Forest Encounters: Reading Recommendations

Just as the Forest Encounters project brings together the disciplines of art, forestry, and the humanities, so too do our reading recommendations offer an inter- and cross-disciplinary perspective on the topic of forest and plants and art during times of ecological breakdown. Two of the featured authors, Giovanni Aloi and Agata A. Konczal, will also be giving lectures on December 1, 2023 at the Forest Encounters symposium in Ljubljana.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an art historian, author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. He is the editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Currently Aloi is lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

• Plant Blind: Why We Look But Don’t See

• Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art 

• Antennae – The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (free download)

Dr. Agata A. Konczal is an anthropologist specialized in environmental anthropology, political ecology, environmental history, and forest anthropology. She has been working since May 2022 at the Wageningen University in the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group.

• Trees That Must Remember

• Telling (Hi)stories in the Anthropocene: When Forest is a Multispecies Relation

• Integrating Nature Conservation Measures in European Forest Management: An Exploratory Study of Barriers and Drivers in 9 European Countries

Dr. T. J. Demos is a professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the same institution. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, ecology, and global politics.

• The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics, e-flux Journal #98

• Art after Nature

• The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology