Forest Encounters Symposium, 1 December 2023, Ljubljana
The lecture is followed by a short conversation between Giovanni Aloi, Urška Jurman, and Mateja Kurir.
In his talk, Giovanni Aloi explores the relationship between the forest and loss as envisioned in art across time. In Renaissance paintings, forests regularly figure as a backdrop and reminder of the darkness lurking at the edges of reason. In contrast, the well-lit human characters in the foreground embody human rationality. The nature versus culture dichotomy is thus subliminally reinforced by beautiful images that - in terms of perspective - place the human being at the centre of the cosmos. For centuries, the metaphorical and actual impenetrability of the forest in Western art has intertwined in representations designed to remind us (or convince us) that we do not belong in nature, that we left it a long time ago, and that the forest essentially is a place of loss in the sense of losing our way, our faith, our sanity, our life.
Drawing on the work of artists as radically diverse as Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Wifredo Lam, and Abel Rodríguez, Aloi explores the different ways in which artists engage with forests as sites of remembrance and recovery rather than of loss and mourning. In order to foreground an awareness of the fragility and resilience of vegetal ecosystems in the face of human intervention, Aloi focuses on a work entitled Sildewalk Forests created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña in the 1980s.
GIOVANNI ALOI, PhD, is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Currently Aloi is lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He is also the author of many books, including: Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020), and Estado Vegetal (2023). Aloi has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe. He currently is US correspondent for Esse Magazine and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.
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The symposium was organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in collaboration with Mateja Kurir and Polonca Lovšin, and with the support of the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC Švicarija).
Co-funded by the European Union, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia.
Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
18 сен 2024
