Green Academy seminars
All seminars were held via Zoom. They were co-organised by The Big Green partners Pro Progressione, Hungary, and Sustainable Europe Research Institute Germany.
1 – Learning to Learn: How to Practise Art for a Convivial Future – with Jan van Boeckel
06 June 2024, Thursday, 18:00 CET
To use our senses is to connect with the world. To go out into the living landscape and engage with it in making art is to intensify and transform our connection with the more-than-human world. This is why wildpainter and artist-educator Jan van Boeckel emphasises direct, unmediated bodily experience. We will talk about how such an artistic approach to nature makes room for three important processes. When we defamiliarise ourselves from old habits of perception, we can explore a landscape afresh using the imagination and evoke insights and connections instead of merely representing what we see. Using examples from his work, Jan will lay out a toolbox of more detailed supporting principles and virtues. They include alternating foreground and background, indirectness, inviting emergent properties, or the ability to inhabit uncertainty.
Here and elsewhere, Jan’s conception of arts-based environmental education is inspired by systems thinking. A core idea: For a system to be complete, part of it must remain incomplete and open to change. That is the space where the system can probe its way forward as it evolves and adapts to changing circumstances. It is through this incomplete part that the system “learns to learn”, as Gregory Bateson put it in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Artistic ways of practicing and knowing can help us inhabit such spaces of incompleteness – invaluable for a society that is probing ways to transition to a more sustainable state.
On a personal level, we will discuss how to face uncertainty, complexity, and not-knowing. Jan holds that engaging with art can stimulate us to access latent and new capacities. And this ability may turn out to be nothing less than a survival skill.
About the speaker
Jan van Boeckel is Professor of Art & Sustainability at the Research Centre Art & Society, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen. He started his career as a cultural anthropologist before shifting focus towards making and teaching art. Jan developed his practice and philosophy while teaching courses in wildpainting, other forms of art-making, and environmental education mainly in Nordic countries, as reflected in his book At the Heart of Art and Earth: An Exploration of Practices in Arts-Based Environmental Education. He received his Doctor of Arts in arts education from Aalto University, Helsinki, in 2013, and has continued to be involved in leading research projects in the field. Having previously worked in Iceland, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland, Jan is now based in the Netherlands. His primary research interest is in how art can help us face the great challenges of our time.
http://www.janvanboeckel.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/artsbasedenvironmentaleducation
http://www.wildpainting.org
http://www.openairphilosophy.org
2 – How to Build a Beast: Changing the World with Wonder and Joy – with Isaac Yuen
27 June 2024, Thursday, 18:00 CET
American conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Creatives working on topics of sustainability and ecological literacy constantly grapple with the emotional toil that stems from dealing with accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and other complex environmental issues. Lurking behind the struggle to affect lasting change are the constant existential questions: How can we truly create in the midst of constant grief and despair? What genuine impact can our work have? What kind of future are we striving towards?
In Episode 2 of The Big Green online seminar series, Isaac Yuen joins us in conversation to explore the role of wonder not only as a source of artistic inspiration and personal motivation, but as a strategy of resistance for creative expression in a world of social and ecological wounds. We will speak on the “wonder writing” philosophy at the heart of Yuen’s latest essay collection, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World, the necessity of finding the extraordinary within the mundane, the importance for eco-narratives to embrace a diverse range of emotional tonalities, and the roles that thought experiments and utopian dreaming play in articulating more radical and subversive modes of living more sustainably on this planet humans and non-humans call home.
About the speaker
A first-generation Hong Kong Canadian writer, Isaac Yuen holds degrees in environmental science, engineering, education, and communication. He is the co-author of Atlas der ungewöhnlichen Klänge: Eine Reise zu den akustischen Wundern unserer Erde (Atlas of Unusual Sounds: A Journey to the Acustic Wonders of Earth) with Michaela Vieser, published in German with Knesebeck Verlag. His latest nature essay collection, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-Than-Human World, was published in 2024 through West Virginia University Press.
Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Isaac’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have been published and anthologized across Canada, the UK, and the US. He was a 2019 writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Literature in Switzerland, a 2023-2024 Science Meets Fiction fellow at the Hanse-Wissenshaftskolleg (HWK) Institute in Advanced Study in Germany, and an upcoming artist-in-residence with the La Napoule Foundation in France. Isaac currently lives and works in Berlin.
3 – Braiding Infrastructures for Each Other: The Art of Symbiosis – with Saša Spačal
28 November 2024, Thursday, 18:00 CET
After the success of our two pilot episodes, the Green Academy is back for a full season 2024–25, with a focus on soil.
In the opening seminar, postmedia artist Saša Spačal invites us into the depths of the moist, fertile ground, where her artistic endeavours take root and evolve. Guided by deep listening and passionate knowledge mining, she will help us imagine symbiosis as a spectrum of reciprocal connections. We will explore how care can be translated into sound and how intricate relationships between species and environments emerge.
Saša’s artworks bear witness to rituals of mind travel, embodied research, and artistic practice, acting as bridges between different forms of life and matter. Using the imagination, we will follow her into symbiotic connections that transcend species boundaries – from bacteria and fungi to crickets – and arrive at a place where all that remains is to braid infrastructures for each other. Then we’ll re-emerge, take a step back, and discuss how Saša develops her artworks and how she creates a role for herself in the symbiosis of art and science.
About the speaker
Saša Spačal is a Slovenian postmedia artist who merges scientific research on living systems with contemporary art, emphasizing the interconnectedness of the environmental-cultural continuum and planetary metabolisms. Her artistic practice involves developing caring and nurturing biotechnological methodologies and interfaces that engage with both the organic and mineral components of soil. Concurrently, she investigates the fragility of posthumanist scenarios, weaving together mechanical, digital, and organic logics within the context of contemporary biopolitics and necropolitics. Saša has held residencies at scientific institutions including the Toby Kiers Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Rillig Lab at Freie Universität Berlin. Her works have been showcased at venues such as ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, Ars Electronica, Austria, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Spain, the New Tretyakov Gallery, Russia, and the National Art Museum of China. Her awards and nominations include the Ars Electronica Starts Prize (2021), Japan Media Art Award (2020), New Technological Art Award (2019), New Aesthetica Prize (2020), Prix Cube (2015), and Prix Ars Electronica (2015).
4 – The Colours of Our Earth: Building an Eco-arts Community from the Ground – with Rui Vasques
23 January 2025, Thursday, 18:00 CET
When Rui Vasques first started working with local mineral pigments, he was struck by how rich and vibrant their colours are – in hues and textures, and also in stories. For him, these pigments are not just materials. They connect the history of our planet and of a unique place with possibilities for today and a more sustainable future.
Through the work of Live With Earth Association at its rural eco-campus north of Lisbon, Rui has continued to explore the potential of natural pigments in eco-arts, design research, and community-building. From gathering ochres and clays with local artisans to experimenting with sustainable methods for paints, textiles, plasterings and ceramics, the process has been as much about collaboration and learning as it has been about creating. Be it in workshops, in the interaction with eco-campus visitors, or during Live With Earth’s recent Design Conference for Sustainable Development, Rui has witnessed how these materials spark curiosity and creativity and foster community.
But there are challenges too: How do we honour traditions while adapting them to new contexts? Can eco-arts genuinely empower local communities in a way that is meaningful and lasting? How can we create social and economic value through these practices? What happens when natural materials are hard to access or when the systems around us push for faster, cheaper, synthetic alternatives?
We will discuss Rui’s experiences and questions as a local practitioner and community organiser as well as his ideas and conceptions as a design researcher. This includes the new theory of colour he developed while researching mineral pigments.
About the speaker
Rui Vasques, born in Brazil and raised in Portugal, is a pioneering designer and social entrepreneur. Awarded the IADE Best Course Student Award 2012 for his Master’s thesis on “Sustainable Constructions: Eco-Village Community”, he founded Live With Earth Association in 2017, integrating Eco Campus at Torres Vedras, Portugal. Eco Campus is part of the Municipal Council for Climate Action and the Culture Network of Torres Vedras and a partner of Geoparque Oeste. Notable for projects like the International Festival of Art and Construction 2017, Rui received the Exceptional Leaders of Excellence award from the Women Economic Forum in 2019. He leads teams in sustainable construction and European projects and is finishing his design PhD at IADE Universidade Europeia, Lisbon, as a researcher with IADE’s design research unit UNIDCOM and a member of the NEB Stewardship Lab (New European Bauhaus).
www.livewithearth.org
Instagram: @livewithearth
5 – Sensing Earthly Entanglements: Teaching Food and Agri-Culture through Art – with Anke Strauß
Thursday, 6 March 2025, 18:00 CET
How can we develop sustainable food systems? Open questions like this call for creative ideas. But training programmes for future professionals in fields like food economics have rarely prioritised creative skills. Anke Strauß is one of the people changing this. At Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development, near Berlin, Germany, students in a new bachelor’s programme on cultures of food and farming do learn a lot about topics such as soil quality, value chains, or organic production methods as seen from science and technology. But right in the first semester, they also take a course where they explore artistic approaches under Anke’s guidance.
Anke begins by asking a different kind of question: What is our relationship to other earthly beings? How are we connected to the earth, how do we embody it? As the course progresses, Anke encourages students to engage with philosophical readings as well as experiment with various artistic methods such as research drawings, collage, poetry, or performance while collaborating with several artists. She teaches students to focus on relationships, between themselves and earth others as well as among co-learners in the group. In this relational key, students practise ways to perceive, consume and value food as that which interconnects body and earth.
Anke will talk us through a range of artistic works created by students in her recent course and, drawing on participants’ research diaries, share experiences and insights that occurred in the process. We will discuss Anke’s arts-based teaching concept and what we can learn from its potentials and issues – for training better food and farming managers as well for helping many more of us approach sustainable development as a creative challenge.
About the speaker
Anke Strauß is an academic researcher and teacher working at the intersection of organisation, art, and ecologies. She is particularly curious about alternative ways of organising, aesthetics and affect as organising forces, and their potential for the transformation to sustainability. Anke holds a PhD in critical management and organisation studies and serves as the head of the executive master’s programme on Strategic Sustainability Management at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development (HNEE), Germany, enabling participants to lead the transformation in their organisations. She was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (now RIFS, Potsdam) and led the interdisciplinary art-research project Working Utopias, which used utopian thinking to develop sustainable ways of organising work lives: www.working-utopias.com
6 – Reshaping Ceramics: How to Transform an Art Practice for Sustainability – with Yuliya Makliuk
Thursday, 10 April 2025, 18:00 CET
How can artists reconcile their creative pursuits with the urgent need for environmental sustainability? Ukrainian environmentalist-turned-potter, Yuliya Makliuk, works within a framework she calls “Ceramics in the Anthropocene”, exploring the connections between clay art and climate change. Her recent research project and book, Potters Save the World, are dedicated to lowering the carbon footprint of ceramics making. Through the lens of ceramic studio art, Yuliya will unfold the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of art, craft, and ecological responsibility.
Drawing from her own artistic practice and experiments, Yuliya will share insights into reducing the environmental impact of creative work while maintaining artistic integrity. From examining the carbon footprint of materials to adopting innovative approaches like low-carbon processes, ethical sourcing, and waste reduction, we’ll discuss practical strategies applicable across disciplines.
We’ll also explore art as a driver for environmental awareness, learning from contemporary ceramic artists leading the way in addressing climate change through their work. By blending a scientific lens with the expressive power of art, Yuliya highlights how small changes can contribute to a larger cultural shift toward sustainability.
About the speaker
Yuliya Makliuk is a ceramic artist, activist, and author driven by a passion for addressing the pressing challenges of our time: environmental crises, social injustice, and war through her practice. Makliuk is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of ceramic tradition, actively exploring sustainable approaches and innovative techniques in her studio, Here & Now Pottery. She has been awarded the Risktakers and the CEC Artslink International fellowships for her work in sustainability and arts organising.
Instagram: @hereandnowpottery
Email: