In this talk, I will engage into an exploration of the deployment of art, not as an add-on “tool” for an already partly-institutionalized “sustainability science”, to help it with the governance of “transformation processes” through problems-solving, but rather, as an epistemologically, phenomenologically and hermeneutically transdisciplinary approach to queering sustainability science.
In this context, I will first discuss the role of “aesthetics of complexity” within a transdisciplinary research culture, and the qualities of artistic research for sustainability studies. I will then further elaborate on art as an articulation of the political – considering antagonistic, agonistic, consensual, and dialogical tendencies in social-ecological art practices and discourses. Moving on from ‘the political’ to policy, and considering the positing of “Culture in, for, and as Sustainable Development”, I will then look at several approaches, ranging from sectoral and inter-sectoral policy-making, to transversal artistic double-agency, and to the emergence of artful spaces of possibilities stimulating a radical open citizenship.