PhD | Call to Arms: Art Institutions in the Age of Ecological Emergency
PhD-Candidate: Giulia Bellinetti | ASCA, UvA | Dr. Jeff Diamanti/ Prof. Esther Peeren
The project investigates the epistemic function of art institutions in the age of environmental emergency. To this end, the research explores the political ecologies of public art institutions in relation to knowledge, environmental concept work, and interdisciplinary forms of collaboration. In particular, I note how the discourse of ‘ecological emergency’ gets mediated by artistic media and form, altering in turn the ‘authoritarian neutrality’ long presumed by public art institutions in the global north, and more precisely in Western Europe. In response to the rampant environmental breakdown, institutions such as museums, art schools and art spaces have become political and epistemic spaces that are contesting disciplinary boundaries and traditional structure of power/knowledge. Combining theoretical and archival research with an organizational ethnography of four art institutions, the project analyses new epistemic configurations emerging in the art institutional context in response to the environmental breakdown. The objective will be to investigate the emergence of new ‘instituent practices’ as defined by Gerald Raunig, where interdisciplinary and participatory processes of knowledge production can open up alternative socio-political imagineries. Based on the theoretical contributions Mieke Bal, Jacques Rancière and Michel Foucault, I will further seek to identify an object-of-rupture in the institutional archives which allowed to prefigure the current epistemic shift.
Image Credit: Fundació Antoni Tàpies