Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture -This issue of Antennae and the next are part of a project informed by the exhibition Making Nature: How We See Animals curated by Honor Beddard at Wellcome Collection (London) in 2016-17.

This first installment, Making Nature, looks at the construction of nature as a cultural pursuit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on issues of visibility and invisibility, both cultural and ecological, to critically appraise the methodological approaches that have defined the philosophies of the discipline. Technologies of visibility like taxidermy, dioramas, macro-photography, and illustration are here juxtaposed to highlight the complicity of art and science in the production of fictional narratives about the world we live in.

This outlook should however not be misinterpreted as an attempt to diminish the epistemic importance of natural history but as an invitation to reach further deep into the discipline’s productive core and to devise new natural histories for the twenty-first century. It is in this context that the next installment, also co-edited with Honor Beddard, titled Re-making Nature will more closely focus on the work of contemporary artists whose practice entails revealing the constructed-ness of nature as a concept to map and untangle important neuralgic and yet under scrutinized junctions in our coevolutional histories with the rest of the natural world.

Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture Details