Editorial: Art and Ethics — Traversing the Fragile Terrains of Responsibility, Memory, and Embodiment
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau
Chapman University, Orange, California, USA
Citer cet article
Magrin-Chagnolleau, I. (2025). Editorial: Art and Ethics — Traversing the Fragile Terrains of Responsibility, Memory, and Embodiment. p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e, 8.
This issue of p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e brings together a constellation of contributions that interrogate the ethical dimensions of artistic practice across a wide spectrum of contexts—ecological, historical, corporeal, and political. The articles, essays, and reflections gathered here do not merely illustrate ethical concerns; they enact them, perform them, and sometimes even trouble them. Together, they offer a rich and multifaceted exploration of how art can serve as a site of ethical inquiry, resistance, and transformation.
We begin with a cluster of contributions that foreground ecological awareness and environmental ethics. Marcher léger. Immersion, observation, co-suscitations opens the issue with a poetic and philosophical meditation on walking as an artistic and ethical gesture. Here, the act of walking becomes a medium for ecological attention, aesthetic lightness, and political subversion. Designing Through the Body: Embodied Ethics and Multispecies Perspectives in Design Practice extends this reflection into the realm of multispecies design, proposing an embodied ethics that includes non-human perspectives. Biofeedback Art Meditation to Strengthen Sense Making for Global Challenges explores altered states of consciousness and their potential to foster empathy and global awareness through brain-computer music interfacing. Finally, L’animisme négro-africain : l’exploitation poétique et l’idéologie écologiste comme un au-delà de l’adoration reclaims animist cosmologies as poetic and ecological frameworks of resistance and care.
The next section turns to memory, mourning, and the ethics of representation. In Eating Shame: A Tribute to Cherry Smyth’s Famished, poetry becomes a vessel for re-membering the Irish Famine through the lens of shame and embodiment. Impasses des politiques de la mémoire dans les actions de deuil de Doris Salcedo examines the political and ethical stakes of public mourning in Colombia through the work of Doris Salcedo. Redressing Naked Dave: Defending Dave Stevens by Challenging Laura Molina’s Unethical and Exploitative Artistic Practices offers a critical analysis of revenge, consent, and the ethics of representation in contemporary art, raising difficult questions about artistic responsibility and personal boundaries.
The third movement of the issue focuses on embodiment, death, and artistic praxis. Quelques situations ordinaires d’usages des corps avec éthique investigates artistic practices that engage the body as a site of ritual, alterity, and ethical encounter. Art as a catalyst for ethical reflection on death, autopsy, and human remains in museums explores how interdisciplinary art projects open new ethical spaces around death, autopsy, and the curation of human remains in museums.
We close the issue with a powerful philosophical inquiry into the aesthetics of violence. L’expérience artistique de la violence : essai philosophique sur la nature éthique d’une représentation de l’extrême examines the ethical implications of representing violence in art.
Across these diverse contributions, a common thread emerges: the ethical is not an external framework imposed upon art, but something that emerges from within artistic practice itself. It is in the gestures, the materials, the silences, and the ruptures that ethics takes form. This issue invites readers to dwell in these fragile terrains—not to resolve them, but to inhabit them with care, curiosity, and critical attention.