#deep ecoclogy

[micro-texture]

Unsettling Eco-Scapes: Aesthetic Performances for Sustainable Futures

Emerging sustainability culture offers new perspectives on creative spatial practice.

The future eco-scape is not necessarily a sphere where you feel ‘at ease’, but a performative and unsettled space in constant transformation and change. 

Increasing landscape awareness as a result of climate change. Sustainable, long term, and organic urban development abounds (somehow). Energy flows, waste handling, biodiversity, and human/wildlife coexistence are not only present but conspicuous in these areas. It’s more than a soothing ornament of industrialization. 

What can human creativity bring to the biosphere? How can is human imagination, and what is it good for? Deep ecologists criticize the privilege of human agency, while emphasizing the non-hierarchical interconnectedness of all living creatures. These concepts disqualify the anthropocentrism implied in ideas like “creativity” or “development”. 

The idea of aesthetic pleasure coming with the experience of logical fulfillment is influential, and doesn’t fortify the conception of nature as true beauty. It also turns the aesthetic experience into an intrinsically personal matter... leading to splendid isolation. 

Art no longer a reflection of harmonious ideas but an intervention into the “physical abyss of raw matter” (Smithson). 

Symbolic aspects of urban microclimate artworks are still important but they also operate on different dimensions -- intervening with and actualizing territorial aspects. 

A source of inspiration for a vitalist approach to environmental aesthetics is the ‘transformism’ of Henri Bergson, who argued that the ontological point of departure was the conviction that life, as a natural, complex system, cannot be ethically grounded ... life is fundamentally transitory, and unsustainable ... it is a perpetual becoming. It revolves around agency as the use of unbound energy, not a single purpose or ideal. 

Why are these ideas important now? They always have been. A beautiful landscape works on our psyche, performing a continuous therapeutic restoration of our mental connections to the biophysical world (Meyer 2008). It[s not about defending beauty but preventing the concept of sustainability from slipping into the recesses of state and corporate political power, becoming hijacked by the ruling regimes.