Agenda

05 Jun 2026 15:30

ART ECOLOGIES Series | Sensing and Imagining Planetarity

Aula Magna Silvio Trentin, Ca' Dolfin & Online

Art Ecologies Series | Sensing and Imagining Planetarity

5 June 2026 |
3:30 – 5:00 pm
Aula Magna Slvio Trentin, Ca' Dolfin

Jacob Lund
Aarhus University

Discussants
Cristina Baldacci
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, DFBC and NICHE

Francesco Spampinato
University of Bologna 

Abstract
“For the first time in human history,” philosopher Emanuele Coccia remarks, “we are experiencing not this or that ecosystem, not this or that place, but the planet as a whole.” At the same time, however, we find ourselves within a new climatic regime, that, in many ways, escapes our human sensory apparatus and our habitual modes of perceiving our environment. The ecological crisis is therefore also a crisis of sensibility: the disappearance of our everyday relations with the living and other life forms.

Drawing on a distinction between globality, rooted in anthropocentric systems of capital, technology, and representation, and planetarity, which foregrounds more-than-human temporalities and alterities that exceed human perception, this lecture explores how the emergence of planetarity challenges modern Western notions of linear, homogeneous temporality and the subject-object relations presupposed by Kantian aesthetics. Through examples of artistic mappings and material mediations, Jacob Lund highlights aesthetic strategies that dissolve subject–object divides and foster participatory, non-representational modes of sensing, thereby cultivating planetary awareness. Ultimately, the lecture calls for an expanded aesthetics attuned to the intertwined temporalities of globality and planetarity, where humans sense and inhabit the Earth as a dynamic image – one that they themselves co-constitute.

Bio

Jacob Lund is Professor of Aesthetics and Culture and Director of the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. He is editor, with Geoff Cox, of the book series The Contemporary Condition with Sternberg Press (since 2016) and was Editor-in-Chief of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 2007-2023. Lund has published widely within aesthetics, art studies, critical theory, and comparative literature on topics such as image-politics, subjectivity, memory, mediality, enunciation, and contemporaneity. From 2015 to 2021 he was PI on the research project The Contemporary Condition, which focused on the concept of contemporaneity and changes in our experiences of time as these might be seen to be registered in contemporary art (funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research). Currently he is engaged on the research project Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions, running from 2022 to 2026 and made possible by an Investigator Grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. His most recent authored book is The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity (Sternberg, 2022).

Zoom Link
https://unive.zoom.us/meeting/register/lP6twka2SrSsmua3CMT-6A

Language

The event will be held in English

Organized by

NICHE

Downloads

Poster 1273 KB

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