The GREEN REVISITED: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures in Art and Research publication (RIXC) was presented by four contributors to the book – Jens Hauser, Rasa Smite, Eva-Maria Lopez and Adam Brown at the KIT Faculty of Architecture, Institute for Art and Architectural History (Karlsruhe) on Tuesday, July 11, 2023 at 19:00.
Hardly any term is as omnipresent, paradoxical and ambiguous as ‘green’. In art, architecture, politics and the natural sciences, naturalness and artificiality, the healthy and the toxic, the hoped-for and the lost oscillate. ‘Green’ is at once a natural and technical color, and with its ambivalent status a powerful discursive tool. The publication GREEN REVISITED presents a wide-ranging collage of artistic research from the EU project of the same name.
Jens Hauser brings ‘Greenness Studies’ into play as a transdisciplinary Studium Generale in order to make the ambivalence of ‘green’ as the most anthropocentric of all colors fruitful for knowledge transfer between the humanities and the natural sciences, beyond simplistic metaphorics. Rasa Smite presents research and immersive media art allowing for experiencing all those complex communication processes that take place atmospherically in a forest in times of climate change. Eva-Maria Lopez reflects on practices of artistic-critical horticulture and ornamental landscape architecture with herbicide-resistant plants – I Never Promised You a Green Garden! And Adam Brown produces arsenic-containing pigments in his neo-alchemical live lab, a reminder that green in art ironically often represented nature and vegetation with the most toxic of colors.
The event explicitly aimed to foster dialogue between disciplines and debates on how to address man-made systemic failures beyond the desire for symbolic ‘green’ hypercompensation.
The KIT Art History Department’s student council provided the setting and the catering.
Discussion/round table:
Jens Hauser, Professor, Institute for Art and Architectural History, KIT
Rasa Smite, Professor and Artist, Liepaja University, FHNW Basel, RIXC Riga
Eva Maria Lopez, artist, Karlsruhe
Adam Brown, Professor & Artist, Michigan State University
Organized by KIT in cooperation with RIXC Center for New Media Culture, OU\ /ERT Paris, supported by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.
More information:
https://www.arch.kit.edu/aktuelles
https://rixc.org/en/home___/0/998