Performing Nature: Social Imaginaries and Nature Representations
María del Buey Cañas, UAM
2025
When we think of nature, we think of a specific idea of nature, that is, our environment, our own condition, animal rather than human, and the ways in which we relate these two spheres. It is therefore important to begin by pointing out that the Western idea of nature is related to a characteristic segmentation of the reality that surrounds us and of which we are a part. This taxonomy can be explained as the conceptual classification of the different degrees of nature, a characterisation of the natural that is based on sensory experience and that is produced under a specific cultural framework, within a specific social imaginary. For example: compartmentalising the biosphere—the material reality that pre-exists us—is a conceptual operation necessary for the production of scientific discourse, but it is also a cultural product of fossil social imaginaries. These, as Jaime Vindel has addressed in his 2020 publication Estética fósil. Imaginarios de la energía y crisis ecosocial, are defined as social imaginaries constituted from the introduction of hydrocarbons into the energy matrix of modern societies, one of the main triggers of the global ecological crisis.
The ways in which we appreciate nature are determined both by our own human condition and by the social imaginary practised by our communities, a notion that powerfully reminds us of Castoriadis’ very relevant essay on The imaginary institution of society. Those ways of appreciating the biosphere that put human interests above all other interests, including our eco-dependence, are characteristic of strongly anthropocentric imaginaries. And these are another major aggravating factor in the global ecological crisis. However, a critical view of those social imaginaries that perpetuate and accentuate ecological injustice depends, to a large extent, on our ability to reorient our anthropocentric epistemic practices beyond the structural blindness of fossil imaginaries.
Although the constitution of social imaginaries is complex, we know that they play a fundamental role in the hierarchical ordering of natural phenomena and characteristics, distinguishing in a general idea of nature different degrees of the wild and the untamed, separating untamed animality from cattle, or untouched landscapes from the orography produced by human intervention. Thinking about nature is, in short, an imaginary process of representing nature in which we distinguish the familiar and the radically alien or strange. And it is in this separation that we perceive a curious phenomenon: social imaginaries reflect concrete visions of the cosmos in which a singular conception of human nature itself is manifested, sometimes unconsciously, as opposed to the plurality of ways of life that different societies perceive as otherness.
Representing what we perceive as different, wild, improper or diverse is another way of thinking about nature. In fact, the artistic representation of nature has often accompanied changes in the way we conceptualise it, as was the case, for example, during the Scientific Revolution. On the European region at that time, the modes of representation of the cosmos expressed a largely organicist cosmovision, in which the natural movements of the stars and nature formed a self-regulating whole, where the smallest phenomena replicated those of the celestial spheres, and the nature of living beings contained the perfection of the entire universe. From the 16th Century onwards in Europe, the Scientific Revolution led to a process of profound transformation, in which the cosmos as a mechanism, and with it all the creatures housed within it, came to be represented as just another gear in the machine. For this reason, treatises on natural philosophy in which animals were described as metabolic machines were very common, a fact that later led to the construction of animal machines such as Jacques de Vaucanson’s Canard digérateur, built in 1739.
The transformation of social imaginaries is a complex process of co-determination: practices of representing nature are permeated by the aesthetic experience of nature itself, as researcher Fernando Arribas Herdegueras addresses in an article published in 2015. That is, by subjective and sensitive attention directed towards a certain way of perceiving the world. Sensitive perception precedes and gives rise to the conceptualisation of nature as a set of symbols and affections, but also as a conceptual relationship between scientific objects. For all these reasons, the social practice of each moment and place motivates the creation of natural representations that reveal very diverse processes of signification.
Social imaginaries therefore influence artistic production according to the specific culture in which they are practised because they are, in short, imaginaries that signify different ways of relating to otherness, expressing ways of relating affectively, ethically and politically to the other and the strange, whether social, animal or vegetable. The strange animal, natural or uncivilised coincides with what we have always found here, in the world and in our bodies, material and essential conditions for our own existence. Thinking about how artistic practice represents the natural — sometimes as landscape, as mystery or as allegory, other times as myth or fable — allows us to reflect on practices that go beyond the production of a particular image of reality. Thus, we find still lifes, pristine and uncreated natures, chaotic, wild and moralistic natures; natures as resources for modernisation and natures as states of uncivilisation.
Silencio en la sala, participatory piece by BallArte Ensemble 2023
What ways of thinking about nature do artistic practices offer beyond traditional aesthetics or art historiography? Iván Illich pointed out, in his very relevant La perte des sens, how the recovery of sensory experience, of reasoning in and with our senses, is an exercise of fundamental importance in the struggle for a liveable world. Artistic practices that dialogue, question and mobilise social imaginaries beyond the thematisation of nature as form or image propose an interesting context in which to continue thinking about our relationship with it. These practices also draw attention to the creative dimension of artistic processes and practices that are not necessarily productive, but rather participatory, as Claire Bishop argues in an essay published in 2012, such as performance, happenings or extended and interdisciplinary practices. Through them, we discover that when we talk about representation, we are referring to different ways of presenting ourselves and the world; to the processes of identification that develop in our own name and in the name of others; but also to their interpretation, performance and execution as artistic performance, intrinsic qualities of the performing arts that highlight the relational dimension of practices that are only possible in the presence and participation of others. Peggy Phelan, along with other authors, points to the capacity of these artistic practices to intervene in a specific social imaginary, not to reproduce a specific image or symbol, but to give rise to a reality embodied, practised and socialised through living bodies, as can be read in Phelan’s publication Unmarked. The politics of performance.
Silencio en la sala, participatory piece by BallArte Ensemble 2023
The fact is that doing encompasses a rich plurality of situated knowledge. Thinking about the artistic representation of nature as a practice and as a participatory process can help us develop a methodology of relational practices oriented towards ecological responsibility. Another way of reorienting our ways of life in response to the perception of that which, by transforming themselves, also transforms who we are and what reality is, offering us new avenues of access to the ecologically fair world that we could build.
Arribas Herguedas, F. (2015). Belleza sin autoría: una visión pluralista de la apreciación estética de la naturaleza. Ecozona, 6(2), 94-109.
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Arts and the Politics of Spectatorship. Londres: Verso Books.
Castoriadis, C. (2013). La institución imaginaria de la sociedad. (A. Vicens, Trad.) Buenos Aires: Tusquets Editores.
Illich, I. (2002). La perte des sens. París: Fayard.
Phelan, P. (1993). Unmarked. The politics of performance. Londres: Routledge.
Vindel, J. (2020). Estética fósil. Imaginarios de la energía y crisis ecosocial. Barcelona: Arcadia.