Open Call for The Sixth International Scientific Conference of the Chair of Theoretical Studies UL ALUO

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

The Sixth International Scientific Conference of the Chair of Theoretical Studies UL ALUO
Between Eco-Agitprop and the Aesthetization of Environmental Ethics?: the Role of Visual Art Practices in the Thematization of Environmental and Climate Change

On 24 September 2025 in Ljubljana, the Chair of Theoretical Studies UL ALUO is organizing the Sixth Scientific Conference on the role of visual art practices in the thematization of environmental and climate change, which will be international for the first time this year.

Starting point

“One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” (McKibben, 2005)

In his 2005 text “What the world needs now is art, sweet art”, environmental activist Bill McKibben reflected on the (lack of) representation of the topic of climate change in the arts in his text and offered several reasons why this was (at the time) the case. Although much has changed in the last twenty years, some of the reasons he provided in the oft-quoted text remain relevant for current thinking about climate change in the context of visual artistic practices (fine art, visual art, intermedia and new media of art, design, architecture). McKibben argues that climate change is most often perceived as a context, a backdrop – beyond natural disasters and certain natural phenomena (representations of which are relatively abundant in the history of art), we hardly experience it as a spectacle or an event but more so as an appropriate starting point for an impressive aesthetic presentation. If any visual representation of climate change manages to make a lasting impression, it is most often in the form of a juxtaposition of images showing the situation “before” and “after”, argue J.M. Ledgard and Alastair Smart, referring to McKibben: “Climate change isn’t evocative enough to get pulses racing. It has no clear narrative or villain. […] These are also highly complex matters: from estimating the nature, extent, pace and location of weather shifts, to what action to take on a political, economic and legal level, as well as locally, nationally and internationally. Without fully understanding these issues, one wonders what artists really have to contribute (beyond eco-agitprop).” (Ledgard and Smart, 2017)

Ever since the approval of the resolution on the declaration of climate and environmental emergency and joining the global initiative of universities for transitioning towards a zero-carbon world by UL ALUO in 2021, the topic of ecology and climate change has become an important subject of artistic, design, and scientific research at ALUO. This has included the participation of the Department of Industrial Design at the XXII. Triennial in Milan, the monograph Echoes of Tomorrow (Lašič Jurković, ed. 2024), the International Summer School Green Nudge, and the recent conferences by the Chair of Theoretical Studies UL ALUO.

In the broader field of art research in the humanities, the topic has a longer pedigree, particularly in literature studies, where, beginning in the 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of ecocriticism and environmental literary criticism has focused on the connection between literary works and the physical environment. In dialogue with related critical-theoretical research approaches, the contributions in this new field in first phase focused on works belonging to the literary canon and on complementing the literary canon from an ecological perspective. In this process, a large part of literary ecocriticism—in dialogue with postcolonial studies—has built a conceptual apparatus for analysing particular literary works, where the main focus is on spatial categories (place, space, environment, the relation between the local and the global, etc.), which are established through the construction of literary worlds. (Jurša, 2013) Worth highlighting in this context are the contributions of T. Morton; in his book Ecology without Nature (2007), for example, he proposed the notion of ambient poetics, thus establishing a foundation for the analysis of the formal-aesthetic aspects of artworks, or the ways in which art can contribute to an awareness of the interconnectedness of human and non-human entities that make up our environment. But as soon as we attempt to apply such a conceptual apparatus to the various fields of visual art, a question arises: is it too broad to be suitable for analysing works of visual art, whose common characteristic, in contrast to other artistic domains, is how fundamentally they are defined by space and spatial aspects?

The themes of ecology, environment, and climate change are addressed in an entirely different way in the context of contemporary environmental philosophy and ethics. As shown by Luc Ferry in his book The New Ecological Order, the current tendencies in these fields come up against the fundamental question of “whether the only legal subject is man, or whether, on the contrary, legal status should extend to what is today called the ‘biosphere’ or the ‘ecosphere,’ formerly known as the ‘cosmos.’” (1995, xix) In the book, Ferry puts under particular scrutiny the epistemological and ontological premises of certain key tendencies in the field of contemporary ecological theory and politics, identifying on the one hand a shallow/reformist ecology rooted in a romantic notion of nature where concern for the environment is fundamentally a concern for one’s own “quality of life”. He also, however, detects a position of “deep ecology”, which questions the very foundations of the Western-cultural democratic (legal) order, which is based on the notion of human freedom, that is, the essential antinaturalness of man. It would appear that a direct application of political and ethical positions thus defined to the field of visual art practices automatically presupposes that artworks are considered as embodiments of knowledge or even as a set of propositions or propositional statements. In short, very general questions are indirectly raised about what kind of knowledge/knowing is conveyed by visual art/artworks, what the relationship is between art practices/works, perception, and cognition, and above all how ethical issues can be linked to the aesthetic and sensual language, whether it is about establishing the conditions of sensory perception, representation, awareness-raising, or the construction of so-called environmental imaginaries.

Invited to the conference are research papers that critically address current definitions of the role of visual art practices in the thematization of ecology, environmental, and climate change from the perspective of different disciplines engaging in art and design. The themes we propose to address include, but are not limited to:

– art-historically complementing the national/regional fine/visual art and design canon from the perspective of ecocriticism and environmental and climate change; the history of national/regional exhibitions featuring environmentally engaged fine/visual art and design (exhibition history); (critical) thematization of what is currently one of the few examples of a comprehensive examination of regional ecocritical art – The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (Fowkes, 2015);

– contemporary analyses of visual art practices from the standpoint of degrowth rhetoric, which is arguably detectable in avant-garde affirmations of laziness, monotony, and repetition (Pranjić and Purg, 2023); in recent years, this position has perhaps been more prominent in those fields that are more closely linked to the logic of the capitalist mode of production, for example in the field of industrial design (see Fry, 2020);

– visual art practices in relation to the expansion of anthropocentric optics to space and time: a critique of ecomimesis (Morton), the ethics of longtermism, the visualization of long-term changes and processes – the so-called deep time, representation of the planetary perspective in visual art practices and design;

– the link between visual art practices and philosophy of nature;

– material ecocriticism and new materialisms.

We invite interested researchers to submit proposals for 20-minute presentations in Slovenian or English featuring the title, an abstract (maximum 300 words) and a short biography (maximum 50 words). Interested doctoral students are invited to apply to the call for conference posters with the title and abstract of their doctoral research (maximum 300 words) and a short biography (maximum 50 words). The deadline for submissions is 13 August 2025 and they are to be sent to kaja.kraner@aluo.uni-lj.si

Timeline:

• Deadline for abstract and short biography: 13 August 2025
  (length of abstract: max. 300 words; length of biography: max. 50 words).
• Deadline for conference poster submission: 5 September 2025.
• An invitation featuring the conference programme will be published in early September.
• Conference: 24 September 2025 in Ljubljana, the duration of individual presentations is 20 min.

New: call for doctoral students – posters

• As a new initiative, we are launching a call for conference posters addressed at doctoral students enrolled in the interdisciplinary doctoral programme Humanities and Social Sciences (Fine Arts Studies) at UL ALUO. The students are asked to present their doctoral research topics in the form of a poster while keeping close to the theme of this year’s scientific conference.
• Students with posters should be present at the conference so that they will be able to provide additional explanations regarding their posters to the interested public in person. The posters will be on display throughout the conference and will also be published in the conference proceedings.
• Deadline for conference poster submission: 5 September 2025
• Format: pdf
• The final print size will be: w: 70 cm, h: 100 cm
• The official languages are English and Slovenian.
• Technical instructions

Registration fee: Conference attendance is free of charge.

Publications: A booklet with abstracts of the papers and short presentations of the participants will be published to accompany the conference. Proofreading of abstracts and booklet graphic design will be provided. Conference proceedings featuring the scientific papers and posters based on the contributions will be published next year. The deadline for submission of papers for publication in the proceedings is February 2026.

Contact: Kaja Kraner (kaja.kraner@aluo.uni-lj.si)

Lead Organization: University of Ljubljana, Academy of Fine Arts and Design

The scientific conference is a result of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme in Humanities and Social Sciences in the field of Fine Art Studies, and the research programme P5-0452 Visual Literacy, both conducted at the University of Ljubljana, Academy of Fine Arts and Design. The research programme is co-financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS).