TOWARDS A POLITICS OF THE THRESHOLD CRITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE 2ND SEMINAR ON “POETICS AND POLITICS OF THE END”
by Rejane de Souza Ferreira & Alejandra Bottinelli Wolleter
On June 30th, July 1st, and July 2nd, 2025, researchers from Brazil and Chile gathered to reflect on a key question: What comes after the end? This was the central theme of the seminar, held at the Federal University of Tocantins in the city of Porto Nacional, and hosted by Dr. Rejane de Souza Ferreira. The event was a continuation of the project of the same name, supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil’s main research funding agency.
Structured around the aforementioned question, the seminar constituted a space for interrogating the multiple crises—ecological, political, social, and epistemological—that define our contemporary moment. Far from a catastrophist exercise, the event proposed a critical cartography in which the notion of the end operates as a discursive and aesthetic device to examine the collapses of Western modernity and their reverberations in Latin America while seeking the seeds of what may yet emerge in critical and aesthetic discourses and practices.
One of the seminar’s most significant contributions was the critical displacement of the universalising notion of the Anthropocene. As Alejandra Bottinelli proposed, it is necessary to examine the forms that the ‘end’ takes, which, simultaneously, redefine the boundaries between the human and the planetary, specifically from the situated perspective of the Southern Cone. In her keynote lecture, “Modalisations of the Apocalypse: Commonality and the Counter-Vanity of the End,” Bottinelli argued for the destabilisation of the universal apocalyptic narrative by framing it as a situated discourse. A crucial shift, she proposed, lies in valuing the apocalypse not as a singular event, but as a process that exposes our radical vulnerability and, thus, our constitutive interdependence.
In this counter-vanity, catastrophe ceases to be a tale of individual heroes and instead becomes a threshold that compels the emergence of relational subjectivities grounded in shared fragility.
Its revelatory power does not proclaim a single truth, but rather exposes the fictions of modern autonomy, demanding the imagination of new forms of community amidst the ruins of unrealised (or not-yet-realised) worlds, in Mark Fisher’s formulation.
These ideas resonated across various presentations, including Rejane de Souza Ferreira’s exploration of Amerindian perspectives (based on authors such as Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak), which challenge the notion of a singular, absolute end. Within these frameworks, apocalypse is not a future event but a cyclical experience and a call to “learn to live with the trouble” (following Donna Haraway), integrating traditional knowledges as viable solutions for inhabiting catastrophe. This ecology of knowledges was further illustrated in concrete case studies: Natalia López analysed the water crisis in Chile not as a natural phenomenon, but as a consequence of the neoliberal model of dispossession, in which aesthetic practices document the crisis and construct a watery memory demanding ecological justice. Similarly, Fernando Pelicice and his team presented the degradation of the Ribeirão São João in Porto Nacional as a metaphor for a stagnant spirit, linking environmental breakdown with cultural and identity ruptures. These studies underscore that Latin America’s polycrisis has a specific genealogy: extractivism, coloniality, and ecological violence.
In another of the seminar’s lines of inquiry—focused on the aesthetics that emerge from the rubble—Horst Nitschack argued that art installations made from discarded materials such as plastic and scrap do not merely signal the end of an aesthetic, but actively challenge the capitalist logic of surplus value. These ephemeral works, by relinquishing permanence, celebrate singularity and open up possibilities for the new in what has been marginalised. The notion of the archive was central to questioning what is preserved and what is forgotten. Viviane Oliveira explored archives as crossroads of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges, as sites of tension where absences and erasures become visible. Mónica González García, meanwhile, analysed in Machado de Assis the image of books consumed by worms as a post-apocalyptic allegory of the vanity of civilisational projects and their material legacies.
These analyses show that the ‘end’ is also a crisis of memory and narrative, in which the archon must be constantly interrogated.
The seminar’s guiding question—“what comes after the end?”—received cautiously optimistic responses through the notion of ‘re-existence.’ André Cardoso identified in the works of Ramiro Sanchiz and Daniel Galera a re-enchantment of the world, an alternative to Weberian disenchantment, emerging from the ruins of modernity.
He argued that, by reducing the world to its raw and elemental state, narratives of the end lift the veil of instrumental rationality that had distanced us from the marvellous. Celia Pedrosa and Prisca Agustoni (analysed by Maria Joscilane) proposed a poetics of rivers and an ecosophy in which the poetic dimension engages with traumatic memories and promotes interspecies alliances, resonating with Haraway’s notion of “Chthulucene.”
Finally, the community and collective dimension proved central. Maria da Piedade Dias examined resilience experiences in Zapatista and Guarani Kaiowá communities, where traditional knowledges and autonomous social technologies weave alternatives to the modern-colonial paradigm. Narubia Werrera, speaking from her position as an Indigenous artivist, embodied this resistance, affirming the Indigenous woman as the first and last line of defence for the Earth.
These projects are not escapist; rather, as Damião Boucher suggested, they constitute radical responses to hegemonic projects of destruction, where the end may recursively mark a beginning.
The 2nd Seminar on Poetics and Politics of the End demonstrates that contemporary Latin American thought is producing some of the most lucid and urgent reflections for navigating the global polycrisis.
Far from surrender or nostalgia, its critical contributions articulate a politics of the threshold.
Inhabiting the end as a space of radical inquiry, mourning for lost futures, but, above all, as fertile ground for worlds yet to come—a counter-archive of possible futures rooted in ecological justice, cognitive sovereignty, and communal reinvention.
About the Authors
Rejane de Souza Ferreira is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at the Federal University of Tocantins.
Alejandra Bottinelli Wolleter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Chile and a former CAPAS fellow.