The SNF project “Mediating the Ecological Imperative: Formats and Modes of Engagement” is a joint research project of the Institutes of Art History, American Studies and Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. In addition, a collaboration with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is being realized. Research focuses on the visual politics of climate change, the role of ecological issues in art and literature, and social engagement with the environment in indigenous cultures. The philosopher Hans Jonas coined the term “ecological imperative” in his book Das Prinzip Verantwortung (The Principle of Responsibility, 1979), in which he formulated an ecological maxim for action based on Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical Imperative”: “Act in such a way that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth”. → Read more about the project
- Prof. Dr. Peter J. Schneemann (Lead, University of Bern)
- Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl (University of Bern)
- Prof. Dr. Michaela Schäuble (University of Bern)
- Prof. Dr. Peter Krieger (2021-22) (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
- Dr. Toni Hildebrandt (Advanced Postdoc and Coordinator, University of Bern)
- → See the whole project team
As much as plants have contributed to the making of human worlds, human intervention has also had a deep impact on vegetal ecosystems: the plant-human relationship is one of reciprocal interplay and mutual exchange, with humans existentially depending on plant life – with every breath. Recent studies have highlighted how these organisms, far from being passive receivers at the other end of the life spectrum, are endowed with active forms of sensory perception, can react, can move and have sex. For all these reasons, vegetal life constitutes a privileged field of investigation and knowledge production, both in terms of applied technologies, as well as of theoretical thinking. This new awareness calls for novel paradigms of historical and transhistorical inquiry, focusing on the wide range of interactions between humans and plants across time and space. In particular, there is a need for transdisciplinary and transregional approaches to the interactions of plant and human ecologies that can help to retrace the Anthropocene, and think beyond it. Peter J. Schneemann will give a lecture on The Empty Lot: Of Remediating Brownfields and Resisting Vegetation at the conference Entanglements across Collections, November 4-8, 2024 in Berlin. The conference is organized by the Berlin-based 4A_LAB Academy: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies Aesthetics Ecological, concept and organisation by Hannah Baader in collaboration with Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
Hubert Zapf, Chair of American Studies, Department of English and American Studies, University of Augsburg, and a long-term project partner of the SNSF Sinergia Mediating the Ecological Imperative in Gabriele Rippl's subproject Ecological Imaginaries: Eco-Ekphrasis in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century North American Fiction will visit Bern to give a lecture on Cultural Ecology in Decolonial Perspective. The Lecture will take place on September 19, 16:15-17:45 at Unitobler, room F-102.
The Visual Methods Studio of the Concordia Ethnography Lab will explore the intersections between anthropology and filmmaking through the screening of three short audiovisual works by Andrea Bordoli, each of them proposing a formal and conceptual encounter with a specific territory. By considering human-nonhuman entanglements, by tracking flows and transformations of matter, and by imagining speculative scenarios that blur past, present and future tenses, each of these films proposes a filmic encounter to think with and think through some key elements of the contemporary ecological crisis. Andrea Bordoli is a PhD student in the SNSF Sinergia project Mediating the Ecological Imperative.
