Art, Ecologies, Infrastructures

This cluster brings together faculty expertise in art and material culture that engages with ecology, environment, systems, and habitat, to develop new ways of thinking about art history through ecological and infrastructural approaches. It takes a broad social and intersectional perspective on ecological art histories, while foregrounding infrastructure as a method for interrogating the material, political, and symbolic intersections of human-built systems and natural environments. This approach attends to the ways in which infrastructure shapes relations—between bodies, technologies, environments, and institutions—and offers a lens through which to examine ecological entanglements, extractive histories, and power dynamics.

The Art, Ecologies, Infrastructures research cluster proposes a set of questions that are both historical and methodological and that engage art and material culture across different chronologies and geographies:

What does it mean to undertake an infrastructural approach to art history and what potential does it have to challenge existing art historical, institutional, conservation, or curatorial paradigms? How does an infrastructural approach intersect with other ecological and decolonial imperatives in art history?

How have artists engaged critically with infrastructures and the relationalities that they engender? How have these practices informed research, writing and curating?

What insight can art history bring to infrastructures of resistance—whether by supporting alternative systems, subverting dominant ones, or prefiguring new social imaginaries and collaborative systems?