With our planet in peril, forces of separation have been growing virulent. Amidst uncontainable disasters and embattled resources, calls resound to erect higher walls to fend off unwanted invaders and grant security to those who assume the right to the land. Fantasies of stability aside, extinction and renewal might be the only recurring pattern of life on our planet. What could be the role of visual arts, academic analysis, and archival work in current states of emergency? Can scaling up and down between micro and macro views yield situated yet connected insights across time and space? Or are pursuits to maintain linguistic diversity, local specificity, and cultural tradition doomed, much like the preservation of endangered species?
Drawing on the work of artists, who have tackled these questions, I argue that a planetary perspective can reveal common ground in transience and inspire self-reflection about the modern subject’s implicated status. Looking back at our time from the vantage point of future extinction has been a recurring trope for Werner Herzog from his first books and films to his Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. His recent memoir underpins his insistence on “ecstatic truth” in a future perfect view. Hito Steyerl has engaged questions of scale and interdependence, probing circuits of complicity in the art market and localized effects of the flow of data in her documentaries, installations, and essays on "art in the age of global civil war." In her ongoing project Becoming Earth, Ursula Biemann proposes a “cosmovision,” reframing human connection with the non-human world while co-creating an Indigenous Biocultural University with the Inga in Columbia. Adopting such dynamic frame adjustments as epistemic lenses might help counter the certainties of wartime rhetoric and imagine possibilities of intermedial solidarity and collaborative survival.