The Halavasepikkä (Hylochares cruentatus) Epoch
“The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not post human.” Donna Haraway Henrik Håkansson’s IHME Project 2018 is THE BEETLE. This film is the Festival’s main production and gives a voice to an endangered beetle species, the halavasepikkä or Hylochares cruentatus, by showing us where it lives and what it does. At the Festival the film experience was continued with a programme of discussions, films, workshops and music on the same subject. Putting a beetle in the leading role raised issues of the cultural objectification of animals, inter-species inequality, the sixth wave of extinctions, and global warming. The film’s themes are epitomized in the much-discussed term, the Anthropocene, the human epoch, which is the source of all these issues. The Anthropocene refers to an era, comparable to a geological period, in which human activity has irreversibly changed the living conditions on our planet for all species, even more than the last Ice Age did. The US feminist theorist Professor Donna Haraway has, however, criticized the concept of the Anthropocene because it does not ultimately take us beyond a human-centric mindset: belief in progress; modernization; and individualism. Haraway has taken up the challenge of looking for new ways of thinking that better reflect the current state of the world, and uses other terms – “stories that are too big but not big enough” – such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene.1 If we were to use just one term for this period, Haraway says the correct one would be the Capitalocene, which refers to capitalism and to all the processes that have led to the current state of our world: the massive exploitation of natural resources; the organization of labour; the development of technology; the formation of markets; and the unequal accumulation of well-being. What does climate change mean for the global Capitalocene, when glaciers are melting and the world’s biggest energy reserves are in the Arctic regions? The Plantationocene, on the other hand, alludes to human-made changes to the environment brought about by agriculture and forestry, mining, the building of road networks, and urban construction. These changes both force species to move and prevent them from moving to new areas. The Plantationocene is an era characterized by densely cultivated, enclosed farms,
1 The term Anthropocene Epoch has also been sidelined in geological research, in which the current era is referred to as the Meghalayan Age. This is named after the North-Eastern Indian state of Meghalaya, where research carried out on sedimentary strata has uncovered signs of a 200-year drought some 4100 years ago.
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