Contemporary Art and Environmental Justice
In this talk, Emily Eliza Scott will share from her book-in-progress on art that traces, and thereby actively attempts to resist, various forms of environmental violence as writ into land, air, and water. In particular, she’ll discuss a 2016 project carried out by the art-activist collective, The Natural History Museum, in collaboration with the Latinx environmental justice group, T.E.J.A.S., which involved a citizen-based air monitoring campaign and related series of tours of the Manchester neighborhood along the Houston Ship Channel in Texas, one of the most noxious petrochemical complexes in the world. This ambitious and hybrid endeavor not only illuminated the starkly unjust scenario of air pollution in a particular (particulate) context as well as its connection to the broader structure of petrocapitalism, but also—in line with the decades-long environmental justice movement to which it was indebted—it envisioned scenarios beyond, or outside of, the present reality.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, New University (NU) Building, Theater 3 (2C-33)
Tuesday 19 September, 18.30-20.00hrs
More lectures in this EHC lecture series Environmental Justice to follow in Fall/Winter 2023.
Emily Eliza Scott is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Environmental Studies at the College of Design / University of Oregon. Herresearch focuses on art and design practices that engage pressing (political) ecological issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. More broadly, she is interested in art and environmental justice, art and activism, critical approaches to the built environment, visual cultures of nature, land-based art from the 1960s-present, institutional critique, and the capacity of art to produce non-instrumental forms of sensing and knowing.
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