The Art & Ecology research group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts is happy to invite you to the next session of the Art & Ecology Reading Group.
The Reading Group gathers monthly at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Each meeting, we will read and discuss relevant and urgent selected articles within the field of enquiry of the Art & Ecology research group. The group welcomes everyone - researchers, staff, students, alumni or otherwise - who wishes to participate.
Thursday 15 January 2026, 17:00-19:00
Our reading group sessions on 18 December 2025 and 15 January 2026 will be dedicated to Rachel Carson's classic, Silent Spring, which was first published as a series in three successive issues of the New Yorker in the summer of 1962, and as a book by Houghton Mifflin in September 1962.
The publication had an amazing resonance: it sparked the environmental movement and led to a partial ban on the pesticide DDT. As Linda Lear was writing in 1998, "Silent Spring reminds us as almost no other piece of scientific literature not only of the practical workings of ecology, which we too easily ignore, but also of the power of the individual to bring about change. Rachel Carson's efforts to save what she loved left us a legacy of singular integrity and personal courage."
During our meeting on 15 January, we'll discuss the chapters 11 ("Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias") and 16 ("The Rumblings of an Avalanche") from Silent Spring, as well as Linda Lear's afterword to Penguin's 1998 edition of the publication.
Warm regards,
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Sina Hensel and Roel Arkesteijn
