This panel (subtitled: “Re-imagining Human-Nonhuman Relations through Drawing, Film, Relational Art, and Sculpture”) was organised by Dr Nicola Grobler and Dr Matthias Pauwels at the inaugural conference of the Southern African Society of Environmental Philosophy (SASEP) at the Krüger National Park’s Skukuza Camp.

Presentations:

Marili de Weerdt (Vega School): “Making Conversation: Surface Encounters and Material Exchanges Between an Artist and a Tree.”

Cow Mash (Tshwane University of Technology): “Plastic Kraals and Woman Cows: An Ecofeminist Exploration of Selected Sculptural Work.”

Chantelle Gray (North-West University/ICE): “White God: Rethinking Human and Nonhuman Subjectivities through Underdog-Superhero Narratives and Ahuman Theory.”

Nicola Grobler (University of Pretoria): “Encouraging Multispecies Sociability Through Art: Anthropomorphism in The Visitor Centre.”

Panel description:

In addressing contemporary environmental issues and challenges, scientific and technological approaches are clearly dominant and prioritised. However, since the environmental crisis also importantly involves a crisis of the imagination, artistic approaches should be given more prominence and recognition. Ongoing contributions by artists range from creating tangible, embodied experiences of the often intractable environmental processes informing climate change, raising awareness of our profound dependency on other life-forms, to exposing and renegotiating dominant cultural attitudes toward nature, and re-imagining different relationships between human and nonhuman beings.

This panel will specifically focus on the latter operation and thematic, and the ways they have been taken up in philosophical-aesthetic and artistic-creative work in South Africa. Covering diverse art genres such as relational art, collaborative drawing, sculpture, and film, the panel’s four presentations interrogate human exceptionalism whilst creatively appraising possibilities for stretching and re-imagining human-devised categories and practices. In doing so, presentations take their inspiration from theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Despret, Harraway, Latour and Callon, and Puig de la Bellacasa, while tapping into conceptual resources such as actor-network and ahuman theory, indigenous African spirituality, ecofeminism, and speculative care ethics.

Overall, the panel asserts art’s singular role and potential in challenging and resetting pervasive human attitudes towards the nonhuman which underlie the inconsistent and slow response to environmental crises such as mass species extinctions and biodiversity loss. As such, it hopes to contribute to exploring and nurturing more caring, balanced and reciprocal interspecies relations.