Frankenstein

Written by an author still in her teens with the intention of instilling fear, Mary Shelley's masterpiece anticipates contemporary climate anxiety, giving rise to a new literary genre; the science fiction horror. Published just after the most powerful volcanic eruption ever recorded by mankind, Frankenstein is not only a contemporary icon but, first and foremost, a reaction to the climatic anomaly caused by Indonesia's Tambora volcano. For climatologists, the eruption provoked the Year-Without-Summer; a dystopian period due to the sulphurous fog that obscured the stratosphere and turned the sky yellowish, lowered temperatures, and caused violent and continuous thunderstorms with considerable damage to agriculture and subsequent famine in Europe, North America and Asia. It was 1816 and in that atmosphere Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. 

Stuck within the limits of cultural taxonomy, the more-than-human being par excellence of Western literature has not had a reading detached from the context in which it has been interpreted. A limitation that, paradoxically, has imprisoned the book in its imaginary, in the laces of an interpretation harnessed by the vision of so-called "normal / natural" readers. The interpretation of Frankenstein [who is actually the creator and not the creature as we tend to believe] has always prevailed over that of the monster, even though the emotional-neurological-literary heart of the book lies in the creature's learning process of itself, of the language and of the world. It is from this leftover, from this exclusion, that OHT's work is born; for the first time it is the monster that speaks, and he takes the floor not as an excluded person but as the creator of our imaginary, as one of our fellow citizens, as one of our monstrous peers. At last, the monster is reborn, revealing himself as a new-born child of Western literature, an infant whose first colours appear, whose shapes acquire volume, whose hands begin to grasp, whose throat and lips - until then only capable of guttural cries - articulate its first words. A monstrous rebirth that evades literary boundaries, creating a new imagery:

"And now, once again, I command my horrible progeny to go forth and prosper” Mary Shelley

Surprisingly close to the political overtones of OHT's research, Frankenstein is a myth in which the outer landscapes blend with the inner ones. The precipices of Mont Blanc become intimate and personal vertigoes in the encounter between the monster and his creator; inaccessible places such as the Alps and the Arctic become a crucial refuge for an elusive creature, who learns to know himself through the natural phenomena that occur in those places. While Victor Frankenstein no longer seems in control of his surroundings, the demon and those landscapes become one; an attempt at emancipation from the human epicenter toward a continuum with the animal, plant, and mineral worlds.