SESSION: Connecting Ecocritical Art Histories beyond Academia (pt.2)
Ecocriticism—that is, critical approaches to understanding the interconnection of terrestrial beings, elements, forces, and systems—has become a significant dynamic in art history over the past decades. This development has progressed in different ways within various areas of art history, and rarely as a cohesive—much less communal—field-wide conversation. In addition, art history’s ecological impact beyond the academy still has much unrealised potential. This session explores how art history could become ecologically allied to realise that impact.
The first half of the day-long session will pose questions about ecological orientations within art history as a discipline, for instance: How can disparate subfields of art history learn from each other in developing ecocritical ways of working? How does ecocritical art history connect with other critical art histories (e.g. queer/postcolonial/Marxist)? What can ecocritical art history gain from dialogue with other disciplines?
The second half of the session will ask how ecocritical art history can engage and shape conversations beyond the academy, for example: How can art history better serve its many publics in exploring the ecological dimensions of art? What forms of inquiry and dialogues can have ecologically meaningful “impact”?
Session Convenors:
Dr Elizabeth J. Petcu, University of Edinburgh
Maurice Saß, Alanus University, Alfter, Germany
Speakers:
Julia Kantelberg,Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Perceiving Landscape in the Rijksmuseum
The painting Meadow Landscape with Cattle depicts a typical Dutch landscape scene. Yet this seemingly pristine image is a profoundly altered environment: a polder shaped by centuries of human water and land management. Paradoxically, these so-called ‘half-natural’ landscapes were – up to the mid-19th century – among the most biodiverse. For the upcoming exhibition on landscape at the Rijksmuseum, planned for 2027, I am exploring how to foreground the ecological dimensions of art and the many nonhuman forces that have co-constituted the landscape alongside humans.
As the Dutch national museum of art and history, the Rijksmuseum’s collection predominantly revolves around human histories. However, the history and temporality of landscape is not bound to human imagination and time. This paper examines how ecological (art) histories and ecological objects, such as herbaria or soil profiles, might enter the exhibition as carriers of nonhuman (hi)stories and aesthetics. I propose that displaying such objects together with artworks can help us move beyond the much-debated nature-culture dichotomy and to visualize a more integrated narrative of the landscape as a living whole. In this way, we can do justice to the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman (hi)stories that together constitute the landscape.
Yosuke Nakamoto, ETH Zürich
Counter-Environmental Reading: Extraction, Absence, and Sensory Disruption in Japanese Art Histories
This paper examines how Japanese art histories can contribute to ecocritical debates while confronting their profound entanglement in extraction, industrialisation, and environmental harm. Building on my doctoral research into the modernisation of salt production in the Seto Inland Sea and my practice-based work integrating Japanese visual culture with environmental history, I propose a methodological framework I call counter-environmental reading: an art-historical practice that focuses on what extractive infrastructures erase, displace, or render illegible rather than on what they visibly produce.
Juxtaposing Kataoka Mami’s exhibition Sensing Nature (Mori Art Museum, 2010), with its emphasis on shizen (nature) and shinrabanshō (all things in the universe) as atmospheric, sensory presence, with my fieldwork in the industrialised saltscapes of Hiroshima, Okayama, and Kagawa, the paper traces the tension between curatorial celebrations of nature as perceptual experience and coastal zones where “nature” has been systematically dismantled through state-led rationalisation. Through archival research, oral histories with former salt workers, and material tracing of salt, sand and kiln ash, I show how extraction reshapes not only ecosystems but also sensory and spatial relations: what Tetsuro Watsuji theorised as fūdo (climate) as embodied and lived structure. By connecting Mono-ha’s attunement to vibration and relational presence with the muted afterlives of industrial saltscapes, the paper argues that ecocritical art history must learn to register ecological violence and disappearance without falling into extractive representational logics that frame extraction as a finished or historical event. Counter-environmental reading thus positions art history as a practice of attending to absences, residues, and disrupted sensory worlds bridging pedagogical, curatorial, and field-based methods to imagine forms of ecocritical work that can meaningfully engage publics beyond academia.
Esme Garlake, University College London (UCL)
Climate Activism as nexus between Art History and Environmental Justice – so what about Ecocritical Art History?
Art historians who are concerned with the ecological dimensions of art will rightly seek ‘publics’ beyond the academy with which to share insights and develop dialogues. This often positions the ecocritical art historian as the nexus between the field of art history and environmental justice. But this paper explores another nexus, existing outside of the academy: climate activists protesting in both museums and on the streets.
This paper first considers some of the ways in which historical artworks are used by people in the climate movement – from headline-grabbing direct actions in museums to art historical images that appear on placards or costumes at street protests. These examples provoke questions about the ecological role of art with a material and imaginative directness that an academic ecocritical art history will find hard to match. As ecocritical art historians, where does our research fit into this, if at all? Fundamentally, this paper understands climate activists as a particular ‘public’ with which ecocritical art historians can share dialogue – to do so, we must look beyond the binary of either praise or condemnation and consider what the ecocritical art historian can both bring to, and learn from, climate activists using historical artworks to sound the alarm.
Peter Schneemann, University of Bern
Response to papers from Part 2.