Today’s interdisciplinary understanding of ecology articulates a web of relations that goes way beyond ‘environmentalism’. Likewise, contemporary art is a radically diversified field, concerned with processes as varied as corporate politics, urban planning, agriculture, tourism, or ethnic justice.
Accompanying the first year of the RSA’s Arts & Ecology programme, this compendium of essays, dialogues and commissioned projects by artists, ecologists, cultural theorists, activists and curators explores art’s varied modes of response to notions of territory, the Earth and the emergencies of 21st century. In part a genealogy of ‘land’ and what has been understood by ‘the environment’ since the 1960s the publication proposes and tests if and how our conceptions of art and artists are relevant to a global debate about the future of the planet, and where, how and why art might operate.