An eco-aesthetic for economization? Non-modern social practices of art and ecology

A central issue of the ongoing debate on ecological practices concerns the different self-positioning of activists in front of political and economic institutions. It ranges from local practices of self-empowerment of marginalized groups (eg. Deirdre O'Mahony in rural Ireland), to protest activism like Occupy Wall Street movement, to alternative anti-capitalist economic models (eg. Theory of degrowth). The ecological activism has different faces, models and targets. If on one hand this diversity is a resource, enabling the movement of creative and innovative capacities, on the other it threatens to fragment the energies and disperse the efforts in many directions. This article seeks to analyze two of the main lines of fracture crossing the different positions in the field of ecology, trying to place them in the theoretical frame defined by Bruno Latour’s research on the relationship between nature and culture and Michel Callon’s research on economization.