Theatricality, Research and Humour: Visual ‘Other’ Narratives As a Means to Popularise Environmental Issues

The physical and aesthetic dimensions of visual culture are part of how we organise ourselves – but they can also change and reorganise us. Art in particular has this capacity to transform us and our world by exhibiting the making of images and the use of images. (cf. Alva Noë). Aesthetic modes and ways of addressing can therefore challenge us to reorient the relationships we inhabit and the orientations that arise from them. Within scenes of address, styles, patterns and scripts of address can be changed, challenged, humorously or ironically turned or mocked through modes of addressing an audience (cf. Monique Roelofs). How this can happen is shown in this paper using the example of the artistic works of Jana Kerima Stolzer and Lex Rütten.

Their work for publicly funded institutions, for example museums and cultural organisations, is based on research into climate change, i.e. they are concerned with making soil, rock or plants speak in the context of the Anthropocene in precisely researched, site-specific stories. They work with a variety of media and create interactive formats in the form of VR worlds, which they also refer to as ‘platforms of 3D objects’. In their productions, they do not place humanity at the centre, but rather associations between human, non-human, virtual, material, conceptual and other actors. They use various digital programs, but also artistic tactics of wit, humour and absurdity.

The main questions I will explore are:

- how are designs of the human body and portraits aesthetically ‘calculated’ in their work in order to make response events (resonance) likely on the part of the audience?

- To which ‘long’ artistic tradition of addressing the audience, based on the use of anthropomorphic figures and an aesthetic of corporeality, can the specific ‘relational’ aesthetic of these works be connected?