New publication: Artistic Practices as Environmental Research
- 3 hours ago
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Publication of a new chapter by Looking Forward’s founding director, Carolina Lio-Rodrigues, in Sustainable Design, Art, and Innovation: A New Paradigm on Creative Practice, published by Springer and edited by Muhammad Nawaz Tunio, Hasim Altan, Shlagha Agarwal and Marina Checa Olivas.
“Artistic Practices as Environmental Research: Designing and Implementing Public Engagement for Sustainability” explores how socially engaged art can operate not simply as commentary on the climate crisis, but as a form of environmental research: creating spaces for experimentation, generating ecological knowledge, bringing together different forms of expertise, and contributing to longer-term processes of environmental and social change.
Drawing on Carolina’s curatorial work with Looking Forward and Visible (the international platform developed by Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and Fondazione Zegna), the chapter focuses on three projects working across marine, agricultural and wetland ecologies:
CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones by Cooking Sections, which rethinks food systems and aquaculture on the Isle of Skye through regenerative approaches to marine ecologies.
Casa delle Agriculture, co-led by Luigi Coppola in Castiglione d’Otranto, Puglia, where agroecology, cultural practice and community organising come together to regenerate abandoned farmland, biodiversity and rural knowledge.
Field Hospital / Field Kitchens by Andrew Merritt, curated and produced by Looking Forward: a transdisciplinary project bringing together art, archaeology, ecological research, food and local knowledge to investigate landscapes affected by long-term processes of extraction and environmental degradation.
Across these different contexts, the chapter argues for understanding socially engaged artistic practices as living laboratories: spaces where artists work alongside scientists, farmers, local communities, policymakers and cultural organisations to test alternative ways of inhabiting, restoring and caring for damaged environments.
The research also considers the role cultural institutions can play in this process, not only by presenting environmental work, but also by supporting long-term alliances, public participation, ecological knowledge, and new forms of shared responsibility.
The chapter is published in Springer’s Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation series.
Curators and other art colleagues can request a free PDF copy of the chapter by email us at hello@lookingforward.online.
