Ecophilia –find your nature
Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia
Trondheim international biennale for art and technology
April 1 – August 14, 2022
Nature has gone estranged. Our link to it is more important than ever. Our home planet needs our care and love. This is what Ecophilia is about. And you cannot avoid it. Nature is all about your lifeworld. Where you live, how you live and how you love it.
Ecophilia reflects not only a necessity, but also a deep desire to connect with nature. But what is nature really? Except for some ecological dreamscapes?
Ecology comes from Greek Oikos, meaning home. In this age of the Anthropocene, our Oikos is constantly altered by new technologies, man-induced environmental disasters, biotechnological wonders, and blurred borders between the made and the natural.
Doomsday scenarios and environmental apocalypses have become iconic images of nature today. The same dystopias of the future lure us back to most romantic portraits of pristine landscapes – a paradise lost.
Some wonderful place we once belonged. What is that nature we so desperately worship, seek to love, protect, and save? Does it even exist?
After all, there is no universal understanding of nature. It is a cultural construct. There is no perfect love for it either. Are the many varieties of ecophilias manifesting our changing relationship of nature? Can one be too much of an ecophile?
Meta.Morf 2022 – The seventh Trondheim international biennale for art and technology – manifests a critical take on our relationship to nature. The biennale will, through conferences, exhibitions, performances, screenings and workshops, critically question what it truly means to be an ecophile in the age of the Anthropocene.
Zane Cerpina / Espen Gangvik, 2022