Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam

What does it mean to do environmental humanities with or through the arts? This online event brings together researchers and practitioners working at this intersection.

Environmental humanities has long engaged with art as both a practice and a framework that challenges the boundary between aesthetic and analytical knowledge-making. What does it mean to do environmental humanities with or through the arts? This online event brings together researchers and practitioners working at this intersection. It is organized by the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, in collaboration with the EHC Amsterdam, the University of Bristol, and Stavanger Art Museum. 

The speakers are: 

Bergit Arends, Royal Holloway University of London & University of Bristol
“Curatorial and performance-based research and the story of The Flying Qajaq”

I will discuss the curatorial process for setting up the performance-based research residency ‘Oceanic Connections’ taken up by artist Jessie Kleemann (Denmark/Greenland) as part of the collaboration between the National Maritime Museum, London (UK), and CoastARTS, a multinational project. The focus of ‘Oceanic Connections’ is to develop environment-related and performance-based artistic expressions through a research residency. In the residency period, artists, communities, curators and knowledge agents come together to recognize and to narrate new ways of existence and interactions with coastal environments. Together we seek to imagine new approaches to understanding the interconnection between human cultures and the diversity of ecosystems. 

More specifically we are focusing on the Arctic, an environment that is changing fast, disrupting cultures and ecological systems. How can these changes be addressed? Arctic Indigenous and locally-based knowledge is critical in addressing the environmental and cultural crisis. How can we recognize and narrate new ways of existence and interactions with coastal environments and formulate new human responses to the environmental crisis? At the example of the ‘Oceanic Connections’ case study I will describe how we work together to retrieve, to mobilise and to shape new forms of environmental knowledge in relation to the dynamics of coastal zones.”

Jeff Diamanti, University of Amsterdam / Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
“Bring Back Summer Camp: Field Theory and Eco-Literacy in the Environmental Humanities”

This presentation will reflect on insights gathered from facilitating three arts and science research residences in the context of energy and logistical infrastructures and the ecologies in which they are embedded: FieldARTS 2022; Critical Raw Cartographies 2024; and the Energy Literacy summer school at E-Werk Luckenwalde, 2025. With particular attention to the arts of noticing and the aesthetics of counter-logistics, I will offer examples of the unique affordances of conducing this collaborative field work for both critical research and pedagogy in the environmental humanities. 

Finn Arne Jørgensen, University of Stavanger
“Tuning to Place: Rephotography and the Exchange between Art and Science”

Rephotography — returning to a past photographer’s exact vantage point and repeating the photographs they took — has never belonged to art or science alone. Its modern history begins in 1889 with Sebastian Finsterwalder’s photogrammetric survey of the Vernagtferner glacier, as a measurement technique. In 1977, Mark Klett, who trained as a geologist, reopened it as artistic inquiry through the Rephotographic Survey Project, which re-read the nineteenth-century American survey photographs as aesthetic compositions and as evidence of ecological change. 

This talk traces the exchange between art and science through four rephotographic sets: Finsterwalder’s Vernagtferner, Klett’s Pyramid Lake, the USGS Grinnell Glacier pairs, and Peter Funch’s rephotographs of Mount Shuksan postcards. I will argue that rephotography’s distinctive value lies in tuning: an embodied alignment with a past photographer’s vantage point in a specific place. Knowledge made this way is always situated knowledge of somewhere specific, made by someone standing there. In the presentation, I will draw on my own fieldwork in Sørmarka, near Stavanger, as one instance in that tradition. In conclusion, I will argue that doing environmental humanities through the arts, such as in rephotography, is less about borrowing aesthetic techniques than about letting disciplined and embodied looking become itself a way of making historical and ecological knowledge.

Estela Gonzalez Lopez, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
“Thinking with Care: Reimagining Caring for Trees at the Intersection Between the Environmental Humanities and Artistic Practices”

In the city of Amsterdam, the complex position of trees reveals tensions amongst residents and governmental workers due to differing views on what constitutes “practices of caring” for or about urban trees. While governmental “practices of care” translate into “maintenance work”, these practices entangle with affective and material relations between trees and residents.

In this context, the project Zaailingen van West (Seedlings of West), composed by the art collective de Onkruidenier, philosopher Chris Julien, artists Tessa Hendriks and Frouwkje Smit and Yehudi van de Pol, seeks to create an artistic and ecological monument in Erasmuspark, composed of artworks and nursery trees planted by residents, thus fostering “care” as a common material and affective responsibility. As an intern to the collective, my contribution centred on exploring the tensions and imaginaries surrounding the project through the lens of “care”, following Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s work Matters of Care (2017). Lastly, my personal contribution to the event will share more about Seedlings of West along with methods and experiences as an EH scholar working with an art collective.

Mitch Turnbull, University of Bristol
“Sonic Entanglement and Ecological Citizenship: Lessons from the Listen to Bristol Feasibility Study” 

What happens when people are invited not simply to learn about urban nature, but to listen to it, record it and be part of creatively reworking it? This presentation shares findings from Listen to Bristol, a feasibility study exploring how sound-based methods might foster nature connectedness and ecological citizenship in an underrepresented Bristol community. In a co-designed workshop in Bristol’s BS5 neighbourhood, participants used simple digital recording tools to notice, identify and capture the sonic presence of birds, other urban wildlife and their wider sound environment, before sampling these recordings into a collective musical piece. The mixed methods study found early but persuasive signals of change: participants described broader positive emotional responses to nature, a slightly stronger perceived relationship with the natural world, more nuanced understanding of ecological citizenship and greater intention to adopt accessible, shareable pro-environmental practices. Qualitative responses revealed how participants began to describe ecological relations not only in terms of food chains or coexistence, but through rhythm, harmony and integration. This points towards sonic entanglement as a useful frame for the next research phase: a way of understanding how noticing and listening can bring human and more-than-human relations into felt awareness and translate that awareness into everyday civic practice with the potential to become the basis for ecological citizenship.