The Visuality of the Envioromental Crisis

Today the environmental crisis is the subject of a vast debate, part of which concerns its representativeness in the artistic-literary field. The article aims to take in account the challenges the prevailing narratives in favor of a broader perspective about the environmental crisis, acknowledging that this discourse needs to be expanded to encompass socioeconomic, philosophical, political, and artistic domains. Amitav Ghosh, in his text “The Great Derangement” (2016), addressed the issue of the depiction of such contemporaneity, by highlighting the elements that make a phenomenon like the ecological crisis complex in its representation. The “visualization” of the environmental crisis is undermined at its base, rooted in the contemporary imaginative crisis. In addition to this, the challenge lay also in the need to subvert the dominant narrative, to show the limitations of a universal “We” and its ties to Western-centric ideologies: ecofeminist thoughts can help us in doing it. These premises do not mean that art has given up in recent decades. On the contrary, the imaginative and creative efforts carried forward by numerous artists have gradually intertwined with the practice of “Visual Activism”, acquiring further power in the communicative and performative field. Visual activism, in the definition given by Nicholas Mirzoeff (An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2023), is configured as a fundamental field of action in which art becomes a privileged means to uncover a deeply sick system, based on a capitalistic logic that rests its history on Western, patriarchal, white supremacy. This article aims to connect the crisis of representation and the visual activism practices in the field of the environmental issues, through the case study of the setting and the curatorial choices at Helsinki Biennial 2023: an enlightening exemplification of the intersection between art and activism, fostering reflection and action within a unique environmental context.