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From ArtHist.net:

Sympoiesis: Temporal Ecologies in Art and Nature, ca. 1800

Sympoiesis: Zeit-Ökologien in Kunst und Natur um 1800

Erbacher Hof, Mainz, 30 September — 2 October 2026

Proposals due by 15 March 2026

Second annual conference of the Mini-Graduate College Die ästhetischen Erfindungen der Ökologie um 1800, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

Between geological deep time and the fleetingness of a single breath, between the slow erosion of coastlines and the periodic return of day and night, between vegetative growth, heartbeat, pulse, and meter, concepts of the natural unfold as constellations of heterogeneous temporal horizons. In works of art, these heterogeneous temporalities can be synchronized: the artwork then becomes a site of sympoiesis (Donna Haraway). This delineates a becoming-with in which biological growth processes, cyclical repetitions, and linear processes of decay are not merely represented but amalgamated into a new aesthetic temporality of the artwork itself. Mary Delaney serves as one example here. In her Paper Mosaiks, she makes collages out of real plant parts put together with colored paper. She presents bud and fruiting body, which are distinct developmental stages, simultaneously, thus transgressing the natural temporal order and creating a synchronicity of diachronic events.

The conference seeks to explore how artworks around 1800 work as cross-sections through heterogeneous temporal layers of the natural. The guiding concept of sympoiesis marks a shift in perspective. It does not pitch nature against art, nor does it denote environments as mere background. Instead, it highlights the cooperative production of vitality across different forms of knowledge and practice. At the center is thus a making-with, in which matter and materials, media, bodies, discourses, and practices enter into relation with one another. The chosen timeframe of around 1800—during which the interplay of natural philosophy, early biology, geology, aesthetics, poetics, and new musical temporal orders is especially prominent—lends itself to discussions of how vitality is both understood in the context of ecological relations and conceived as a temporally structured process of becoming.

A range of disciplinary approaches is welcome, including:
• Temporal ecologies in poetics and aesthetics, descriptions of nature, history of metaphors; meter, rhythm, repetition; temporal semantics of growth, transformation, threshold, crisis.
• Image-time and material time; montage/collage, series, study; landscape as a medium of deep time; visualizations of cycles, change, erosion; practices of collecting and classification as temporal orders.
• Beat, pulse, period, tempo as models of the living; bodily and affective temporalities; rhythmization, synchronization, and their disruptions; form as a temporal ecology (recurrence, variation, transition).
More broadly, the conference invites reflections on:
• Aesthetics and orders of temporality
• Temporal concepts within individual disciplines
• Knowledge and history, tense and development
• Phenomenologies of movement and transformation: how can growth and metamorphosis be narrated or visualized without freezing them in static representation?
• Rhythm and meter: where does “striated time” (meter, beat, measured time) encounter the ‘smooth time’ of organic flow? How do heartbeat, pulse, and breath relate to the musical period or poetic meter around 1800?
• Cycles and thresholds: how do art, literature, and music stage the transition from day to night, the change of seasons, or the stages of life? Do these works assert a harmonious synchronicity of the natural, or do they instead make visible the asynchronies and fractures within the temporal fabric?

The workshop will take place from 30 September to 2 October 2026 at the Erbacher Hof in Mainz. We invite interested scholars to submit abstracts in either German or English (maximum 300 words) for a 30-minute presentation, along with a short CV, to gregor.wedekind@uni-mainz.de and ctheisin@uni-mainz.de by 15 March 2026.

b i b l i o g r a p h y

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