Professor Jane Chin Davidson - Environmental Performance: Art, Science, and Trans Terminology for Ecological Justice in the Global Context

IAS Residential Fellow Professor Jane Chin Davidson delivers a seminar on their research -

Artists since the 1960s-70s have used performance to restore environmentally fragile sites and to stage activist events in locations impacted by anthropogenic climate and species devastation. An archival effort to document these works, this project seeks to develop trans-disciplinary methodologies for studying environmental art;  including the past and present activism of artists, such as for the Fruit Routes project here at the Loughborough campus, revealing the ways in which art and science can be used to engage communities at the grassroots level.

In the global context of environmental humanities, performance becomes a means to explore trans-national, trans-corporeal, and trans-human identities in the Anthropocene. A review of the 1990s work of contemporary artists in China recognizes the use of Chinese performance traditions for addressing the oncoming capitalist industrialization of the country’s landscapes. The eco-feminist discourse in China contributes to the global acknowledgment of the patriarchal regimes that have authorized extractive modes of capitalist domination over all of planetary life.