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Making the Strange Familiar: Getting Intimate with Toxicity

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Title: Making the Strange Familiar: Getting Intimate with Toxicity
Authors: Ruby, de Vos, Art & Sustainability, Art & Sustainability, Alberto, Godioli, Nilgun, Bayraktar
Source: E(n)stranged: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture. :73-92
Publisher Information: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Publication Year: 2024
Physical Description: 20
Subject Terms: defamiliarization, ostranenie, toxicity, toxiciteit, vervreemding, Art, Art & Wellbeing, Healthy Ageing, Art & Sustainability, Art, Learning and Participation, SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities, SDG 09 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, SDG 15 - Life on Land, SDG 14 - Life Below Water, SDG 13 - Climate Action, SDG 04 - Quality Education, SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production, SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities, Language, Culture and Arts, Education and Teaching, Spatial Planning and Policy, Nature and Agriculture, People and Society
Description: How does defamiliarization relate to that which it assumes to be familiar? This chapter explores this question in the context of toxicity, an often invisible and imperceptible power, with the aid of two case studies from landscape art. Wout Berger’ s work Giflandschap (Poisoned Landscape, 1992) is exemplary of the ways in which defamiliarization has been a useful aesthetic strategy for artists to make toxicity’ s presence in the everyday tangible. But if toxicity (also outside artistic contexts) always has to be discovered or remembered anew, as Lawrence Buell (Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24(3): 639–665, 1998) already pointed out, how can we learn to live with toxicity and to understand its ongoing, pervasive presence? Can defamiliarization actually stay with the toxic trouble at hand (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)? Through a second case study, Alexandra Navratil’ s Silbersee (2015), this chapter explores the possibilities of getting intimate with toxicity instead. Ultimately, it suggests that in the context of toxicity, it can be generative to make the strange familiar again.
Document Type: book Part
Language: English
Access URL: https://research.hanze.nl/en/publications/f932b5d2-1ca8-4041-be13-e8ef2b177f1e
Availability: http://www.hbo-kennisbank.nl/en/page/hborecord.view/?uploadId=hanzepure:oai:research.hanze.nl:publications/f932b5d2-1ca8-4041-be13-e8ef2b177f1e
Accession Number: edshbo.hanzepure.oai.research.hanze.nl.publications.f932b5d2.1ca8.4041.be13.e8ef2b177f1e
Database: HBO Kennisbank
Description
Abstract:How does defamiliarization relate to that which it assumes to be familiar? This chapter explores this question in the context of toxicity, an often invisible and imperceptible power, with the aid of two case studies from landscape art. Wout Berger’ s work Giflandschap (Poisoned Landscape, 1992) is exemplary of the ways in which defamiliarization has been a useful aesthetic strategy for artists to make toxicity’ s presence in the everyday tangible. But if toxicity (also outside artistic contexts) always has to be discovered or remembered anew, as Lawrence Buell (Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24(3): 639–665, 1998) already pointed out, how can we learn to live with toxicity and to understand its ongoing, pervasive presence? Can defamiliarization actually stay with the toxic trouble at hand (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)? Through a second case study, Alexandra Navratil’ s Silbersee (2015), this chapter explores the possibilities of getting intimate with toxicity instead. Ultimately, it suggests that in the context of toxicity, it can be generative to make the strange familiar again.