Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia, known for his knowledge of nature and particularly the lives of plants, will hold a public lecture on Wednesday, 20 September 2023, at the invitation of Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts and the Saastamoinen Foundation.

The contemporary climate crisis is also and above all the evidence that what we call Earth, is not an object, but it is a subject, it is something that stands before us like any other self: the planet acts freely, it literally does what it wants and we are no longer masters of its behavior, neither from a cognitive nor from a pragmatic point of view. This is why the terms and names of ecological science (the very name of ecology, the concept of ecosystem, that of planet) seem to have become completely useless.

This is why we need art (theater, music, performance, video games, painting, sculpture, installations, fashion, literature, and all other disciplines) to talk about the planet: we can no longer afford to talk about it without making it talk, we can no longer afford to talk about it without staging it as a free subject, as a character of a novel or of a play. That is why ecology must become an art, and art must become the supreme form of ecology.

The event is organized as part of Saastamoinen Foundation Keynote series in cooperation with Uniarts Helsinki.