Update: So delighted to share the new book “Plasticity of the Planet: On Environmental Challenge for Art and Its Institutions” designed by Honza Zamojski published by Mousse has been nominated for two categories for Polish Graphic Design Award: “Publication of the Year” and “Project of the Year”! https://www.polishgraphicdesign.com/2019/projekt2019

Yesterday, I had another request for more information about The Hollywood Forest Story. The writer from Norway asked: ‘And who coined the word–”Symbiocene?”‘ (it was coined by Australian farmer philosopher Glenn Albrecht, whose work I have written about). This query reminded me, in my busyness to develop my Haumea Online Ecoliteracy courses recently (new courses just listed) that I haven’t posted about recent publications that The Hollywood Forest Story has generated.

So in the next few posts I will be sharing how my eco-social art practice The Hollywood Forest Story is further advancing news of the ecological turn that is the Symbiocene, and the growing interest in situated-in-place eco-social art practices, occurring in art practice research, in academia and others who have been inspired by The Hollywood Forest Story.

First, I was really delighted to be contacted late last year by Polish independent curator, art historian, Magdalena Ziolkowska. Somehow, through the academic grapevine she had heard of the interest in my talk and paper ‘Goodbye Anthropocene: Hello Symbiocene – eco-social art practices for a new world’ that I presented first in Galway, then at the Anthropocene conference at Trinity College Dublin last summer (2019).

Magdalena was involved in editing and creating an engagingly detailed book on diverse art practice responses, international curators concerns and academic research that highlights developed artistic responses to the ecological emergency. This book is Plasticity of the Planet: On Environmental Challenge for Art and Institutions (2019)/. The editorial ambition was to present the idea of philosopher Catherine Malabou’s notion of ‘plasticity’ in the broad perspective of philosophical thinking and the curatorial practice it has inspired in recent years. 

With artists projects, academic texts and conversations with curators and art institution staff, Plasticity of the Planet reflects on the important and timely exhibition  “Human-Free Earth” , an international group art exhibition curated by Jaroslaw Lubiak, for the Centre for the Contemporary Art U-jazdowski Castle in Warsaw. And these issues, have not gone away either with the pandemic – in fact the pandemic is another symptom of the dominant culture’s broken relations with the wider community of life.

The book is available here and details of the exhibition and seminars here.

A big thanks to Magdalena who acted as editor for this book – it proved a smooth professional collaborative experience; Magdalena guided me through submitting the article, although we have never met and live in different parts of Europe. And I was so delighted to find such a home for my paper – it has attracted >1200 reads since I first published on this site.

So I would highly recommend the book to curators, art institution staff in particular and other creatives who are responding to the ecological emergency.

Some images from the book (488 pages) can be viewed in this slideshow below:

On Academia.edu, Magdalena has shared from the book the introductory essay ‘Plasticity of the Institution’, and curator Jarosław Lubiak has shared his essay, ‘Plastic Planetarism: The Art of Staying with the Trouble’