Construing the Postapocalypse in Two Different Spaces and Artistic Languages: Margaret Atwood and Adrián Villar Rojas

Abstract

From a thematic approach to literature and the arts, the article aims at exploring and comparing how the Postapocalypse is constructed in the trilogy MaddAddam by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (n. 1939) and the recent works of the young Argentinean sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas (n. 1980). The production of both artists is approached as belonging to a dystopian tradition, defined mainly from Frederic Jameson’s point of view. The main interest of Atwood’s trilogy is centered on the conditions of survivalof the human species on the planet after the “waterless flood”, a pandemic produced in a laboratory of bioengineering. Atwood believes in the possibility of survival, in a new beginning of culture on the planet on the basis of an unprecedented hybrid life born out of the mixing of human beings and beings born in laboratories, and a new approach to animal and natural life. As to Villar Rojas, though his first site-specifics are quite pessimistic as to the fate of the planet, in the title of one of his XXIst Century exhibitions -Today We Reboot the Planet, in the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2013)- the faith in a Postapocalypse begins to emerge. The analysis will precisely focus on the techniques he uses in his celebrated site-specific art to attain this aim.