Through the autumn of 2023, as the graduating cohort of the
MA Art & Ecology prepared their contributions to The Journal of Art
& Ecology, the necessity of linking ecology to questions of social
justice has seemed more urgent than ever. The work gathered here, by Aliansyah
Caniago, Sirun Chen, Rhiannon Hunter, Linnea Johnels, Jane Lawson, Sam Metz, Sohorab
Rabbey, Tina Ribarits, Elizabeth Salazar and Ella Wong, asks what it means to
be situated as an artist with a commitment to thinking and working ecologically
in the midst of planetary turbulence. At a time when settler-colonial violence, pollution and climate change denialism are surging, what artistic sensoria, tactics and
kinships might beckon towards more just and liveable forms of earthly life?
This 2023 edition of The Journal of Art & Ecology approaches dispossession and unfolding ecocide through sensorial memory, archival
investigation, material sensitivity and embodied knowledge. Much of the work makes
a critical challenge to the distancing techniques of extractivism and colonial
taxonomy, repurposing diagramming, mapping and digital capture to ask how we
might reconfigure our relations. The task of pluralising ecological knowledge
and attending to its historical omissions takes us into new methodological
territories – proposing autistic stimming as investigation, fungi as guides and
plants as healers of the cosmic body. Western epistemologies and capitalist
imperatives, which privilege certain kinds of bodies, are provincialized in
assemblages that combine the organic, the mineral and the technological, taking
their organisational logic from ancestral knowledge, acts of ecological care, Taoist
wisdom, neuroqueer phenomenology and decolonial feminism. In some contributions
the politics is outspoken, in others it appears as a haunting, in everyday
gestures of conviviality, or in quiet transgressions of translation. There are perspectives
that are tender and entangled, mournful and enraged, defiant and magical. It is
work that is not afraid to stumble through unfamiliar languages, to linger in
interstitial moments, to sit with discomfort and to recognise the radical
alterity of nonhuman creatures. It is art that is extending its antennae,
feeling its way towards deeper understandings of climate justice, mutuality and
recuperation.
Dr Ros Gray
Programme Director, MA Art & Ecology