«Your animated GIFs run on burnt coal and your computers are built by slaves»: l’estrattivismo come rappresentazione simbolica del Capitalocene

Which metaphors can be used to understand the agency of the cultural logic of the Capitalocene within contemporary art? Can we consider the extractivism as a symbolic representation of this new kind of geological era? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions by tackling several contemporary art case studies useful to define a trajectory that focuses on the interplay between the landscape, environmental disasters and technological infrastructures. After a short introduction on the term Capitalocene and its success within contem- porary art criticism, the article is made up by two thematic chapters devoted to establish a dialectic between the old minerary extractive methods and the current practices linked to the contemporary mining.