Climate justice is hampered by a lack of awareness and consensus on actions. Offering imaginative scenarios and unconventional approaches, Art & Artistic Research enhance awareness and empower people to move from awareness to action. JUST ART mobilises this potential for a climate just future in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

This research programme focuses on a period of severe pan-European economic and demographic change: the Late Roman Period (AD 300-500) and Early Middle Ages (AD 500-1000). Physical-geographical and biogeological data point at marked climatic variability and changing landscapes during this time interval. In geomorphologically sensitive regions such as river deltas and coastal areas these changes must have had a noticeable impact on the location and lay-out of urban centres and rural settlements, land use and subsistence strategies, and connections of population centres to their economical ?hinterland?. Recent developments in digital infrastructure in the Humanities and Geosciences in the Netherlands for the first time enable us to study these phenomena from an interregional and interdisciplinary perspective. We propose to study how settlement dynamics, land use, infrastructure, demography and trade between AD 300 and 1000 were related to changes of the landscape and climate, focusing on the Lowlands? geomorphologically most sensitive regions. This reconstruction will take place within three complementary PhD-projects, in the realms of archaeology, physical geography and biogeology. Subproject A focuses on occupation patterns and land use in coastal, river and Pleistocene sandy regions, subproject B on natural geomorphologic landscape dynamics in these regions, and subproject C on vegetation changes and climate. We will use dendrochronology-based information about the exact age of settlements and infrastructure, economy, landscape evolution, vegetation and climate to connect the projects. The results will be synthesized in an interdisciplinary reconstruction of the interactions between cultural and environmental dynamics in the Lowlands between AD 300 and 1000 in a broader northwest-European context. The proposed study will greatly improve the archaeological understanding of dynamics in the Early Medieval Lowlands and strongly enhance the framework for future research of this key period.

Ecocritical Approaches to Landscape in the Fries Museum This research explores the potential and dilemmas of ecocritical approaches to landscape in the Fries Museum. Based on case studies from the Fries Museum collection, this research sheds light on issues related to ecology and sustainability in contemporary art and museum practice.

As early as the late 1960s artists have used Dutch landscapes as material in their creative process with aesthetic, ecological and political intentions. Given persistent and new ecological crises (e.g. rising sea levels, earth quakes), the human-shaped landscape of the Northern Netherlands is, again, of great interest to artists today. Yet there is no integral study of the environmentally engaged art in the Northern Netherlands. While the American land artists in the Netherlands (Oppenheim, Morris, Smithson) have received a fair share of attention, related work of Dutch artists (Jansen, De Vries) has faded into oblivion. This project foregrounds the particular engagement of artists with the landscape in the Northern Netherlands since the 1960s. By comparing past to present practices this project shows the shifting notions environmental issues in art and society, with special attention for the particular materiality of local land art: water, peat and gas have not only shaped the environment in the (recent) past but artists utilize those materials in their creative endeavors as critical materials today. The project is structured along these materials and localities in four contexts (coast, polder, peat and gas extraction). This comparative framework enables an analysis between different historical periods and distinct aesthetic approaches: from abstract to activist art, and the myriad of idiosyncratic artistic practices in between. The result will not only provide insight into a hitherto neglected chapter of Dutch land art, but also show how artists might foster awareness and develop new perspectives in the face of contemporary ecological crises.