Art and Sustainability: Aesthetics of Complexity

Speaker: Sacha Kagan
In collaboration with Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

October 12, 2012 | 6.30 pm
Goethe Hall, Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai

Communities across the world engaged in the search for lived cultures of sustainability, are involved in cultural transformations affecting our ways of knowing, learning, valuing and acting together. In this context, “transdisciplinarity” matters. It implies a mode of knowing reality that combines dimensions traditionally split between art and science. Humans urgently need to develop ‘artscience’ methodologies fostering both embodied, transversal modes of knowing at the individual level, and a creatively evolutionary capability for resilience at the level of social systems.

Elaborating a theoretical understanding of the cultural dimension of sustainability as based on a trans-disciplinary understanding of complexity, the lecture will introduce an understanding of “aesthetics of sustainability” as addressed in the book Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity.

Following both Edgar Morin’s approach to complexity, and Basarab Nicolescu’s understanding of transdisciplinarity and dialogical thinking processes, the lecture will point at the roles of some genuinely transdisciplinary practitioners exploring the possibilities of a connective aesthetics. Moving away from the modernity’s ‘culture of unsustainability’, such practices have the potential to address NatureCulture’s dynamic complexity. This can potentially ally with commons-based social movements experimenting with cultural transitions, such as the “transition towns” and “right to the city” movements in the context of Europe.

Sacha Kagan (PhD) is Research Associate at the Institute of Cultural Theory, Research and the Arts (IKKK/ICRA), Leuphana University Lueneburg (Germany). He founded the International level of Cultura21, Network for Cultures of Sustainability. The focus of his research and cultural work lies in the transdisciplinary field of arts and (un)sustainability.