Project description
Exploring environmental narratives in art history
Preserving our planet’s history is more than just documenting geological shifts or cataloguing species. It is also about understanding our cultural heritage. Artworks, often overlooked in environmental discourse, offer crucial insights into our relationship with the earth. They are repositories of environmental knowledge, showcasing our use of natural resources and documenting human impact on nature. However, this knowledge remains largely untapped. With this in mind, the ERC-funded ECOART project aims to rewrite art history, illuminating the ecological interconnections that shaped artistic practices from 1500 to 1800. By examining key artistic sites across Eurasia, particularly in the Global South, ECOART seeks to reveal the environmental contexts that influenced art and craft.
Objective
Works of art are repositories of environmental knowledge. Paintings, sculptures, and artifacts preserve material evidence of the use of natural resources like mineral pigments, plant-based dyes, and precious metals, and contribute to a visual archive of human interaction with nature by providing pictorial records of mining and deforestation. ECOART aims to rewrite art history as a history of ecological interconnections and prove that aesthetic practices were conditioned by environmental circumstances by examining the artistic use and visual representation of geographical, geological, botanical, zoological, and climatic resources across Eurasia, a space dominated by European and Chinese economic spheres of influence, in an era of early modern globalization from 1500 to 1800. The project investigates six key artistic sites with a focus on the Global South, an area still affected by the colonial exploitation of resources – the Indian region of Gujarat and the port cities of Manila in the Philippines, Jakarta in Indonesia, Guangzhou in China, Yangon in Myanmar, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands – with three objectives: 1. to analyze works of art as early modern repositories of environmental knowledge; 2. to reconstruct local ecologies of art and artisanship in the Global South in relation to trade and colonial exploitation; and 3. to make visible transcultural models of sustainability and creative reuse across early modern Eurasia. Digital mapping will demonstrate linkages between sites of artistic activity, resource extraction, and trade via overland and maritime connections. Through a geographic focus on under-researched regions of the Global South, and its transcultural and comparative methodology, ECOART will contribute to the decolonization of art history, provide theoretical insights into circular economies and the ecology of art, and contribute key historical information to an interdisciplinary understanding of natural resource conflicts during the Anthropocene.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities arts visual arts
- humanities history and archaeology history
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology
- social sciences other social sciences development studies development theories global development studies globalization
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
0313 Oslo
Norway
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.