My four-year doctoral project, titled Sustainable yet forgotten. Rediscovering the contribution of the Belgian art networks to the second wave of environmentalism, is the first art theoretical and archival investigation to discover Belgian sustainable environmental art practices created during the sixties until the early eighties.
This time period was selected because the second wave of environmentalism then peaked. This wave saw nature not as the mystic antipode of rational culture but as an important actor that influences our life in system-like environments. Multidisciplinary studies called for nature to be incorporated respectfully in our cultivated environments in order to create milieus in which all involved benefit equally. These studies also influenced numerous countercultures in the Western world. These, in turn, brought modernist-critical theories to the foreground during their protests to safeguard environments from extensive cultivations to monocultures. Sustainable environmental art pictures nature-culture systems and exposes the dangers that occur when the milieu is neglected in a modernizing world.
Answering the question: “What is the contribution of Belgian sustainable environmental art to the second wave of environmentalism?”, provides new insights in how this art was created and perceived in Belgium and how environmental debates and critiques influenced Belgian artists.
To start, I reconstruct the political aware timeframe to discover which environmental discussions typified Belgium. In order to select the practices that are still relevant for today’s debates, I thereafter create an up-to-date framework to re-evaluate past practices of sustainable environmental art. Here, I fall back on the Actor-Network Theory of Bruno Latour and the ideology of landscape commons. Finally, this framework will be used in archival research to investigate and contextualize the most prominent Belgian examples through art critical readings.
At this moment, my cases consist of artists that each have a distinct methodology to investigate and critique modern man’s position in the environment as well as to disseminate sustainable alternatives. That these art practices discuss modern human’s destruction of the environment through an unthoughtful and asocial urbanization is topical for that time. The debate around landscape cultivation is one that occupied many Belgians as policy makers were accused to value the landscape solely as a facilitator for economic profit instead of safeguarding the natural and historical values that foster livability.
