Research Lines: Hybrid Natures and Anthropogenic Materialities
Nature can no longer be understood apart from anthropogenic processes. Plastics, microplastics, PFAS, pesticides, radioactive isotopes, and other unprecedented materialities circulate on a planetary scale, enter organisms, and transform soils, waters, and atmospheres. These are not merely external pollutants: they have become part of the environments and bodies we inhabit, often irreversibly and with effects that exceed our technical and political capacities.
Arte+Ciencia studies these processes through a transdisciplinary approach that brings together philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the humanities. We seek to understand how these materialities transform nature, material culture, and everyday life, as well as how they reshape our concepts of body, organism, environment, technology, and waste. What is a clay pot containing PFAS? How does an artisanal practice change when the soils, clays, pigments, or fibers on which it depends are transformed?
Our research focuses on specific objects, environments, and territories. We analyze crafts, industrial objects, waste, soils, waters, and organisms in order to reconstruct the networks of production, circulation, use, and disposal that shape them. This situated approach allows us to study spaces of hybridization in which natures and cultures, organisms and technologies, ecological processes and material economies become inseparable.
One of our central concerns is the transformation of material culture. Craft practices and popular arts do not remain untouched by environmental change: ceramic deposits, soils, fibers, pigments, and techniques are altered. We therefore study the biographies of objects and the relationships among matter, labor, knowledge, memory, and territory.
We also investigate artistic practices that engage with altered ecologies, anthropogenic materials, and representations of nature. Art is not understood here as a mere illustration of scientific data, but as a form of research capable of producing devices, images, interfaces, archives, and sensory experiences that make otherwise hidden processes perceptible.
From this perspective, waste is not simply what remains. Microplastics, for example, are simultaneously matter, process, environmental transformation, and a form of agency. They persist, circulate, fragment, and enter into new relationships with organisms and ecosystems.
Our work seeks to develop methodologies that integrate philosophical inquiry, scientific analysis, artistic creation, and public participation. Through publications, workshops, exhibitions, visualization devices, citizen-science practices, and field research, we aim to contribute to a critical and plural understanding of the transformation of the natural world.
Rather than offering general answers, Arte+Ciencia works from specific contexts. We seek to understand how the realities we inhabit are produced technically, politically, and materially, and how other forms of relationship among bodies, objects, communities, and environments might be imagined.
Spaces of Resistance
Space as a philosophical concept has gone through important questionings and has acquired centrality in contemporary debates. From the history of ideas, we could analyze the emergency conditions of the repositioning of this concept. There would be at least two fundamental conditions: the questioning of mathematical space, its continuity and extension; and the cracking of the subjectivity, to which the space belonged as part of the possibility of understanding the world.
Neither mathematical nor subjective space, that is to say, neither something quantifiable and divisible, nor something as a mere structure; the reconsideration of space as an ontological category has implied to link it back to time, to temporize it, to make it the result of interrelations and in constant construction. The space is not merely there, but it comes to be, it is open and it is also constituted according to the entities that occur in it.
If the idea of spatiality had excluded temporality, it is now a matter of understanding the movement, historization and temporization of what seemed neutral, empty and simply given. Space is invested, it is not an a priori and it is something that is built through negotiations; the political sphere is inescapable.
From the proposal of natural philosophy that we are following, we intend to think the space in temporization with ecology and evolution as the horizon for reflection. Seeking to have a more specific approach to concrete materiality, we have to open up the subject of space and frame it in evolutionary and ecological terms in order to think about the relationship conditioned-conditioning in spacing. This is, in what way living organisms condition the environment, at the same time as it is conditioned by them.
In the context of the contemporary academic discussions on the “evolution of the species” the importance of organisms as integrated systems that develop ontogenetically —that is, they unfold structural and functional complexity as they grow throughout their lifetime— and that respond plastically to the environment in which with their own activities, are central. Within the theoretical structure which represents the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”, the notion of causal reciprocity between organism(s) and environment(s) and their complementary concept —according to which development ontogenetic is itself constructor of the structural/functional details of the organism (since these are not 'coded' exhaustively in the genome)— needs to include the idea of spacing so as to rethink the conditioned-conditioning relationship.
We will also incorporate the idea of niche construction, because it allows us to ask questions in relation to the role that organisms play in the production of their space, and how it is directly related to the adaptive process and ecological heritage.
This is linked to discussions in the art world. In the twentieth century notions of selection and mutation are included in artistic formulas that rethink the configuration of spaces and their intervention beyond the limits of the museum and the gallery. Space and the medium must be explicitly thematized as plastic materials.
Main Lines of Research in Nature Philosophy, Art and Science (2018-2023)
During the twentieth century in continental philosophy the ontologies of language and history had a preponderant place, and although there are exceptions, as in H. Bergson, H. Plessner or N. Hartmann, it is possible to say that the century was dominated by the reflection of language and history. In the last decades a shift in continental philosophy has begun towards the themes of life and nature which are starting to become a commonplace. The way to approach the subject of life and nature from ontology, differs from the epistemological concerns that often characterise the philosophy of science and the recent philosophy of biology. The way in which an ontology, with the living as its horizon, operates and can be constructed is precisely what needs to be investigated.
This project seeks to propose that:
1) The privileged place to sketch the ontological question has ceased to be human culture (either language, art or history).
2) That the emergency conditions of this turn have yet to be investigated, however, it is possible to advance the proposition that material changes are so forceful in the twentieth century that it has become necessary to ask again from the natural world, just now that the last corners of the natural world seem to disappear frantically. The massive growth of western and eastern cities in the twentieth century, the demand for and alienation of food, the disappearance of urban animals, the birth of biotechnology, the almost all-embracing nature of technology, environmental destruction, sustainability issues, the increasing degree of artificiality of the world we are facing, all seem to lead to the necessary and unavoidable question about life and nature. For this reason, biopolitics, bioethics, biophilosophy, bioart, animal philosophies, plant philosophies, history and theory of art from biotechnology, and philosophies of the media and technological, artificial and biological mediations begin to emerge.
3) That the way of asking ontologically for the real in the twenty-first century is obliged to do it from matter, from nature, from life but in very different terms from the immediate antecedent, that is, from the natural philosophies of the nineteenth century, since the relationship we are currently establishing with the sciences and technologies from the humanities (and even from everyday life) is radically different given the rampant technologization of the urban world, the ultra specialization of science, DIY movements (do it yourself) within the biological sciences, e.g. the so-called “garage biology”, the challenges of projects on artificial life and artificial intelligence, recombinant DNA, manipulation of living organisms at the genetic level with epistemic, economic and/or aesthetic intentions and a very long etcetera.
4) That art, with the preponderance it had in the ontologies of the 20th century, must also be thought of ontologically from a natural philosophy, but not in modern terms, not as a separate, delimited and definable aesthetic object, but as a way of dealing with the sensitive real, with the sensitive world based on procedures and processes marked today by hybridization, not only of group and collective techniques and knowledge, but also of audiences and spectators, producers, exhibition spaces, etc. The territories of art today appear rather as open processes, the border between art, science, technology, design, engineering, theoretical research, humanistic reflection are very often exceeded in contemporary artistic proposals.
5) That if natural philosophy is to be a way of rethinking the ontological question in the twenty-first century according to nature and materiality, this philosophy can not proceed outside the sciences and the arts, but will have to think of a direct contact with them, as constant producers of the world of nature and materiality. The way in which natural philosophy can fruitfully deal with the arts and sciences in order to rethink the ontological question has yet to be invented on the march, and that is precisely what it proposes to do with this research project, to take a few steps in the way towards a natural philosophy.
6) That systems biology may be related to natural philosophy since in the last decades the study of biological phenomena has revealed the need for an integral approach. That is why the so-called systems biology has become very important. In this approach we propose a global methodological framework in which diverse disciplines converge, including mathematical and computational modeling. As a result of this approach, several trends have been outlined.
