'O Chão é a Grande Pregunta': Non-Human Temporalities in Nuno Ramos

Abstract

This essay argues that Nuno Ramos’s installations and writings represent a decisive intervention in current aesthetic debates on temporality and the non-human. Working on the unstable terrain between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, the fossilized and the spectral, Ramos’s work sheds light on scales and frames that challenge the anthropocentric sensorium of our critical habits. By focusing on writings included in Cujo (1993) and Essaio Geral (2007), the essay analyzes how the configuration of such critical perspective in Ramos’s work interrogates and reformulates the ways in which memory and the political interface there where the very notion of life—the bios that articulates the biopolitical—is at stake.