This exciting symposium will focus on artistic, curatorial and cultural responses to urgent environmental and climate justice issues. All are welcome from across the University and beyond.
An Uncertain Forecast Art in the Age of the Anthropocene and Ecocide
This symposium is an opportunity to highlight and share innovative steps, practical solutions and everyday activisms that can be taken to reduce environmental impact. To address the challenge of how arts can give meaningful contribution to a more sustainable future, we invite questions such as: How does social change and upheaval precipitate new art forms? How does art, culture and the curatorial field address our epoch that is now being called Anthropocene? What is the visual and material culture of climate change and what purpose does it serve? What can be done today to generate real impact on the issue of human-induced climate change? How can the interference of mankind with the environment in which it exists, and on which it depends, be curated within the arts, in order to generate active participation in societal change?
The Age of the Anthropocene and Ecocide seem to exist more as polarising questions dividing opinion than a generally accepted truth that we cohabit a planet whose ecological and environmental crises are overwhelmingly shaped by human interference. Much of modern society refuses to accept or take responsibility for human induced climate change, man-made toxicity and pollution, destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity loss that drive species extinction and threaten all life on earth.
Dominant political and economic thinking’s reliance and belief in technological solutions holds off for tomorrow’s future our necessity to act in the present. We have long possessed the tools and knowledge to reduce emissions and stop extraction of fossil fuels but are propelled forward by an extractive global capitalism and its market logic of growth at the expense of all human and non-human life. As climate activist Naomi Klein suggests, ‘our economic system and our planetary system are now at war’. The hour is late and much has already been lost. No longer a quiet drama, the urgent challenges we face today demand we act now.
Radical social and cultural change remains our strongest hope. At the systemic edge of ecocide, ‘resistance’ movements blockade infrastructures of extraction and economic profit, dams, pipelines, airports. Campaigns for climate justice fight expulsions, join territorial struggles of indigenous peoples facing the direct consequences of climate change, and lobby for policy and system change. Understanding the role of creative resistance, civil disobedience and impact of art within the visual culture of climate change campaigning is crucial to building mass social movements. The necessary shift from passive consumer to active participant is at the heart of our ability to imagine and instigate real alternatives.
Much of how we understand the natural world was shaped by 19thcentury science such as Alexander von Humboldt’s theory of interconnectedness and his early understanding of human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss, by observing the links between intensive farming, monoculture, deforestation and their direct effects on ecosystems. Understanding the ecological impacts of how we live and consume, and the urgent skills we need to learn to divert ecological and environmental crises describes an ‘ecological intelligence’ that needs to be at the forefront of creative solutions. In order to radically change our everyday behaviours and to energise a new generation, we must first learn to think, act and live differently.
Art in the Age of Anthropocene and Ecocide will examine how art practitioners, curators and interdisciplinary researchers can become agents of change, striving for environmental justice with a post-capitalist, post-colonial agenda and an ambition to reveal fresh, unconventional viewpoints to achieving a sustainable future through activism, alternative modes of action and new forms of collective intelligence.
Art in the Age of Anthropocene and Ecocide is hosted by the MA Curatorial Practice program in collaboration with the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University. It will focus on the artistic and curatorial responses to the ecocidal Anthropocene and the approach to curatorial activism in terms of environmental and ecological art. The intersections and interplay of these perspectives can generate nuanced, meaningful and imaginative responses. With unique and shared understandings, artistic amplification and insights, we hope to offer a resource for re/telling, imagining, re/making and co-creating alternative narratives.