Understanding Our Climate Emergency Through Art and Aesthetics. October 21st and 22nd
Understanding Our Climate Emergency Through Art and Aesthetics. October 21st and 22nd
Sala de Graus Albert Calsamiglia, 40.035 Campus Ciutadella, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Click here for the programme
This conference gathers philosophers and artists working on our environmental emergency through art and aesthetics to widen the horizons of our University Planetary Wellbeing Project implemented by the former President of the UPF, Prof. Jaume Casals.
This conference is not only meant to show how the prevailing techno-economical approach has not managed to reduce a dramatic environmental emergency that has now reached levels of no return, but also to propose alternative transformative actions to counter this condition.
Art, as well as the humanities broadly understood, can provide us with a different conceptual platform to address these issues outside the techno-economical approach we are framed in. Scientists and organizations, for example, repeatedly foresaw the recent pandemic, but little was done to prepare ourselves for its impact. We believe that if politicians, governors, and society at large would have been persuaded by their explanations we would not find ourselves in this condition now.
This conference rests on the belief that art now works better than science as a way to express and bear emergencies. This is evident in the difference between the facts that scientists use to explain our climate crisis and the artists' works of art. The difference is not one of kind but rather of degree, intensity, and depth. Scientific photographs of the Antarctic can be truthful, but rarely as powerfully as a photographic work of art or an art installation of the same. Knowledge is not enough to understand climate change: feeling, emotions, and senses also play an essential part. The problem is not that science has a communication problem that art can solve, but that we have only listened to science to solve an issue that requires also art.
Artists Diane Burko and Andrea Conte, as well as philosophers Amanda Boetzkes and Santiago Zabala, have been working for decades on these problems and will contribute by providing the public with a different theoretical and cultural approach to offer alternative transformative actions.