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Art is linked to knowledge, to politics and to the ethical positioning of each society. Images and words, the different artistic languages that operate on a symbolic, emotional and aesthetic level, have served, and continue to serve, to interpret our perceptions of the world and mediate in the construction of sensibilities and thought. Historically, artistic manifestations have provided innovative insights that have served to unravel the relationships between human beings and their biophysical environment or to understand nature.

In recent decades, we have witnessed a drastic rupture between cultural systems and the very nature that houses them. We can affirm that the hegemonic growth paradigm has brought humanity to an unprecedented situation. At this point, we are aware that environmental problems cannot be separated from socio-economic factors, since they are the foundations that feed the breakdown of ecosystems, just as it is not possible to establish accurate diagnoses of society without taking environmental factors into account. The dimensions that characterise the environmental crisis - climate change, the depletion of non-renewable energy resources, the loss of biological diversity and the massive production of waste - combine with the gradual disintegration of a large part of social gains. The urgency of adopting new economic patterns, of making a drastic change in the consumption of resources in all areas, is empirically demonstrated. Although techno-scientific knowledge is moving in the right direction, it is essential to establish new codes of conduct among citizens. The dissemination of scientific facts is not enough to encourage us to change our habits: it is essential to renew the principles underlying our desires and motivations for action. In this direction, the utopian dimension of art can open up a space to establish different ways of relating, becoming a necessary catalyst to promote an ecological transition towards sustainability.

Artistic practice moves in a frontier thinking, and it is right there, in the border dispute, where the greatest intellectual richness is produced: solutions, new ideas or new ways of seeing an idea are generated; knowledge is produced, in short. Creativity, by definition, is the ability to create, but we can also characterise creativity as an original way of providing answers to any problem or question. We recognise in art a meeting place where conditions can be tested that facilitate a new understanding of the phenomena that occur in our environment; a space for intersubjectivity, a forum for launching proposals, generating critical positions or exposing reflections that have an application in the creation of knowledge and encourage thought, all of which are decisive aspects for moral training.

In recent times, the visual arts have undergone an order of transformations that are not only formal, but also related to the public use of these forms.There has been a significant growth in practices with a communicative dimension and social distribution of knowledge, and even in actions that intervene in social organisation itself or in its transformation.Among these, the proposals of a type of political and social art that is governed by an explicitly ecological or environmentalist commitment stand out.Their positions are characterised by critical knowledge, by an interest in collaboration or participation in the local challenges of ecological transition with a global perspective, integrating values such as empathy, equality and social justice. For their materialisation, these proposals consistently adopt material austerity and respect for biocultural environments as unavoidable premises.

For this volume of AusArt we have chosen 17 contributions that orient artistic creation towards sustainability by pointing out options that come close to the emancipatory project of social ecology, a selection that covers a wide range of possibilities from a multidisciplinary perspective.

To begin with, José Luis Albelda Raga and Lorena Rodríguez Mattalía propose the participation of art in the design of a culture of sustainability through an 'aesthetic of degrowth' or humble aesthetic. This would take shape by creating vectors for the transformation of imaginaries based on the assumptions of the ecological humanities, seeking to build with empathetic discourses in order to advance towards the necessary austerity. They propose approaching the ‘transition narratives’ from a multiplicity of languages, promoting the media with the greatest social impact, such as audiovisuals in all their typologies.

Focusing on the urban environment, Maria José Gutiérrez González addresses some of the problems in the city, such as the speculation of space or pollution, related to an unsustainable lifestyle and consumption. She proposes an initiative to respond to this context, through respect and coexistence with the elements of the past, through artistic practice. Specifically, it involves the process of drawing up a cartography that shows the deterioration of the architecture linked to the historical irrigation culture of the city of Valencia and its metropolitan areas.

In «Resisting 'calamity': Art, community and speculative fiction», Raquel Fernández Couto discusses the actions that Lauren, the protagonist of the novel La parábola del sembrador, generates as a response to the difficulties she is going through in her world. The article offers a re-reading that relates different currents of thought with the aim of reflecting on the possibilities of artists' work in relation to community interventions and the increasingly conscious 'crisis of care'. With a different approach, «Text as ecoartivist practice», by Lucía Álvarez Borrajo and Rocío Arregui-Pradas, presents a piece of writing that has been created collaboratively. The authors start from the hypothesis that performative writing as a narrative form facilitates mechanisms of enunciation and makes visible strategies of resistance in which peripheral knowledge and critical knowledge are combined. By way of conclusion, the intertwining of disciplines and contexts and the importance of participation in real cultural networks are outlined, highlighting the example of mediation carried out by El Cubo Verde in the project «Culturarios | Humus de iniciativas culturales en el campo» (Culturaries | Humus of cultural initiatives in the countryside).

Next, we have the contribution of José Manuel Eizaguirre Granados, who appeals to touch to construct a positive iconography that anticipates an aesthetic, a culture, appropriate for a future age of frugality. In his article, he argues how touch draws us back to the concreteness of the corporeal in the face of the abstraction of scientific communication, negating the logic of the object as merchandise, and can be symbolically related to values such as sufficiency, equality, solidarity, the importance of care or slowness. It thus seeks to counteract the simplistic criticism or rejection of degrowth. Sheila Rodríguez Cañestro proposes a reflection on the Western paradigm of progress, which has historically implied the exploitation of nature and the subordination of women. To address this question, she focuses on the analysis of the exhibition project «Secondary roots» (2022) by the artist Gabriela Bettini, where she deals with the intersection between European colonialism in Latin America, the emergence of capitalism in the region and the current crisis of natural resources. To contextualise this theme, the contributions of ecofeminist theorists such as Alicia H. Puleo, Vandana Shiva and Yayo Herrero are used.

There follow two contributions that propose alternatives for artistic production in response to the challenges of sustainability. Antonio Vargas in «-87, artistic production proposal towards carbon neutrality: Measurement and compensation of the carbon footprint», taking as a frame of reference the race towards a carbon neutral world in 2050, explores the role of the contemporary artist in such a scenario. It explores individual responsibility and commitment, assuming a tangible involvement in this context. The work traces the development of a transdisciplinary aesthetic investigation, which reveals the link between artistic action itself and the quantitative analysis of greenhouse gas emissions. Ane Rubio Echazarra, in «It’s what it was, It’s what it is, It’s what it will be» is based on ephemerality and the reuse of the materials used or recovered to make her works. It is an enquiry into alternative ways of artistic production, with the intention of framing the categories of sustainability and ecological practice within art.

Interspecies relations or the concurrence of non-human beings as a mediation of ecological creation are the subject of the four articles that follow. Belén Cerezo Montoya presents some reflections based on the photographic project "The oldest living things in the world" by the American artist Rachel Sussman, based on the generation of an archive of the longest-lived organisms on the planet. Carmen Gutiérrez Jordano and Carmen Andreu Lara, in « Interspecies contact art: Contemporary artistic practices of care towards non-human animals», analyse the perspectives with which animals have been included throughout the history of art. They emphasise the utilitarian vision that has been maintained for the most part in contemporary art. From a critical position, they contrast the conceptual approaches and strategies of artistic creation in an anthropocentric framework with an interspecies alternative of care and empathy. Alizée Armet presents an artistic study on soil phytoremediation, carried out in the town of Jesenice, Slovenia. In the research-creation of «Ghostly plants of damaged world», she invokes scientific knowledge and techniques, highlighting the limits of our understanding of soil. By presenting the mutualism between plant species and mycorrhizae, the work brings us back to the idea that ecology is not just a matter of paying attention to our uses, but of paying attention to relationships. Fernando Luque Cuesta and Mª Carmen Hidalgo Rodríguez, for their part, present an investigation on the vegetable garden as a space for productive, cultural and family resilience. Based on the 'garden diary' as a scientific-artistic model, they conclude the need to strengthen intergenerational personal relationships in order to prevent the extinction of cultures associated with local production, including the conservation of native crop varieties. The resulting artistic creation presents the orchard as a driving force behind conceptions of the world in which human beings are legitimate members of their natural environment.

In another artistic field, Iñaki Barcena Hinojal and Josu Larrinaga Arza deal with the potential of popular music in the eco-social transition. In their article they show a search for the knots of interest between social and environmental problems and cultural change through musical expression. They specifically analyse the role of music in the creation and reproduction of the hegemonic imaginaries of industrial capitalism or, on the contrary, in the critique of the destructive capitalist model. For example, some music has been used as a vehicle for anti-ecological imaginaries, deepening its role in the creation of consumerist culture, and in other cases, nowadays in the minority, music demands a change of direction in our socio-ecological relations, aiming to transform relations with ecosystems and between human beings themselves.

It is followed by the text «Posters for a wounded planet: From Milton Glaser to Luba Lukova», in which Mikel Bilbao Salsidua draws attention to the modern poster, which has played a very important role as a means of communication and persuasion until relatively recent times. Beyond its common uses, this medium has been used, over the last half century, as a tool for raising awareness of the violation of essential rights, inequalities and the growing deterioration of the planet. In this essay, the author analyses its role in the field of environmental activism since the 1970s, taking as a reference the contributions of creators of the stature of Milton Glaser, Robert Rauschenberg, Seymour Chwast, Paula Scher, Shigeo Fukuda and Luba Lukova, among others.

The following three articles address the pedagogical application of artistic creations to reflect on sustainability and ecology. Estíbaliz Gutiérrez Ajamil and Ander Gómez Miranda write about the legacy that contemporary art offers to what they call 'art education for sustainable development'. To this end, they review a small selection of artists or collectives that work on themes related to the environment, responsible consumption and pollution, among others. Sergi Quiñonero Ortuño, in « Ecoart: Discussion and contradictions», proposes a critical approach to works that deal with questions about our relationship with nature, understood from an ecological perspective. He also presents case studies, in which the author has been involved, and which highlight the difficult relationship between the concepts of art and ecology. Finally, Óscar Cornago Bernal asks about methods; about methods with certain times and modes in relation to the environment in which they are developed that do not always respond to the good reasons of the expert, the researcher, the artist. To delve deeper into this question, he analyses the intervention of the Mexican collective Teatro Ojo Volverse Negro in Salamanca (Guanajuato), where the country's largest oil refinery is located.

Finally, aware that the image is part of our discursive language and constitutes a tool for reflection with research potential, we wanted to integrate it as another contribution, in this case a visual one. We have done so on the cover, with an image of the work «Letxuga power», from 2021, by Isabel Álvarez, and on the inside, interspersed with detailed photographs of the artist's book Reducir, produced by Susana Jodra in 2020.

Carmen Marín Ruiz

Susana Jodra Llorente

Artekom Project

Coordinators of the monographic issue