On Sunday December 1, we welcome our next Visiting professor: Rosa Eidelpes. In her lecture called Natural Aesthetics? She will expand on nature-culture-relations in art.

Shaken by the global economic and political crisis in the early 1930s, Surrealists like the artist André Masson or the writer and sociologist Roger Caillois were looking for new ways to describe the relationship between nature, culture and art. Caillois for example writes on the beauty of nature; he visions universal and ‘natural’ aesthetics and poetics, a ‘natural fantastic’, not based on human creation, but rooted in nature itself.

In her lecture, Rosa Eidelpes takes up historical approaches to art and aesthetics and puts them into perspective, aiming to reflect on their productive as well as their problematic sides. Given the contemporary debates on the ‘Anthropocene’ and on humankind’s relationship to the environment, we will discuss: How can we think about art and nature in a fruitful way today?

Rosa Eidelpes is a writer, literary scholar and cultural theorist based in Berlin. In 2015, she finished her doctoral thesis on the entanglements between surrealism and ethnology in Paris in the 1930s. Since 2018, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz with a research project on approaches to an “alternative ethnology” in the Federal Republic of Germany, ca. 1979 –1989, and has recently worked with Haus der Kulturen der Welt to prepare the exhibition Love and Ethnology. The Colonial Dialectics of Sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte).