| Summary: | This recording and transcript form part of a collection of podcasts conducted by the Cultures of Energy at Rice University. Cultures of Energy brings writers, artists and scholars together to talk, think and feel their way into the Anthropocene. We cover serious issues like climate change, species extinction and energy transition. But we also try to confront seemingly huge and insurmountable problems with insight, creativity and laughter. Live from Santa Cruz, CA, Cymene and Dominic cover the politics of homelessness, celebrity academic sightings, and the legacy of R.E.M. Then (13:01) anthropologist and filmmaker Juan Salazar joins us from the future (or at least Friday). We talk with him about his several currents projects related to climate change and Antarctica, including a comparative project on Antarctica’s “gateway cities” (Capetown, Christchurch, Hobart, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia) and how they are creating a new urban culture facing South rather than North. We discuss how climate change has generated unprecedented attention in the Antarctic and Juan explains how he became interested in charting “anticipatory modes of futuring” through media ranging from documentaries to museums to games. That leads us to his film Nightfall on Gaia (https://vimeo.com/117241386) and to why he thinks anthropological theory has not sufficiently engaged the problem of the future in recent years. Juan talks us through his filmmaking process, how he bridges the ethnographic and speculative dimensions of the work, and what he finds problematic in Antarctica films like Werner Herzog’s, Encounters at the End of the World. We turn then to Antarctica as an extraterrestrial space and close by talking about new projects including one concerning the longest bamboo bridge in the world and another about the rise of environmental insecurity following the peace process in Colombia.
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