Art, ecology and the alchemy of projections: Giuliana Bruno presents her new book with Cecilia Alemani
October 20, 2022, 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
General Admission Ticket: $15; Members & Students: Free
On the occasion of the publication of Professor Bruno’s new book, Atmospheres of Projection, CIMA will host a conversation between its author and the curator Cecilia Alemani on art, ecology and the alchemy of projections.
Giuliana Bruno’s latest book explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science as well as visual art and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their “environmentality” produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.
“Bruno’s extraordinary book is a capital redefinition of the boundaries between art, reality, and ecology. . . . It shows us that art is always atmospheric projection: transporting the real out of its proper place that image with the world instead of separating it from it. To make art is always to traverse the cosmos, to make atmosphere with it. Art, then, is the first form of ecological construction of the world.”
—Emanuele Coccia, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is internationally known for her research on the intersections of the visual arts, architecture, film, and media. Her seminal book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002, 2017) provided new directions for visual studies, and won the Kraszna-Krausz Award for “the world’s best book on the moving image.” In Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago, 2014), she revisited the concept of materiality in contemporary art. Other books include Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton, 1993), winner of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies book award, and Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Chicago, 2007). Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. Professor Bruno has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary artists. She has written for the Whitney Museum’s show Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2017 as well as exhibition catalogues of the Venice Biennale, the Museo Reina Sofia, the Guggenheim Museum, LACMA, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She is featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (Sage, 2008) as one of the most influential intellectuals working today in visual studies.
Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York. Currently, she is the Artistic Director of the 59th International Art Exhibition (2022) in Venice. Since 2011, she has been the Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York. In 2018, Alemani served as Artistic Director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires. In 2017, she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Tiro a Segno Foundation.
