SESSION: Connecting Ecocritical Art Histories within the Discipline(s) (pt.1)
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:
Elizabeth J. Petcu, University of Edinburgh
Maurice Saß, Alanus University, Alfter, Germany
Speakers:
Diana Bullen Presciutti, University of Glasgow
Viewing roadside shrines through an ecological lens: the Umbra Valley (1300-1600)
In common with the rest of Italy, the roads of Renaissance Umbria were once lined with roadside edicole – small, unenclosed structures typically decorated with images of holy figures. These edicole were erected by local communities and other stakeholders for a variety of motives, including demarcating boundaries, seeking divine protection from the plague, commemorating important events, and facilitating devotion at miracle-working sites. Unlike the relatively stable internal ambit of the church, edicole were ever-changing settings for devotional practice. The experience of edicole was always a hybrid one – a transient and multisensory combination of being inside a sacred space and being outside in the surrounding environs.
Reconstructing the viewing experience of edicole thus brings to the fore viewing conditions predicated on environmental and material instability. Traditionally, art history has sought to fix the art object in a particular moment in historical time, often that of its completion or installation. Yet for both local and transient visitors to edicole, a constantly mutating viewing context would have been a fact of life, with each visit to an edicola having its own unique ecology. Taking the edicole of the Umbra Valley as a case study, I seek in this paper to integrate recent work on the environment in early modern Europe, across multiple disciplines, with the methods of art history in order to develop a better understanding of how ordinary people might have understood the relationship between ecology and piety in the context of their quotidian devotions.
Edwin Coomasaru, UCL/University of Bristol
Aesthetics of Abundance: Queer Sri Lankan Ecologies Beyond Scarcity
The planet has enough resources: they just need to be redistributed, dismantling the very identity categories which act as structures of unequal accumulation. This argument is central to a recent wave of interdisciplinary abundance scholarship. Such analysis has emerged from decolonial theory such as Candace Fujikane’s Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future (2021), environmental Marxism and degrowth communism like Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene (2023), sexuality studies literature as in Anjali Arondekar’s Abundance (2023), as well as policy proposals for Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell’s Radical Abundance (2025). Scarcity as an organising logic of the centuries-long development of capitalist colonialism, ultimately driving climate breakdown on a global scale, has also come under increasing academic scrutiny, from Deborah Valenze’s The Invention of Scarcity (2023) to Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind’s Scarcity (2023). This paper will address how an ecocritical art history can and must connect with queer, decolonial, and Marxist approaches through abundance as a methodology. Sri Lankan visual culture will be the focal point for thinking through points of intellectual tension and alliances between the different intellectual strands that make up a collective philosophy of abundance, drawing on both Sri Lanka’s indigenous environmental folklore and queer ecological art practices – from Lionel Wendt’s surrealist photography to Chathuri Nissansala’s ritual performances.
Timothy Stott, Trinity College Dublin
Art History and Sympoiesis
How can an ecocritical art history further develop, in tandem with biology, analytical categories that move beyond the individual and the human? Evolutionary biologists such as Lynn Margulis have argued that life on our planet is symbiotic to the core, characterised by mutual relations between organisms. Building on this insight, some humanists – Donna Haraway foremost amongst them – study sympoiesis, or ‘making with’, which includes asking how humans have produced culture in the company of other living beings. This paper will consider how an ecocritical art history might analyse historic and contemporary cases of such “making with”.
We begin from contemporary art, with its many symbionts, its mutualist experiments, art-science fieldwork and figuring, and interspecies encounters. We will discuss how some artists test and configure sympoiesis and what changes in labour, medium, and intention follow. To avoid reinstating the distinction between ‘contemporary art and everything else’, as Christopher Wood describes it, we then turn to the challenge of how, if at all, to uncover sympoiesis through analysis of historical artefacts. A further challenge is how such an art history would reconnect with the biological sciences. What would be the terms of renewed dialogue between these different cultures of inquiry? What can we learn, and avoid, from previous art-historical uses of organicism and evolutionary theory? At stake here is how art history might join other fields in revealing the complex dependence of human culture on more-than-human companions.
Sria Chatterjee, Paul Mellon Centre
Response to papers from Part 1.