Building Common Ground
Ecological Art Practices and Human-Nonhuman Knowledges
open access | peer reviewed
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edited by
- Emiliano Guaraldo - Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia - email
Abstract
This volume examines the entanglements between contemporary art practices, ecology, and non-human subjects through contributions from scholars, art writers, critics, artist-researchers and designers. The collected essays reveal contemporary art’s potential to reorient epistemological and ontological coordinates amid ecological and existential crises, questioning human exceptionalism and the exploitative logics of extractivism and planetary industrialization. Central to the volume are issues of environmental degradation and violence, racial capitalism, colonial legacies, the emergence of the Anthropocene, in relation to the diverse terrain of contemporary art practices. Emphasizing the agency of more-than-human collaborators, from animals to microbial ecologies, and from oceans to nuclear waste, these practices expose injustices, reclaim damaged ecosystems, and propose alternative ways of being in and with the planet. Artist-researchers contribute perspectives that open up new avenues for knowledge creation in the disrupted landscapes of the Anthropocene, pointing to symbiotic relationships between humans and non-human entities that are only beginning to be explored. By sharing theoretical frameworks and languages, the artists’ and writers’ contributions make clear that the environmental crises impacting the ecosystems require new collaborations to build common epistemological grounds, and shared visions of planetary futures.
Keywords Birdsong • Cosmopolitics • Contemporary art • Archiving method • Migration • Plantationocene • Aurality • Mediterranean Sea • Platforms • Water • Re-worlding • Pluriversal ontologies • Colonialism • Non-human animals • Art practices • Synesthesia • Biopolitics • Networks • Ecomaterialism • Ecology • Racialized labour • Environment • Anthropocene • Woodland • Visual Art • Radioactive legacies • Toxicity • Ecosystems • Vernacular design • Imagining otherwise • Mimicry • Permaculture • Ecological art practices • Cultural heritage-making • Materiality • Nuclear knowledge • Narratives • Coppice • Visitation • Regionalism • Architecture • Eco-art • Multispecies • Multispecies studies • Speculative practices • Blackbird • Spores • Extraction
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-756-2 | e-ISBN 978-88-6969-756-2 | Published Dec. 14, 2023 | Language en
Copyright © 2023 Emiliano Guaraldo. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.