How the Environmental Humanities may heal our relationship with the Planet, by Analize Nicolini to Ca'Foscari (2020)
Instead of wanting to make art reductions through political schemes, I would prefer that we make political recompositions through the riches of art.
Félix Guatarri
Humanity, as we know, is still facing a series of crises. Climate change, significant losses of biodiversity, and natural resources generate concerns. With the increased use of resources per person, continued population growth and parallel depletion of renewable energy supply have become global challenges. The environment has already reached its limit to absorb pollutants as well as old and new waste. Globalization increasingly brings human and animal beings closer together, thus facilitating the emergence of new infectious diseases and consequent pandemics.
These environmental problems have severe and unequal effects on human populations. Although they are rooted in the changes in the physical environment, they are the main ones involved in social and cultural issues, due to their human roots and their close interconnections with all aspects of society, such as capitalism, justice, poverty, diasporas, financial crises, terrorism, scientific and technological developments. Scientists in the human, social and arts, natural and activism fields are continually warning us about the environmental collapse the world is facing.
The Environmental Humanities represent an urgently needed interdisciplinary movement to think about how to live well on a damaged planet, inserting public discourse in new ways, so that these issues are felt and understood more deeply. It can make a crucial contribution to critical understanding, in thinking about social, scientific, economic, political, aesthetic, and cultural reality from different perspectives, with a purpose to promote dialogue, reflection, and action.
Its proposal is the promotion of studies that put the cultural sphere in connection with the environmental understanding and crisis. They constitute a field which doesn't accept its separation from science and can help us imagine habitable futures. It is about surpassing the economy as the most important measure of all things and forging an alternative worldview that puts the conquest of the good life and the rebalancing of the biosphere as objectives.
The artistic and cultural activities of the Humanities - such as activism, visual art, performance, literature, poetry, music, documentary - are created and criticized with an expanded lens, where environmental discourse is placed on equal footing with philosophy, sociology, and art theories. With this connection, these activities can offer a vision of a different future from the one we´re currently moving towards.
In this context, there's an emergence in the search for aesthetic structures that correspond to the expansion of reflections about the changes suffered by nature and stimulated by a consumer society. By confronting the audience with unpleasant information, often difficult to digest, converged in an aesthetic experience, awareness goes beyond the barrier of the rational and touches people. It's easier to ignore statistics than to ignore images and sensations. When art represents society's troubled relationship with nature, actions become an urgency.
The work of art can act as a mirror of what societies and individuals feel, think, and do. Art drives the processes of perception, sensitivity, cognition, expression, and creation. It has the power to sensitize and provide an aesthetic experience in the transmission of emotions or ideals. Art is, by definition, a bridge, when producing dialogue between the artist and the audience. A complex dialogue, which reveals a multiplicity of speeches when bringing together the work of art and the act of its creation - meanings intended by the artist, the context in which it was produced, relationship with its contemporaries - and the audience converted to interpreter once before an image. As Agamben points out, “contemporary is the one who keeps his gaze fixed on his time, to perceive in it not the lights, but the dark”. Arts can propose reflections of social and environmental changes, as a guide at the crossroads of this dark, in the search for new ways of perceiving and feeling the environment that can contribute, through and beyond emotions, in the change of attitudes.
Contemporary artists can bring real contributions, since they have the ability to redefine the meanings of reality, break boundaries, leave institutional frameworks, and think laterally, representing the problems of contemporaneity symbolically and aesthetically. This is the case of the polish artist Frans Krajcberg (1921-2017). His striking sculptures and environmentally friendly work reveal a solitary struggle for the conservation of what still exists. Krajcberg uses incinerated fragments of Brazilian forests as exponents of revolt against deforestation - mainly caused by fires to convert land to agriculture - and its other consequences to the ecosystem.
The German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is considered one of the pioneers in defense of nature. Beuys led several environmental protest actions against deforestation and urban deterioration. One of my authorial artistic projects, “Ending in Venice” (2019), proposes reflections and actions on predatory tourism in the city of Venice, bringing attention to the issues that the city, residents, tourists, and visitors face from the impact of intense tourism, the encounter of different cultures and the fateful structural and human limitations.
Whether through art as a form of a manifesto, or even with the use of symbolic concepts, often implicit in the use of objects or materials, it’s noted how these artists have presented real contributions to the concept of sustainability, both in the environmental, and social spheres. New narratives are revealed: the need for a critical view of society on consumer culture - which has caused damage to the environment and, consequently, to society itself.
Therefore, scholars in the Environmental Humanities can play an important role in expanding the range of voices and ideas in environmental deliberations. They can achieve this by presenting their ideas, listening to, and observing those who have little voice. What we need are new narratives that propose dialogues between countries, continents, and cultures, parts of a technological, frontier, and chaotic world, which needs provocations capable of generating local and global socio-economic-political-cultural changes of planetary impact.
Analize Nicolini
About the author
