Everyone agrees: in the face of the dramatic effects of the climate crisis, art should urgently act, filling the voids left by politics and governments. But what kind of responses are required from art? And through which strategies can we engage aesthetically with the climate crisis?
Here, the answers vary widely. For some, aesthetics—as a form of sensory, embodied engagement—should foster a participatory experience that reconciles us with nature. It should enhance awareness of ecological values, allowing us to recognize the beauty of nature and, in turn, the need to preserve it. Others, however, warn against the risks of idealizing nature as pristine and pure, as a kind of salvific elsewhere. They instead advocate for a more unsettling, disturbing and aggressive aesthetic that resists romanticization.
Some argue that the climate crisis is, in itself, an aesthetic problem: it transcends time and space— those categories that Kant, in his transcendental aesthetics, identified as the a priori conditions of sensibility. Climate change, in this view, is an “hyperobject”, eluding our perceptual and cognitive frameworks. The task of art, then, is to provide a sensitive and affective access to this elusive phenomenon. Other authors, following Donna Haraway, argue that what we need most is a speculative aesthetics—one that imagines alternative futures and creates new narrative tools to shape our world and our relationships with non-human beings.
In the first, theoretical part of the seminar, we will engage with texts by a variety of authors (such as Berleant, Morton, Haraway, and Bennett), presenting and discussing key approaches within ecological aesthetics. The second part of the seminar, including student presentations and contributions, will connect these theoretical positions to artistic practices. We will explore how artists working across various media—literature, film, installation, AI—develop and embody ecological aesthetics. Finally, in the third part, the students will realize their own artistic project and present it during the final “Open Atelier” of the Spring Shool.
NOTE:
This course includes an attendance phase in Weimar from March 12 to March 21, 2026.
