Artistic research and sustainability

An artistic research project "4 questions about nature"

Abstract

The theme “cultural heritage and sustainability” of the “World Summit of Arts Education in Funchal.Madeira.Portugal” in March 2023 provided the impetus to develop an artistic research project “4 questions about nature” on site in order to uncover relationships between personal places, nature and sustainability. The site-specific artistic research method of displacement, the placing of different positions in relation to a topic such as sustainability, enables divergent aspects to be linked together in an unusually associative way in order to reveal new perspectives. According to Michel Foucault (1967), space is understood as a network consisting of many places. Places are related to each other and, in addition to their physical significance, also take on a discursive meaning through stories that people experience in places and talk about places. The research project explored these stories by interviewing ten people. The special thing about these interviews was that the answers were sketched into a kind of place map made up of text and images. In this way, ten location-based maps were created which, after being read, were transformed into a "map of the relationships between personal places-nature-sustainability" as an artistic result of the research. The artistic research project highlights [...].