Arts and Sustainability: Nicolas Nova and François Ribac

When it comes to art, ecological matter as well as the term “sustainability” take on many meanings, and artistic practices that address such issues have expanded dramatically in the past few decades. In their work – in multiple fields ranging from music to visual arts, dance, new media arts or cinema – artists may highlight problems, criticise or denounce our behaviour, engage people into debate about environmental collapse, or even aestheticize it. Some may also look for solutions while others reframe our imaginaries and explore other ways of being in the world.

In this dialogue, we will shy away from the often normative perspectives about arts and sustainability, sometimes focused on recommendations about consumption or problematic behaviour. We will instead focus on artistic practices that we find stimulating to question our relationship with their environment. While François Ribac will focus on music and theatre arts, Nicolas Nova will address new media arts and design projects at the crossroads of digital cultures and ecological issues. Based on cases that illustrate how artists deal with environmental issues, this dialogue will shed some light on how these practices correspond to various concepts such as sustainability, or the local/global tension. The dialogue will question how art worlds, in parallel to science-fiction or pop culture, may unleash new imaginaries regarding the current crisis, and the main drawbacks or limits of such perspective.