The research cluster traces material entanglements of art and earth in the shadow of the Anthropocene.
Our task is to practice terra-aesthetic archaeologies and facilitate new ways of thinking, sensing and dealing with the environmental crises of our time by tending to aesthetic and earthly matters.
Art is from and about earth. On the one hand, earthly matter and material processes are made visible, tangible and audible in the arts. On the other hand, paper, canvas and a number of artistic tools and instruments are derived from plants; many pigments are made of plants and minerals; digital art relies on the extraction of mined matter; sound is an effect of material motion in the atmosphere, carried between bodies through vibrations.
In our epoch of environmental destruction, these basic materials become precarious, and art negotiates ways of living with the damage or acting against it. By engaging with sensory, bodily, and visceral aesthetic practices from different historical periods and within different art forms, the research cluster wishes to throw a new light on the environmental relation between the human and the non-human.
Investigating modes of environmental co-inhabitation in the Anthropocene, e.g. aesthetic practices of care for a given habitat, its sustainable maintenance and expansion; adaptive planning of resilient architectures, cities, and landscapes by doing design; durational collective art practices replacing short-lived participation by long-term engagement.
Discussing aesthetic practices of reappropriation, recycling, regeneration; engaging with less wasteful cultural techniques and aesthetic practices we embody; embodying technologies we have externalised; reconsidering the critical potential of aesthetic theories and practices of decomposition, désœuvrement, or inoperativity.
Articulated through dynamic network systems, co-implication, co-development, transduction and individuation, or entanglement. In this context, we are also interested in the dialectic relationship between affective-emotional internalisation and medialised or institutionalised externalisation and entanglements of body and spirit.
Critically revisiting the reflections on art and sensuous matter in aesthetic philosophy and cultural theory. The challenge is to approach the aesthetic experience as an encounter with sensuous matter. In the experience of art, we become aware of the basic and fragile matters both underlying the world of human meaning and undermining it.
Investigating archaeologies and material approaches to cultural history, archival practices, transformations of situational environments and their topologies; pace and rhythm in informational, energetic, environmental, and material movements; the relation of aesthetics, deep time and slow time; potential practices of historiography in the face of the uncertainties of the Anthropocene.
Questioning a valorisation of the active and organic in recent critical theories that counteract anthropocentrism by redistributing notions of agency, force, and energy; exploring the passivity, indifference and inertia of inorganic matter as possible resistance to a mindset of productivity and progress that has contributed to the ongoing destruction of the earth.
E.g. of sea and air in Woolf’s The Waves, clouds in John Constable’s Cloud Study, landscapes in Caspar David Friedrich, the earth ground in Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations, urban landscapes from above and sewers below in Nadar’s or Gaspard-Félix Tournachon’s photography, arctic material cultures in Ann Noble’s photographic art or melting ice in Christoph Marthaler’s performance Plus Minus Nul.
Presented and produced in the arts, e.g. in Kirkegaard’s Isfald, Björk’s Biophilia, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Andersen’s Ice Maiden, Eliasson’s Life, Smithson’ Spiral Jetty, Allan Kaprow’s Fluids, Ana Mendieta’s earth body works, or Zheng Bo’s queer nature project Pteridophilia.
Of art as well as matter-to-matter and matter-to-body relations established in various artforms, e.g. material colour relations in painting, audible breath or bodily movements in sound performances, bodily interactions with artificial natural environments (e.g. Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield, Mel Chin’s Revival Field, Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculptures), interactions between actors’ bodies and props on stage, atmospheric environments into which the beholder is immersed (e.g. performances by Signa, Sisters Hope, Punchdrunk; ambisonic 3D sound-productions), or sonic or visual figurations in poetry.
Of aesthetic processes and the bio-, geo-, cyro-, hydro-, sono- and atmospheric mapping approaches that exceed analogies, e.g. biosemiotics, sonic materialism, the aesthetics of rupture responding to erratic elemental forces, art and earth as archives, sustainable infrastructures and the aesthetic practices of material everyday culture.
This glossary of key terms engages with the potentials and challenges of addressing climate change by experimenting with different modes of speaking in environmental humanities tongues, via a transdisciplinary dialogue across the faculties.
