'Archiving the Anthropocene: New Taxonomies Between Art and Science'

Edited by Cristina Baldacci and Emiliano Guaraldo
"Holotipus", vol. 4 & 5
www.holotipus.it

This double issue of "Holotipus" welcomes contributions on the relationship between contemporary archival processes and the visual, media and performing arts, and between the scientific production of knowledge and aesthetic practices. At the same time, in order to represent the complexity and potential of the debate around these themes, the issue aims to also include critical perspectives within or as response to the aesthetic framework established by the Anthropocene thesis and by Western natural history. Particularly welcomed are contributions from interdisciplinary scholars working the fields of the visual arts, philosophy, and the environmental humanities across media and geographies, as well as from artists and designers engaging with these topics.

IN SHORT
30 September 2022: deadline for submission of abstracts
15 October 2022: notification of abstract acceptance
31 December 2022: deadline for submission of articles

Since its initial formulation and popularization in the public sphere, the Anthropocene thesis has triggered several critical debates across scientific disciplines and artistic practices, which have included non-anthropocentric and decolonial perspectives, critiques of species thinking and extractive economies, and insights from political ecology and the natural sciences. While scientific institutions have increasingly initiated collaborations with artists and designers, visual artists from different geographies and traditions have creatively engaged with the geological and planetary imaginaries mobilized by the ‘epoch of man’. They have done so by maintaining a critical relationship with the forms of knowledge reproduced by geoscientific research and communication.

In the visual, media and performing arts, the Anthropocentric paradigm has, at times, activated challenging processes of archival construction, research, and revision, which tackle traditional modes of collecting and classifying. These processes have enabled both a surveying gaze on the geophysical phenomena composing the natural history of the planet and a renewed interest for the complex relationships that entangle the forms of life cohabiting in it. The extensive deployment of this gaze by artists, activists and art/science practitioners has contributed to build a visual and material inventory of epochal transformations, hyperobjects, extinctions, sedimentations, ecologies and endangered ecosystems. This ongoing inventory (re)presents and re-enacts a univocal planetary nature through the unifying lens of the Anthropocene thesis and, at the same time, highlights the urgency to rethink taxonomies as open systems of knowledge and understanding.

From this perspective, the Archival/Anthropocenic paradigm has also been challenged and problematized by artists stemming from the global south, as well as belonging to indigenous and racialized communities. Specifically, critical archival approaches to the Anthropocene thesis have been exposing and denouncing the colonial roots and the problematic genealogies that constitute European natural history and its institutions and discourses. In this context, an understanding of the planet as a pluriverse, or as a ‘world made of many worlds’ has emerged. Such perspectives force a re-configuration of natural history as conflictual and heterogeneous, opposed to the unifying and totalizing view of the geological Anthropocene.

This double issue of Holotipus welcomes contributions on the relationship between contemporary archival processes and the visual, media and performing arts, and between the scientific production of knowledge and aesthetic practices. At the same time, in order to represent the complexity and potential of the debate around these themes, the issue aims to also include critical perspectives within or as response to the aesthetic framework established by the Anthropocene thesis and by Western natural history. Particularly welcomed are contributions from interdisciplinary scholars working the fields of the visual arts, philosophy, and the environmental humanities across media and geographies, as well as from artists and designers engaging with these topics.

Some themes may include:
– Orality and archival processes in the Anthropocene;
– Critiques of anthropocentrism and of the role of technology in constructing different images of the planet;
– Indigenous forms of knowledge in relation to non-human life;
– Marginalized, colonized, and oppressed natural histories;
– Acts of re-worlding and alternative eco-political imaginations;
– Denunciations of ecological and epistemic violence;
– The relationship between scientific visual communication and the visual arts;
– The geological and stratigraphic imagination of the Anthropocene;
– The processes of classification, fossilization, sedimentation;
– Ecofeminist and environmental justice approaches to natural history;
– Alternative taxonomies, toponyms, and nomenclatures;
– Enactment and pre/re-enactment as artistic practices in the context of planetary change and the ecological crises;
– The visuality of scientific disciplines such as paleontology, botany, zoology, systematics within the contemporary arts;
– Earth beings and non-Western ontologies of nature;
– Artistic and curatorial practices for decolonizing natural history and its institutions;
– Methods and practices of ecocritical Art History;
– Queering of archival processes, methods and procedures;
– Speculative zoology and botany;
– The divide between living and non-living matter;
– Pluriversal imagination and artistic practices.

In order to be considered for publication, abstracts of 400 words (in English), together with five key words and a short bio, must be sent, in Word or PDF format, to holotipusholotipus.it by 30 September 2022. The editors of the issue will contact the contributors to communicate if their proposal has been accepted by 15 October 2022. Once confirmation of acceptance of the abstracts has been received, articles in English of maximum 5000 words (footnotes included) must be sent by 31 December 2022. To see "Holotipus" editorial norms: https://www.holotipus.it/publication-norms/. All articles will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

"Holotipus" combines Taxonomic Science and Art/Design, a theoretical paradigm which involves Philosophy, Literature, Anthropology and all Visual Studies. Editors, Editors-in-Chief and Editorial Board members are selected by many academic fields to better face the contemporary challenges such as Coloniality, Feminism and Geopolitics in Science. "Holotipus" is a Catalan word, and is not a typo of Holotipos. Both share the same meaning but the first former gave us the chance to wield a clear mission: talking about a multiculturalism and anti-colonialist approach, i.e. restarting from the origins.

"Holotipus: journal of zoology, systematics and taxonomy" is published exclusively online, open access; the journal follows a continuous publication model, with the online issuing of an annual volume, divided into two parts, each year. The journal publishes articles and editorials about alpha taxonomy, biodiversity, ecology, ethology, phylogenetic and cladistics studies, among others. All works are released in gold open access, under the Creative Commons International license, without fees for authors or readers. All published articles are archived on LOCKSS, Biotaxa and Zenodo. This promotes their long-term storage.

TO DOWNLOAD THE CFP
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