Zoom-ID for online attendance: https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/3440507571 

To interested parties outside of the Department: please register with Jaqueline Berndt (jberndt@su.se) to allow access, and indicate whether you wish to participate in person or online.

Speakers: Ewa Machotka, Associate Professor in Japanese Studies/Art History at Stockholm University and Takehiro Watanabe, Associate Professor in  Anthropology/Global Studies at Sophia University Tokyo.

Abstract

Aesthetic categories such as the beautiful and the picturesque have exerted considerable influence on the development of environmental attitudes and the creation of green spaces such as nature reserves and city parks. But what exactly is that role in urban water conservation practices today and how does it interplay with environmental ethics?

This seminar introduces the case of a social media influencer who likened the community-based conservation project at Inokashira Pond in Tokyo to the water lily paintings of the French artist Claude Monet (1840-1926), as a shorthand for a waterscape that is both exquisite in its beauty and healthy in its ecological balance. Behind this casual commentary is a long and tangled global history of aesthetic attitudes concerning the natural world, much of which have informed the design of urban parks and gardens, the visual arts, and the practices of cultivating plant and animal species.

Against this backdrop key nodes in the history of this cosmopolitan exchange between Monet’s pond in Giverny and the pond in Tokyo are examined. We locate the initial moment of exchange in Japonism, the global popularity of Japanese gardens, and the use of Western principles in Japanese park design, and contextualize these phenomena in the global horticultural trade. By attending to the history of the particular interplay between ideas, art objects, and life, we offer to elucidate the cosmopolitan dynamic and tensions between aesthetics and ethics in today’s urban ecological conservation initiatives.