L'historien de l'art T.J. Demos examine les propositions innovantes d'artistes et de militants pour inventer de nouveaux modes de vie associant durabilité écologique, justice climatique et démocratie radicale : une contribution originale à l'intersection de l'histoire de l'art, de l'
écologie, de la
culture visuelle, de la géographie et de la politique environnementale.
« Decolonizing Nature presents a timely critical analysis of the parameters and limitations of philosophical, artistic, and curatorial models responding to anthropogenic climate change. Rich and informative, the book makes an impassioned argument for a post-anthropocentric political ecology, in which the aesthetic realm enjoins with Indigenous philosophies and environmental activism to challenge the neoliberal corporate-state complex. It invites us to confront tough questions on how we might collectively reimagine and realize environmental justice for humans and nonhumans alike. »
Jean Fisher, Middlesex University
« Astute and ambitious. Essential reading for anyone interested in the arts, activism, and environmental change. Demos moves with impressive ease across national boundaries, cultural forms, social movements, and ecological theories. »
Rob Nixon, Currie C. et Thomas A. Barron, Princeton University
« Demos breaks new ground in art criticism. In an expansive analysis of polyvocal artist-activist practices in the Global South and the North, Demos eschews environmental catastrophism, scientific determinism, and techno-fixes to highlight collaborative resistance to neocolonial violence and neoliberal collusion-to-plunder. He is also searching for what the path forward might be. Rigorous, accessible, and rebellious, Decolonizing Nature is an inspiring and indispensible contemporary art manifesto. »
Subhankar Banerjee, University of New Mexico
« With Decolonizing Nature, Demos extends his formidable intellectual project to a realm that has until recently often been characterized by varying degrees of naïveté, obscurantism, and indeed green-washing: the relationship between art and ecology. The first systematic study of its kind, Decolonizing Nature is an exemplary combination of militant research and contemporary art history that will resonate with activists on the front lines as much as those working in the art field, reframing the latter as a site of struggle in its own right as we come to terms with the so-called Anthropocene. »
Yates McKee, auteur de Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition
« Demos' s ability to distill and interrelate heterogeneous discourses, practices, and eco-political contexts, without flattening them in the process, is a breathtaking feat and, moreover, one that rises to the demands of his complex and urgent subject. As clear in its argumentation as it is dense with information, the meat of this book lies in its detailed discussion of specific artworks and the environmental struggles from which they emerge and to which they ambitiously, and often brilliantly, respond. Decolonizing Nature makes a forceful case for why and how art matters, now more than ever. »
Emily Eliza Scott, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, coéditrice de Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics
Seconde édition (2024).
T. J. Demos, écrivain et critique d'art, est professeur et titulaire de la chaire Patricia et Rowland Rebele en histoire de l'art et culture visuelle de l'université de Californie à Santa Cruz. Ses recherches se concentrent sur les intersections entre l'art contemporain, la politique radicale et l'écologie. Il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages de référence et ses textes sur l'art moderne et contemporain paraissent régulièrement dans des revues telles que
Grey Room,
October,
Third Text ou
Nka, ainsi que dans
Artforum et
Texte zur Kunst. Il a également été commissaire d'un certain nombre d'expositions et de séries de projections de films, notamment
Rights of Nature. Art and Ecology in the Americas au Nottingham Contemporary (2015),
Specters. A Ciné-Politics of Haunting au musée Reina Sofia de Madrid (2014).
