Performing ecology

“But if the humanities have long been fenced off from the natural sciences, it is precisely the arts that are ready to open up to previously impossible, dangerous connections through affective registers. The younger generation of artists in particular, as well as dramaturgs and art theoreticians, is very open to addressing interspecies coexistence and environmental issues. In view of the inevitability of an ecological catastrophe, the beginnings of which they are already experiencing first-hand and which will mark their future, these topics seem to them not only necessary, but ethically urgent. Some of them do this in an explicit way, through the activist addressing of the ecological crisis via the medium of devised theatre, in Slovenia perhaps most prominently by the director Žiga Divjak (Fever, 2021). Others through more subtle practices, where it is about cultivating listening to the Other, to which the medium itself adapts experimentally, for example in the case of the radiophonic documentary play by Saška Rakef (The Voice of the Jackal, 2021) and some other soundwalks organised in our area by the Cona Institute.” (Excerpt from the Editorial)