the simple fact of naming the Anthropocene implies a radical crisis of the possibility of life on the planet as we know it, we can foresee a scenario in which fascism
would prepare to draw its strength from the environmental crisis, feeding on the perception of powerlessness in the face of the possibility of survival in the city, in the face of social inequalities and injustices.
Different scenarios will therefore be outlined, based on concrete examples from the cultural and political life of our world and dystopian projections produced by science fiction.
Biography
DANIEL TÉRCIO studied Philosophy, Fine Arts, Art History and Dance Theory. He was a professor at FMH, University of Lisbon, and is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnomusicology - Centre for Music and Dance Studies. He has taught courses in Portugal, Spain, East Timor, Scotland, France and Brazil. He has published in specialist journals such as Performance Research (United Kingdom) and Conception (Brazil) and contributed to anthologies, some of which have been published by prestigious publishers such as Peter Lang, SAGE and Routledge. In Portugal, he is the author of Dança e Azulejaria no Teatro do Mundo (Inapa 1999) and author/editor of Dançar para a República (Caminho 2010) and Em torno d’o animal. Pensamento e práticas performativas (By the Book, 2024).
He is the author of science fiction published in Portugal and Brazil. With the support of DGArtes and several municipal theatres, he is currently developing the project ‘Linhas de Tensão. Arte, dança e ecologia’ (Lines of Tension. Art, dance and ecology), consisting of the publication of a book and the organisation of workshops with the collaboration of guest artists. As a critic, his articles on dance have appeared regularly in the Portuguese press since 2004.