From Rio to Paris: Exhibiting Art and Sustainable Development in the aftermath of the Rio Summit
This research project focuses on Villette-Amazone: Manifeste pour l’environnement au XXIe siècle to intersect an ecocritical reading of the art of the 1990s with the history of environmental thinking and politics. Villette-Amazone appears as a groundbreaking large-scale exhibition meant to introduce ecology to a wide audience. The hybrid project displayed architecture, technique and artworks, at the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris in 1996. In a substantial book, its curators Bettina Laville and Jacques Leenhardt claimed for a cultural change to face the upcoming environmental threats.
Villette-Amazone crosses politics, on national and international levels, and the idea of sustainable development–in particular the one defined by the United Nations in the Brundtland Report published in 1987 as well as at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), known as the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992. In conjunction with this political agenda, the first report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in August 1990 marked a step further in understanding the global environmental situation of planet Earth. Whereas some of the artists exhibited were well-known for their ecological commitment, their works may have taken on a shifting meaning in light of the political agenda of the exhibition project.
Besides, addressing the discourses and the representations associated with Villette-Amazone requires questioning the concept of sustainable development with common representations that opposed the North and the South. Villette-Amazone followed an interest of the Parisian art scene in ecological issues fostered by South American experiences and artists. This research aims at questioning such transnational cultural and artistic dynamics which contributed to shape ideas on the so-called nature, ecology likewise.
This case study aims to analyse exhibitions as a tool to shape new knowledge and sensibilities on the environmental crises. It considers the intricacies of underlying or overt confidence, as well as the doubts, towards liberal capitalism with regard to environmental issues that followed the collapse of the USSR. What is at stake is to understand how contemporary art exhibitions could have contributed to establish a narrative for sustainable development in the wake of the Rio Summit.