L’artista ecologista

In our age, marked by growing anxiety over a world that is disappearing and by the sense of living in a state of permanent crisis, ecology represents a frontier of possibility, drawing on intelligence, attentiveness, care and creativity. The term, initially technical and academic, has now become ‘branched out’, coming to encompass movements of resistance and regeneration.
Filipa Ramos, tracing the history of the divide between humanity and the environment, tells us of artists who have centred their work on ecological issues, offering transformative proposals. Before them, in the 1960s, a number of pioneers – Joseph Beuys, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, Joan Jonas – used various artistic languages to raise public awareness, anticipating the most recent generations.
In these pages we read of attempts to interact with seal pups, of spiders displayed in a museum as masterpieces, of the revival of pastoral traditions and of river journeys to rediscover forgotten sounds. We learn to respect the enigmatic nature of certain peoples, that right to privacy all too often violated by the colonial gaze. And above all, we learn to move beyond our outrage at the state to which we have reduced our planet and to start afresh with those – such as Britta Marakatt-Labba, Tomás Saraceno, Eduardo Navarro, Pierre Huyghe or Tabita Rezaire – who are at the forefront of the fight against the devastation of the Earth.