Worlding Ecologies: Art, Science and Activism Towards Climate Justice

by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (Editor), Eva Burgering (Editor), Ursula Biemann (Contributor)

How can art, science and institutional practices counteract the negative consequences of climate and ecological breakdown? How can these practices and ideas advance systemic change? Worlding Ecologies serves as an anthology of examples and wayward navigational tool, assembling eighteen authors exploring this question from their diverse backgrounds—as scientists, artists, philosophers, activists, theorists and curators—to rigorously approach urgent ecological challenges, including climate breakdown, pollution, biodiversity loss, environmental and social justice.

This book emphasizes the fundamental role of art as a vehicle and support structure for intersectional ecological thought. Whilst navigating imagination, worlding-possibility, science fact, social justice and climate action, the book prompts a fundamental role for art to create the blueprints for regenerative and sustainable more-than-human worlds. Structured alongside three sections—Science and Climate Truth; Activism and Climate Justice and Social Justice in Institutional Ecosystems—Worlding Ecologies moves from fieldwork-taking to patchwork-making, unifying the arts with science, politics and ecology into a field of synthetic thought and commitment.

256 pages, Paperback

Published July 22, 2024

About the author

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (1988, NL) works as director and curator at RADIUS, center for contemporary art and ecology in Delft, which he founded in 2021. In 2012 he founded The Office for Curating. Previously, Lekkerkerk was director of the art space A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam between 2019-2021; was the artistic director of Brussels-based platform POPPOSITIONS between 2016-2019; and was curatorial fellow at TENT in Rotterdam between 2015-2016.

Central to Lekkerkerk’s work as curator and writer are socio-political, theoretical and philosophical discourses revolving around climate and systemic change, environmental and ecosystems thought, social and climate justice. He particularly focuses on debates concerning the Anthropocene, modernism and natural sciences, regenerative ecologies, post-humanism, and the increasing entanglement between nature and culture, approached through the lenses of intersectional ecology and the philosophy of science.

Publications by Lekkerkerk include Worlding Ecologies: Art, Science and Activism Towards Climate Justice (Valiz, 2024), Bestiary of Corona Animals (Onomatopee, 2020), and The Standard Book of Noun-Verb Exhibition Grammar (Onomatopee, 2018).

In 2012 Lekkerkerk received the inaugural Demergon Curatorial Award, and in 2014 he was the beneficiary of the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition.

Reviews

[Àngels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great compilation of essays from leading voices from curating and theory in contemporary art on institutions and ecology, one of the most urgent issues to address in ethics and policy.

[Anastasia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is one of that cases when you get a nice idea, beautiful publishing and bad editorial work. Strangely the worst piece was actually a Foreword written by Niekolaas Johannes Leekerkerk and Eva Burgering (people who are at the very heart of the project). I would definitely gave up on the book entirely was it written by them. But being aware that it is collection of essays by different contributors, I moved on. What I found was a set of very different articles on the topic of art, science, institutional practices as part of climate change and ecological breakdown. I appreciated the variety of opinions, and some authors did a very good job, such as Chus Martinez. Most of them though were lexically pretentious and hollow.