Ewa Machotka

Associate Professor in Japanese Art history at Stockholm University

Membership period 2019–2024

Culture is recognized as an important factor that impacts social-ecological systems, but the precise parameters of the role of visual art in sustainability remain obscure. The question is how art operates as the agent of social-ecological change. Does it hinder or generate pro-environmental behavior, the Holy Grail of sustainability? And how do we reconcile the clash between the subjectivity of artistic experience and the collective goals of socially engaged art?

As an art historian specializing in Japan with a transnational education and career (including Poland, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden) in museums and academic institutions, I am interested in cross-cultural perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches that intersect visual arts, social and environmental history and sustainability sciences, which are capable of addressing these complex issues. Currently my main research project explores Japanese early modern landscape images as a way to study human artistic interaction with the environment and interrogate the role ecological systems play in influencing human creativity and vice versa.

CONTACT

Ewa Machotka at Stockholm University External link, opens in new window.

ewa.machotka@su.se

Click for press photo. Photo: Magnus Kårdal

IN BRIEF

Born: 1974
Interests: Running, hiking, skiing or watching scifi movies and reading short stories from the late 1800s (Tolstoy is my favorite).
Other: During my early teens I developed my own cryptic language, with which I wrote several stories (still not published).

Dissolving disciplinary silos and cultural bias is seen as the key to addressing global climate change, one of the great current 'super wicked problems', which are difficult to understand, analyze and communicate to the public. Young Academy of Sweden, being an interdisciplinary collaboration platform for young researchers, focused on dialogue with the public and decision makers, has great potential to create the synergies necessary to build the social-ecological sustainability that I want to contribute to.”