#DIDAKTIK. Filipa Sofia Correia Carvalho e Cruz & Tiago Barbedo Assis: Ecological artistic practices and archive for research and arts education
Lecture by Filipa Sofia Correia Carvalho e Cruz and Tiago Barbedo Assis, as part of the lecture series #Didaktik, department for Art and Education.
This talk asks how material practices can act as ecological witnesses at a time when knowledge is increasingly mediated by data and digital infrastructures. It explores how such practices challenge data-driven modes of knowing, the use and development of digital platforms for arts education and research.
Focusing on artistic practices that engage stone, soil, roots, pigments, organic matter, analogue film, digital data, and atmospheric traces, the talk examines how these materials function as indices of ecocritique and narratives. Situating these practices within critique of the archive and art-based research, it addresses the tension between embodied material experience and the risks of informational saturation. Ecological witnessing emerges not through the accumulation of data but through sensory, temporal, and site-based encounters in which materials themselves teach. From a situated knowledge perspective, we discuss how such materials and practices can be archived on digital platforms.
Digital tools serve as perceptual amplifiers, attuning audiences to processes otherwise beyond human scale. These practices foster forms of ecological literacy, demonstrating how making and experiencing material forms function as methods of research and modes of attentiveness and care.
It is challenging to find digital tools that serve as structured repositories with the flexibility and plasticity that some artistic practices seek. We seek opportunities to archive semantically structured data, adhering to Open Science. We also want to dispose of, transform, and visualize the materials in different ways. To sum up, we present cases of ecological artistic practices and the possibilities of extending these practices to digital archives.