Arte y Sostenibilidad. Respuestas Artísticas ante el Colapso

Theories about the collapse of contemporary societies have aroused increasing interest in recent years. Similarly, the environmental discourse has entered strongly into contemporary art, not from the naturalist or ecological approach of aforetime, but from the political ecology. Art, like other areas of knowledge, questions possible alternatives to collapse in terms of sustainability. However, given that there are two interpretations of the term sustainability, a weak one (the institutional one) and a strong one (the one defended by political ecology), it is relevant to clarify the implication of artistic projects in this sense. In the first part of this article, the scenario of the collapse of contemporary western society is presented and a parallelism with geological instability processes is established, in the context of an artistic research. Next, the types of responses to collapse are analyzed, based on ecological economy and political ecology concepts, and examples of artistic proposals are presented for each type of response. This analysis concludes on the role of contemporary art in the transition towards a sustainable society, as well as the convenience and urgency to promote artistic proposals that are framed in the concepts of strong sustainability.