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Oliver Lubrich: Humboldtian Landscapes
Humboldtian Landscapes
(p. 73 – 110)

Oliver Lubrich

Humboldtian Landscapes

PDF, 38 pages

  • aesthetics
  • ecology
  • art theory
  • cultural critic
  • architecture

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English

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English

Oliver Lubrich

is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bern. Previously he was Junior Professor of Rhetoric at Freie Universität Berlin and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, California State University, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. His books include Shakespeare’s Self-Deconstruction (2001) and Post-Colonial Poetics (2004). He has edited several books of texts by Alexander von Humboldt and is currently directing the complete edition of Humboldt’s essays. His second research project documents international testimonies from Nazi Germany. He works collaboratively with neuroscientists to study experimental rhetoric, and with primatologists and ethnologists on a project called The Researcher’s Affects.
Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time ‘beyond’ modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds.