Coming to Terms with Gaia

“Environmental aesthetics at the time of our ontological crises accounts for a cohort of activists profoundly distinct from what ecological commitments could present in the past decades. The RMIT Gallery’s exhibition Bruised Art Action and Ecology in Asia seized the opportunity of this troubled moment to present complex thoughts of an awareness that is nonetheless transitive, effervescent, and confusing, but that we do not have the luxury to ignore. Whistle blower sensor, artists anticipate our environmental changes and develop visions and alerts. Like planners, politicians, and entrepreneurs, they have also swelled the ranks of activists and conscious citizens of our Anthropocene. If the conflict production and environmental consensus reflect a Western ontology, what is happening in Asia where formerly nature and culture rippled together without ignoring to the point of engendering the conditions in which our meta-modernity is struggling ? Our discussion with Yu Fang Chi, Taiwanese artist, Dr Marnie Badham, artist & curator, Dr Tammy Wong-Hulbert, Asian art specialist, and Bjorn Low, urban gardener and community activist, allowed us to establish an inventory of the particularity offered by the artistic and activist movements developed in Asia in the face of global upheaval.
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The slant approaches of these activists of muddled and complex environmental causes allow us to envisage the environmental craze renewal which for the last twenty years seemed blind and to vow to restore the vampiric practices of our modernity. Thanks to the intellectual diversity of these practices, we are able to savour the resilience of our little arrangements with Gaia.”