Arts as Ecology

What It Is

Ecology — the study of the relationships between living organisms and their environments — began as a branch of evolutionary biology in the 19th century. As a framework for art practice, it emerged most visibly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as artists began working directly with environmental systems, time, and the non-human.

The Arts as Ecology framework (Zurich Art Summer Program, 2024) situates artistic practice within three related registers:

• Eco-aesthetics: Perception, experience, and beauty in ecological context
• EcoArt: Art practice that directly engages ecological systems and processes
• EcoArt Activism: Art as environmental advocacy and political intervention

Key Exhibitions & Movements

• Earth Art (1969) — Exhibition at Cornell University curating land and earth-based art. A foundational moment for what would become Land Art and Earth Art.
• Art's Fragile Ecologies (1992) — Barbara Matilsky's landmark survey exhibition of ecological art practice.
• Down to Earth (2020) — Gropius Bau, Berlin. No electricity, no artificial light, no air conditioning — site-specific work in radical material constraint.
• Feral Atlas (2020) — Anna L. Tsing and Jennifer Degar. An interactive atlas of "feral" — unintended, ungovernable — ecosystems produced by human infrastructure. Evolutionary science meets humanities.
• Sex Ecologies (2021–22) — Stefanie Hessler. Exhibition exploring reproduction, desire, and ecological interdependence.

Key Artists

• Alan Sonfist — Time Landscape (1965–present), New York City. A 300-year reconstruction of pre-colonial Manhattan forest — planting native species on a city block as ecological memory. One of the earliest and most sustained ecological art projects.
• Bruno Latour — Scientist and philosopher whose work on actor-network theory and the "Parliament of Things" has deeply influenced art and ecology discourse. His concept of non-human actants reshapes how we understand relationships between objects, materials, and systems.

Concepts

Cosmovision / Cosmogonies

Indigenous and non-Western frameworks for understanding the origin and structure of the universe — often fundamentally different from Western scientific cosmology in placing living relationships rather than abstract laws at the centre. Relevant to art practice that engages non-Western ecological knowledge systems.

Anthropophagy (Cannibalism / Cultural Appropriation as Metabolism)

From the Brazilian Modernist movement of the 1920s (Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto Antropófago") — the idea of cultural cannibalism as a creative strategy: consuming and metabolizing foreign influences to produce something new and hybrid. The term recurs in ecological art discourse as a metaphor for how cultures and organisms absorb and transform their environments.

Syntropic Systems

Agroforestry and farming systems that build biological complexity over time rather than simplifying it. In contrast to extractive monoculture, syntropic farming involves humans as part of the ecological loop rather than extractors from it. Referenced in the context of sustainable agriculture and indigenous land management in the Amazon.

Legal Personhood for Rivers

The idea of granting legal rights to natural entities (rivers, forests) — as in the legal personhood of the Whanganui River in New Zealand (2017) or Norway's proposals. A political-ecological gesture that fundamentally renegotiates the human/non-human boundary.

Material Memory Studio in Ecological Context

Material Memory Studio's practice of working with botanical materials, local earth pigments, biomaterials, and alternative photography is situated within this ecological art framework — not as environmental communication, but as material investigation. The studio's interest in the cosmovision of specific places (봉화, Oaxaca, Seoul) connects to a broader tradition of art that understands place as active rather than passive.

References

• Arts as Ecology program — Zurich Art Summer Program (Zdkh), 2024
• Alan Sonfist — Time Landscape, 1965–present, NYC
• Anna L. Tsing — Feral Atlas (2020); The Mushroom at the End of the World
• Bruno Latour — Actor-network theory
• Barbara Matilsky — Art's Fragile Ecologies (1992)