Immaterial Ecologies: book exhibition

Joining the program Immaterial Ecologies, presenting by Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) under the curatorship of Alejandro Alonso Díaz (fluent) and Rita Fabiana (CAM), the Art Library suggests a selection of titles from its collection.

The book exhibition aims to encourage discovery, research and critical reflection on themes that analyses the relationship between the arts and nature with environmental conditions, sustainability and, equally, to help “think extractive practices beyond their material meaning, creating a space for sharing and discussing immaterial and invisible dimensions that allow us to imagine other possible worlds”.

This bibliographical selection is divided into two parts.

The first part concentrates on titles by the participants in the program Immaterial Ecologies such as Emanuele Coccia, Rita Natálio, Michael Marder and Denise Ferreira da Silva – Ana Hatherly and Lourdes Castro. It is a set of works that crosses various disciplines and artistic practices, with aesthetic and theoretical approaches that have been the object of reflection of philosophers, artists, poets, scientists and landscape architects from various continents, seeking “the sharing of invisible forms of knowledge and relationship with the world, based on non-productivist, indigenous, matriarchal, queer, peasant and plant-oriented ontologies”, as written by Alejandro Alonso Díaz and Rita Fabiana in the presentation text of Immaterial Ecologies.

The second part presents a selection of works that have been published since the end of the last decade of the 20th century, with different perspectives of issues related to Nature, Ecology and Sustainability in the fields of visual arts, architecture and landscape architecture, design, and urbanism.

With this thematic bibliography, the Art Library also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in June 1972 in Stockholm. Under the theme “One Earth”, the Stockholm Conference was the first global awareness of the urgency of political and economic measures to harmonize the relationship of human communities with the environment, at a time when large-scale exploitation of the planet’s natural resources was already threatening its survival.