SEAE Research Seminar Series: The landscape is thinking itself through me. On art, sustainability and regenerative education

You are invited to our next SEAE Seminar Series event on Wednesday, 18th June 2025.

The SEAE Research Centre Seminar Series promotes scholarly dialogue about transformational approaches that facilitate opportunities for profound change in education & research.

Abstract

In his presentation, Jan van Boeckel will explore the kind of contributions that art and artistic practice in his view can make when seeking ways to navigate the challenging times that we are living in today. The title of his presentation refers to a famous quote of French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, who once said about his art making: "When I paint, the landscape is thinking itself through me. I become its consciousness." These lines point to a kind of reciprocity between the creating human being and a more-than-human landscape in which he or she is situated. Such a shift from an orientation of control of the nonhuman world to a more humble effort to align with it could be of vital importance when seeking more sustainable ways of living on this earth.

Jan will take up how more open-ended forms of education, of which artistic orientations could be an important part, can move us away from more conventional approaches of primarily goal-orientated, purposive education which tend to focus too one-sidedly on knowledge transfer. Such a redirection seems to be desirable if we are to more forward. For, as Nigerian thinker Bayo Akomolafe succinctly formulated the challenge that is facing us: "What, if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?"