Natalia Castro: "The metaphors of the apocalypse have been the most appropriate to explain the present."

PalmIn 2019, Natalia Castro (Mahón, 1989), from Menorca, posted a tweet saying that if the world were to end, she would spend it writing a thesis on the apocalypse. And it was precisely during the lockdown the following year that she finished an investigation that has led to... The end-of-the-world partyThe latest winner of the Anagrama Essay Prize, this Princeton University professor reviews the social configuration of the last twenty years in Spain from urban, historical, and cultural perspectives, all permeated by an apocalyptic vision. Eurovegas, the 15M movement, and COVID-19 are explained through the lens of Susan Sontag. Mad Max and the play Bankers vs. Zombies, among others.

Where does your interest in the apocalypse come from?

— On one hand, there's a more personal aspect: I've always loved stories about monsters. My mother took me to see Godzilla I liked it when I was little, and I liked it too. Jurassic Park and King KongI loved stories about tsunamis and catastrophes. They've always fascinated me, so I wondered why they were so interesting and what their effects were.

He didn't write the book just for this hobby, did he?

— No, no. There's also a political-theological aspect. For years I've dedicated myself to studying critical theory and the symbolic and discursive tools we have to transform or resist oppressive dynamics. And within this, I'm very interested in the culture of religions. I had the intuition that religions had taught us concepts with great potential to change the world.

Especially Christianity, right?

— Yes, I was fascinated by how a sect of a handful of marginalized and persecuted people managed, in a relatively short time—considering the course of history as a whole—to become the official religion of the empire. This process involved a cultural and political revolution connected to the apocalyptic dimension, understood as a moment of change and transformation. And to all this, you have to add that I was very interested in exploring the entire archive on these issues. I started reading contemporary novels, and, well, the evidence was there: the metaphors of the apocalypse have been the most fitting to explain the present, and for some reason, that had to be the case.

Their generation has witnessed all these apocalyptic fictions and references and may question their origins. But those who came after, those born from the 2000s onward, have grown up immersed in them: it's their reality.

— I have many students in my class and I'm learning a lot, to be honest. I've been surprised by the generational gap, even from one semester to the next: you can perceive many differences. The pandemic caught them at a particular stage of their development, which has led them to have a way of relating to each other that is unique to them. This is one of the audiences I'd like to reach with the book, because I see this gap between generations, which sometimes seems artificial to me, and I think it needs to be bridged.

How can it be done?

— Okay, we need to understand that the languages we use are different; even nonverbal communication is completely different. Young people today are immersed in a kind of posthumous condition. And we think we're experts on the apocalypse, but we know almost nothing about its historical and political context and how it served to understand the concept of crisis not as an opportunity—which is a capitalist appropriation—but as a transformation.

The book begins with Eurovegas, a project that in the collective imagination is halfway between fiction and reality.

— That's precisely why I chose it; it's such a good example! The dossier the Americans submitted about the project was called 'Possible Dream,' and there were numerous elements surrounding Eurovegas that interested me greatly: how it activated the imagination of so many people, because it's something that had never been done before, but which has songs and books and its own body of work; how it proposes a dialectic between Jerusalem and Babylon, because it is both at the same time, and it also allowed me to bring up the concept of 'desert,' which is essential in the book.

Surprisingly, urban planning is one of its main pillars.

— When you hear about the apocalypse, you tend to think of zombies and meteorites, not urban planning theory, even though it's closely related to, for example, the idea of homogenizing cities, or the capitalist bulldozer. Creating deserts isn't just about the Monegros or the Mojave; it's about destroying unique features, and there are some very interesting theories about this. What defines a desert isn't what it has, but what it lacks.

As the subtitle suggests, the book explores a period with a beginning and an end, from 2008 to 2023, although the final chapter addresses the devastating floods in Valencia and a sense of exhaustion or the end of the party. So the question is inevitable: what comes after the apocalypse?

— This project is at least 10 years old, and the collective mood has changed a lot while I've been working on it. So many things have happened, many of them terrible, and it's normal that we're still feeling a hangover from many of them. There have been times when we thought another world was possible, but just as I was thinking about how I could finish the book, the DANA storm hit, bringing with it this new understanding of organizing pessimism. So, in response, what I've been doing lately is seeking out certain environments that serve as a refuge.

For example?

— Lately, I've been finding this in poetry, understood as a collective practice that, for better or for worse, is marginal in the cultural industry and, above all, focuses on play, joy, and desire. Poetry leads you to experience a logic contrary to that of the algorithm. It's a shared space from which we can redefine the meaning of words.