European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes

Erratum

Marco Malvestio — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Introduction: Aesthetics of the Anthropocene 2

Pierpaolo Ascari, Andrea Borsari — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

On the Aesthetics of the Anthropocene: The Sublime and beyond – other Concepts and Forms of Visualizations

Andrea Borsari — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

There are many connections that link the aesthetic sphere to the set of phenomena that are encompassed by the general definition of “Anthropocene”. Among them, there are two that are explored in this contribution. On the one hand, it is a matter of getting to the bottom of the relationship between the conceptual heritage of the aesthetic-philosophical tradition and its metaphorical variants with the thematic core of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, it is a matter of ascertaining how this process intertwines and interferes with the forms of visualization of the “human epoch” and thereby conditions the possible reactions that descend from such representations. Finally, to conclude with a tentative assessment of the possibilities of countervisualization and lines of research within the conceptual field of aesthetics for a different rendering of relations with phenomena linked to the notion of the Anthropocene.

“Nature that Takes Back it Spaces”: when Architecture Teaches how to Trace Roots. A Conversation with Carlo Ratti

Aurosa Alison — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Today, the definition of the Anthropocene is still very complex. Indeed, it isn't easy to illustrate a concept with many aspects. It is attractive, however, to understand how to interpret the human impact on the environment, and the concrete design of architecture can do so much to this end. In this contribution, I would offer an authentic and sensitive conversation with one of the most concrete architects on the international scene. I like to define Carlo Ratti as a "concrete" architect. Ratti's anthropocentric aspect is not only related to his design projects. His concept of the architectural project strongly represents the future part of the environmental system. How, more and more, the approach to the sensitivity and phenomenology of the present is the central aspect to be understood as a starting point to read future elements. In this regard, an architect creates a warning for the future generations who will inhabit the earth.

Abysses and Ghosts. Remarks for a Discourse on Anthropocene Hyper-Aesthetics

Stefano Ascari — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In reflecting on a possible aesthetic of the Anthropocene, it seems spontaneous to refer first of all to the figurative and visual outcomes that have been produced within the specific reflection on the topic or at least traditionally associated with the representation of global climate change. Just as the definition of Anthropocene has been widely questioned both from a terminological and chronological point of view, the visual contents in fact (well represented by the 2018 exhibition "Anthropocene: Burtynsky, Baichwal, de Pencier") turn out to be partial and in some cases misleading. They are in fact representative, at most, of one of the possible discourses on the aesthetics of the Anthropocene. In order to articulate the theme better and insert these results in a more effective and broader framework, it is necessary to retrace the history of those images and integrate this narrative heritage with aesthetics generated, even if only apparently, outside the context traditionally referred to the Anthropocene.

Perceiving the Anthropocene as a Public Health Risk via Visual Culture

Daniel A. Finch-Race — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

There is widespread scientific and cultural evidence that Earth’s planetary boundaries are being exceeded in irreparable ways due to unsustainable behavior in the Global North’s resource-hungry nations in particular, but responsiveness to the climate crisis is still lagging in many parts of the world. It has become clear that significant numbers of people have limited engagement with ecological risks accumulating on a scale much bigger than the micro-level human actions causing them, such as the day-to-day build-up of industrial pollutants including nitrogen dioxide. How best to go about galvanizing socially just degrowth in the face of barriers to individual commitment that range from a sense of powerlessness to disinterest in futures-thinking? Given the extent to which a preoccupation with wellbeing spans walks of life across the globe, it is worth considering the motivational power of understanding ecological dangers in terms of the potential for personal harm. With that end in mind, this article fleshes out an artistically and emotionally oriented approach to the totalizing extractivism of the Anthropocene as a source of public health problems, not least the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anthropocene as Energy Imaginaries: Fossil Culture between Industrial Revolution and Ecological Crisis

Jaime Vindel — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This essay proposes a reading of the Anthropocene from the reconstruction of the energy imaginaries at the beginning of industrial civilisation. The transformations that took place in the energy matrix of productive processes, with the new social and geographical organisation of work derived from the use of fossil fuels, had their correlate in the appearance of a series of discourses and images with a strong ideological component. The emergence of thermodynamic science, based on the observation of the processes of energy transformation, was underpinned by narratives oriented to boost the denigration of subjects who resisted integration into the productive devices of the industrial world. These imaginaries contributed to naturalise a certain worldview, where the universe was assimilated to an immense repository of energy at the service of the West civilisational project, where the development of industry should guarantee the production of exponential wealth. In this context, the imaginaries of energy contributed to constituting a new socio-environmental relationship that, for the last two centuries, has conditioned the cultural development of fossil modernity, while generating eco-systemic effects that are at the origin of the climate crisis.

The Currency of the Anthropocene. Dismantling the Theological Presupposition of Neoliberalism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

Andrea Righi — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This essay analyzes Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest Sci-fi novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020), by focusing on key narrative elements developed in the text that offer solutions to our current climate crisis. Although fictional, these ideas are theoretically relevant because they challenge the current symbolic system of neoliberalism based on a sacrificial economy and a notion of transcendence that demands the infinite accumulation of surplus value. In particular, I examine the import of Robinson’s argument regarding the need for political representation of future generations through the creation of an ad hoc intragovernmental branch (the above-mentioned Ministry of the title of his novel) and a new understanding of value based on the concept of the Carbon Coin reward system.

Penetrating Planets: Schelling and the Anthrobscene

Francesco Di Maio — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In this paper I will analyze the early recurrences of the concept of Anthrobscene, as proposed in media studies by Jussi Parikka, in the aesthetics of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, as advanced especially in “On the Relationship of the Plastic Arts to Nature” of 1807. This work is established within the broader debate on the concept of Anthropocene, which, as known, identifies the human being as the main cause of impact on the Earth system in the era we are living. In the first part, I will introduce this concept in a critical way, to then compare it, in the second part, to the elements of Schellingian thought relevant to this debate. Finally, in the last part, after briefly explaining the new conceptual elements embedded in the term ‘Anthrobscene’, I will analyze Shelling’s Rede of 1807, in order to reclaim his aesthetics as properly anthrobscenic.

The Form of Happiness. Some Remarks on Art, Mimesis and Technology in the Wake of Adorno’s Conception of Natural Beauty

Rolando Vitali — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The article investigates the relationship between the concepts of mimesis, technology and art in Adorno, in the light of some epistemological implications of the Anthropocene. In order to do so, it starts from the problematic concept of natural beauty, by showing its internal dialectic between social and natural moments. Then, an interpretation of the work of art is proposed, which identifies its natural moment in the peculiar kind of productive praxis that takes place within it. Art in this sense is a mimetic technology that does not only imitate art as an object, but also imitates the productive process of nature. Finally, on the basis of this mimetic moment, the article analyses the emancipatory potential of art, interpreted as a form of transformative praxis, which modifies the relationship between technology and nature.

The Assemblage as Aesthetic Place. A Reading between Aesthetics and the Anthropocene of The Mushroom at the End of the World

Ivano Gorzanelli — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The text proposes an interpretation of the category of assemblage starting from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's reflection in The Mushroom at the End of the World. The hypothesis we suggest is that through the theoretical figure of assemblage, as image, place, concept, space of livability, Tsing along the multi-voiced itinerary of her text deconstructs the linearity and compactness of certain landscape histories. In doing so, Tsing resorts both to a precise and pointed critique of the idea of progress - especially thanks to W. Benjamin - as well as the search for a modelling of the landscape that has above all in the indeterminate and in chance encounters the reasons for its being. In Tsing's text, the assemblage becomes both the concrete experience of a place and a way of observing that allows an aesthetic reading and a critique of Landscape and cultural heritage to be combined.

Soil of Enterprises. A Critical-Historical Analysis

Federico Diodato — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In France, from the 1960s onwards, a tool for productive territorial planning was put into place: the Zone d’Activité Économique (ZAE). As sites reserved for the establishing of enterprises within a given perimeter, outside inhabited centres, ZAEs have since grown steadily and become one of the major factors responsible for the peri-urbanisation of the French territory. Their impact on soil artificialisation and the fragmentation of agricultural land forces us today to question their ability for a sustainable development of the territory. After introducing the ZAEs, the paper will propose a "territorialist approach", which aims to establish a synergistic relationship between production and local resources. In this perspective, it is necessary to return to local development systems: forms of development rooted in endogenous characteristics and territorial specificities that focus their specificities on the production of sustainable and perennial wealth. What is the role of the soil in these practices? Can the soil be considered the ‘active operator’ of productive processes, a heritage to be maintained and valued within the economic process?

Landscape in Transition. The Agency of Time in Understanding and Representing the Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Gianni Lobosco, Lorenzo Tinti — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This contribution examines the representation of landscape temporal scale as a driver for landscape design and planning, questioning the univocal relationship between human and environmental processes, both from an aesthetic and procedural point of view. The aim of controlling and measuring the physical space by representing it has progressively evolved into an attempt to narrate the dynamic, ecological and social interactions that characterize its change in order to aesthetically penetrate the reality of objects that ontologically withdraw from us. Design directions can be developed from the quantification and representation of environmental time-based processes and directed towards future-oriented landscape transformations strategies and imagery. Among these perspectives, this essay interweaves the concepts of time and space, exploring how this merging represent a prerequisite for landscape designers, and a necessary exercise for students, in order to critically address design practices within the context of landscapes in transition.

Aesthetics of the Anthropocene and Social Representations. A Case Study on Venice’ Exceptional High Tides in November 2019

Zeno Mutton — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This research investigates the social representations of exceptional high tides occurred in Venice (Italy) between 12^th and 18^th November 2019 through the analysis of YouTube contents. Those events could be considered as a local manifestation of Anthropocene, and therefore could be linked to its representations. Moreover, after a summary of aesthetic literature on Anthropocene, this research aims at considering how aesthetics contribute to the definition of social representation of exceptional high tides. Twenty-nine YouTube videos were collected and analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. The results show that there are several intersections between aesthetics of Anthropocene and social representations of the event analyzed, with particular concern for themes “sublime” and “future as a threat”, and their relation to attribution of responsibility processes. These findings reflect an elaboration of the event based on aestheticization and trends of “deresponsibilization”.

Rebranding Athens as the Creative City of European South. The Contribution of Documenta 14. A Critical Approach

Styliani Bolonaki — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The following article presents a very brief review of the impact of the art institution Documenta on the Athenian urban environment aims to give an answer to the question of how and why the art exhibition “Learning from Athens” gained such popularity in urban and economic developers, locally and globally, that has not yet led to enough critical discussion on the cultural, and political researchers. The article approaches two views on this impact. One linked to the Athenian urban ruins of the Greek economic recession through which emerged a new (exotic) touristic destination to the European periphery. And the other linked to the politics of the Creative City which function as the main strategy of the present Athens cultural-led gentrification including heritage and planning politics, real estate, touristic, entertainment, and creative industries. The article is setting up a number of important questions to cultural and political researchers about city rebrand processes and the generated change and innovation produced; the social inequalities in particular.

Ecosemiotics of the City. Designing the Post-Anthropocene

Nicola Zengiaro — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

The city was thought as the place of culture, a boundary of separation from the wilderness. Recently, ecosemiotics has shown that every kind of space is a habitat for those who survive in it. Thanks to a semiotic reading of the city, especially the urban park, we will try to deconstruct the opposition between nature and culture. Moving beyond this dualism it means to intersect every form of life that make up the city. This essay will attempt to rethink our time in a multi-species project aimed at the post-Anthropocene. Along this path we will try to imagine a posthuman that can survive the catastrophe. In the proposal we will see what can be done to live together with non-humans. For this reason we must think a new space for a peacefully coexistence. The ultimate question is: is it possible project the city by the relation between human and non-human? In the conclusion we will ask: is it possible to live as a holobiont?