Ecocritical Study of Landscape Representations in Contemporary Art

This interdisciplinary project identifies the genre of landscape as offering rich material for an ecocritical study of art. Ecocriticism emphasizes issues of environmental interrelation, sustainability, and justice in cultural interpretation.

Having first emerged in literary studies, over the last two decades environmental and ecocritical enquires flourished in many fields of the humanities.

Art history is yet to take an active part in these debates, but this project seeks to demonstrate that art history has a distinct and unique role in formulating a cultural response to one of the most urgent global priorities, identified in The UN Sustainable Development Goals as Goal 13: Climate Action.

In this, the aim of the project is to establish a theoretical and aesthetic meeting point for art historical study and the burgeoning concentration of research in ecocriticism and environmental humanities. The objectives of this project are both historical and theoretical.

The overall historical aim is to produce a study of the developments in the genre of landscape in the contemporary period (since the 1980s), in the representative case studies drawn from the corpus of European contemporary art.

The distinctive feature of this project is to consider new imaging technologies (photography, digital, animation) as not just material supports of landscape pictures, but as active participants in the evolution of the genre.

The main theoretical aim of the project is to develop new tools for the study of landscape in an ecocritical perspective, so as to appraise the fundamental shifts in the paradigmatic conceptions of nature and human, and epistemic ramifications of such changes. This project leads to several well-defined outcomes, disseminated to both academic and non-expert audiences.