University Ecologies Event: From Lawn to Garden: Artistic Forms of Vegetal Resistance, 9/24

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University Ecologies invites you to attend a special event with Dr. Giovanni Aloi of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This event is part of the Hoch-Cunningham Environmental Lecture Series

At the intersection of the research developed in two of his books, Lawn, published last year by Bloomsbury, and Avant-gardeners, forthcoming with Prestel, the lawn and the garden emerge as cultural forms through which to rethink the relationship between art and nature. As a monoculture, the lawn suppresses biodiversity, demands water, fertilizers, pesticides, and repeated mowing, while offering no hospitality to animals and other forms of life. A rooted manifestation of outdated colonial and patriarchal ideals of order and normativity, the lawn conceals histories of exclusion and extraction, making the garden’s unrulier, more relational forms of cultivation all the more politically significant. The recent interest in gardening as an artistic practice constitutes a form of dissent against the extractive logics that have impoverished soils and reduced the living world to resource or passive backdrop. Many contemporary artists are now working with the vegetal world, unsettling the categories of artwork and process, authorship and collaboration. In their practices, cultivation becomes a way of unlearning modernity’s distance from the earth and of imagining new forms of situated belonging, more attuned to the relations of care that make all life thrive.