Aesthetics of Risk: Art, Design, and the Cultural Politics of Uncertainty
About this Event
The evening with Francesca Laura Cavallo will feature responses from Dr Josephine Berry, Dr Emily Candela and artist Heather Phillipson.
Followed by a drinks reception.
How is the imperative to manage risk transforming contemporary visual language? Are the rhetorics of danger, reassurance, and rationality convincing us that we are prepared—and at what cost? Through the analysis of artworks, warnings, pre-enactments, and data visualisations, Aesthetics of Risk explores how art and design can shape risk perception and transform the ways we live with uncertainty.
This is the second of two events celebrating the recent work of researchers on the Scoring Warnings AHRC Research Project at the RCA. The first is a screening of Aura Satz’s 2024 film Preemptive Listening.
Dr Francesca Laura Cavallo is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project at the Royal College of Art, UK. An art historian, curator, and interdisciplinary researcher, she teaches across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Communication. Her research explores how art intersects with the activation, management, and perception of risk, engaging critically with contemporary art, curatorial practice, and risk theory.
Dr Josephine Berry is an art theorist and Reader in Environmental Art History at the School of Arts and Humanities. She writes on aesthetic politics with a focus on the intersections of art, site and (bio)power – from spaces of digital globality, to neoliberal urbanism and planetary crisis. She is currently researching artistic approaches to degrowth. She is the author of Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse (Sternberg, 2025) and Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry (Sternberg, 2018).
Dr Emily Candela is a historian and audio artist exploring histories of science and design, most recently through her Arts Council funded project Slag Speaks, made in partnership with the Lapworth Museum of Geology. She is a Senior Research Tutor on the RCA’s MRes programme, Academic Lead for AcrossRCA, and co-organises Sound@RCA and the Voicing Sound Research Group.
Heather Phillipson is a British artist working across sculpture, installation, video, digital media, drawing, sound and text. Phillipson was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022 and her sculpture THE END was selected for the Fourth Plinth commission, Trafalgar Square, UK, from 2020-2022. Also an award-winning poet and an acclaimed filmmaker, Phillipson has published several poetry collections and received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016.
About the book:
“Risk is as much a sensory and aesthetic experience as it is an anticipatory condition. In Aesthetics of Risk, Francesca Laura Cavallo eloquently demonstrates how perceptions of safety or threats materialise across aesthetic dimensions, from safety manuals and data visualisations to survival guides and instructions for surviving disasters. This is an essential contribution to broadening our understandings of risk landscapes.” (Jennifer Gabrys, Professor, University of Cambridge, UK)
“Aesthetics of Risk by Francesca Laura Cavallo faces forwards as well as looking back. It offers a sense of how the future of risk and its management (perhaps still conceived as the making of safe spaces) can be harnessed to, or at least comprehended by, modes of accommodation and social amelioration. It questions how we might shore-up ‘the predictive vocabulary of risk’ against both the predatory and unknowable.” (John C. Welchman, Distinguished Professor of Art History, University of California, USA)
“Risk is hard to define yet is often best conveyed via visual language. This essential book provides a critical review of scholars and practitioners approaches to risks by examining visual aesthetics and performative rhetoric throughout history, right though to contemporary existential risks. By working across disciplinary silos and a wide range of artists and tools ranging from Marina Abramović, to Atomic Radiation Guides, to Bloomberg, this book presents a compelling argument on the importance of the framing and perception of risk, that ultimately shape our future, and the need to create dialogue to support understanding and relevance.” (Carina Fearnley, Professor in Warnings and Science Communication, University College of London, UK)
“This book is a startling rendition of and an essential contribution to risk exploration and analysis. Its brilliant intellectual and visual melding innovatively relates risk and art, demanding that the reader seek to understand and create better futures in which risks are aesthetically reimagined and thus managed better for everyone.” (Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health, University College London, UK and UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
“Francesca Cavallo highlights a repressed underpinning of creative endeavor: the calculation of permissible expenditure by which danger is reified and transformed into its opposite, "risk." Demonstrating the unsettling pervasiveness of risk assessment not only among the gatekeeping institutions of the art world but also, in its extreme extension, within the micro-expenditures that make up everyday activity and interaction, Cavallo reveals ours to be a risk-management society, in which danger's rightful role in our lives—the right to make sacrifices without a guaranteed outcome—is increasingly being eradicated. Cavallo's practice thus helps make sense of the dead, relentlessly "safe" character of everyday life under neoliberalism—a mood so at odds with its reality of extreme involuntary danger—creating a small space in which another, more authentically risky way of life becomes momentarily imaginable.” (Abraham Adams, Artforum Contributor)
Interview with Matteo Pini for Tank Magazine
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
