Translated by Louise Pain

The historical division between nature and culture is a structural order that continues to shape how we view the world today. It became firmly established during the Enlightenment and with the emergence of the modern natural sciences, which increasingly sought to frame nature as a thing that could be objectively apprehended and measured in neutral terms—in direct opposition to the rational, reasoning human subject. This dualistic worldview has been repeatedly challenged throughout human history—perhaps most notably by evolutionary theory, Marxism, and Freudian psychoanalysis, each of which has helped to problematise the supposedly clear-cut boundary between nature and culture. Yet despite these challenges, the distinction has retained considerable influence. Since the 1990s in particular, it has come under renewed, fundamental criticism, increasingly understood as a historically constructed category of order that fails to account for the complex entanglements of human and non-human existence.

From this perspective, nature and culture can no longer be understood as separate, independent spheres. Instead, they emerge as intertwined, mutually constitutive, and interdependent dimensions of a single reality. This interdependence—or mutuality—is what lies at the heart of the present issue of this journal. The term ‘mutuality’ refers to a condition of reciprocal dependence and is closely related to Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘Natureculture’, which directly challenges the assumed dualism between nature and culture.

This concept of fundamental reciprocity or mutuality—as opposed to, say, autonomy—calls into question more than just the order that divides the world into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. It also challenges the associated hierarchy that casts some entities as active subjects and others as passive objects, while presenting this arrangement as neutral and self-evident. To this day, ostensibly objective demarcations between subjects and objects, nature and culture, continue to be used to legitimise colonial, racialised, and gendered hierarchies and forms of violence. At the same time, they also serve as instruments of exclusion, marking particular bodies, ways of being, and even entire populations as ‘Other’, and thereby making the subjugation, paternalistic control, and oppression of these groups seem justified.

As a critical concept, mutuality must also be considered in relation to the tradition of a dialectic of the domination of nature: the attempt to free humanity from nature’s perceived tyranny, whether manifested in the form of natural disasters or disease. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer show that this aspiration to mastery can itself give rise to new forms of subjugation. The domination of external nature also entails the suppression of our internal nature: our drives, affects, and bodily existence. In seeking to master the natural world, human beings are also compelled to exert control over ourselves, increasingly through technological means. In the process, we become objects of the very same instrumental reason we apply to the world around us.

Yet however accurately Adorno and Horkheimer may have described this dialectic, they failed to fundamentally interrogate the categories of nature and culture themselves; the underlying dualism remained intact. This is where Haraway’s concept of Natureculture opens up a different perspective. As a neologism, it rejects the assumption that nature and culture can be separated into distinct domains, instead emphasising their constitutive entanglement. Natural and cultural phenomena do not exist independently of one another before entering into relation; rather, they are continually produced through their interactions. To understand them therefore requires examining the relationships through which they emerge and take shape.

Taking the idea of art education as an artistic practice as its starting point, this issue explores the relationships between human and non-human actors. It asks how structures, processes, and frameworks of inclusion and exclusion can be rendered visible or even overcome, how responsibility, respect, and equality can be put into practice, and what pitfalls these efforts may entail. The focus is therefore not simply on the existence of mutual relationships in art—a notion frequently invoked in art discourse and in some cases used as a means to establish a sense of distinction. Applied to art, mutuality demands that we attend to the needs of others, human and non-human alike, while critically reflecting on our own actions and remaining open to the possibility that we may be changed by these encounters. It also requires us to recognise that relationships are not inherently egalitarian: they can remain shaped by power, exclusion, and people’s unequal capacities to act. We must ask ourselves: Who gets to define relationships? Whose knowledge is recognised, and whose perspective remains invisible? And how can we take accountability without yet again reducing others to mere objects of our own assumptions and projections?

Drawing on this perspective, Doina Petrescu introduces TERRRA, a centre for popular ecology in Romania that brings together local knowledge, traditional craftsmanship, and contemporary ecological practices. The project places collaborative learning and the transmission of embodied knowledge at the heart of socio-ecological transformation.

Sophie von Redecker explores the dialogue between agricultural practice and posthumanist theory, submitting the two to a process of mutual understanding. She argues that mutuality, care, and situated knowledge—understood in ways that extend beyond exclusively human perspectives—are integral to the agricultural approach, while also offering valuable points of entry into the diverse fields of new materialisms and posthumanism. Weaving together autobiographical experience with theoretical reflection, her contribution demonstrates how the ‘agrarian humanities’ are not only of academic relevance, but can also have an impact in the political and cultural spheres.

Art historian Michael Klipphahn-Karge takes land art, a movement that first emerged in to the 1960s, as a starting point for examining the implicit political positions of art that sees itself as being intertwined with nature and the Earth. He shows how the supposedly inherent power of such artworks often goes unquestioned, as do the economic conditions of their production, which both shape and exploit the very conception of nature these works invoke. From this critique, he develops possibilities and criteria for what he terms ‘materialist mutuality’ in contemporary art.

Sarah K. Becker examines how the science-fiction film Under the Skin, which features a female alien protagonist and a black, fluid space, revives and reimagines an ancient and enduring motif from mythology and cultural history: the seduction of men by beings or entities that are perceived as female—and are often associated with water—who simultaneously embody both desire and danger. Becker traces how the relationship between men and these ‘women of the water’ reproduces a binary trope within gendered systems of order. She also demonstrates how this dualistic framework, which contrasts the fluid and enigmatic on the one hand with the strong and solid on the other, is rooted in a fear of losing a stable masculine identity.

In an interview with Havîn Al-Sîndy, Martin Krenn explores how relational art practice might be redefined by considering ecologies and the conditions of visibility in tandem. Al-Sîndy’s work demonstrates how a relational perspective can open up new possibilities for mutuality, while also always carrying the risk of engendering new forms of exclusion. The artist is acutely aware of this tension and addresses it directly in her practice. For Al-Sîndy, mutuality involves critically examining the conditions that determine our own visibility and invisibility, while remaining willing to be profoundly transformed by our encounters with others.

Paula A. Knust Rosales interviews Jule Hillgärtner about her professional trajectory and her work at the Science and Art Lab at the TU Braunschweig. Their conversation explores how their work focuses on establishing points of intersection between science, art, and education, with the aim of embodying and establishing reciprocity in practice. This requires challenging and overcoming existing institutional structures and logics, and reimagining these fields not as separate domains, but as parts of a unified whole.

Benno Hauswaldt speaks with Aria Farajnezhad about his installation work The Flowers Devoured What They Were Meant For, which is currently on display at the Kunstverein Hannover as part of an exhibition featuring work by the recipients of the Kunstverein Hannover Award. In this piece, Farajnezhad investigates the involvement of industry in the German Empire in the Armenian genocide of the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival research, he focuses in particular on the Hanomag industrial complex in Hannover’s Linden district, which was responsible for manufacturing and supplying armaments and locomotives for the Berlin–Baghdad Railway.

The practice-based contributions in this issue also approach mutuality as a question of concrete relationships, both within the field of art and beyond it, in its interactions with broader social and ecological contexts. In their ten-year art project Park in Progress, Susanne Bosch and Ulrike Zimmermann will be monitoring a selection of trees in Sanssouci Park and documenting their progression amid the conditions of climate change. By tracing the interdependencies between trees, humans, and their environment, they ask how responsibility might be rethought if non-human living beings came to be viewed not merely as objects to be protected, but as active participants in a shared world.

Lio Bramkamp explores the possibilities of an intersectional approach to art education that is informed by an active awareness of social inequality. The contribution examines the ways in which classism, social disparities, and intersecting forms of discrimination determine what access different people have to art spaces, and how a reflective practice of art education can help dismantle barriers, challenge hierarchies, and foster a sense of self-efficacy.

For this issue, Julika Teubert reviews Eva von Redecker’s recently published book Dieser Drang nach Härte: Über den neuen Faschismus (The New Fascism: Entitlement and the Urge to Destroy). Taking contemporary social and political conditions as her starting point, and drawing in particular on Critical Theory, von Redecker seeks to articulate a term for the present-day manifestation of this drive toward hardness and destruction. The book also examines the degree to which historical definitions of fascism align and overlap with how we understand the term today.

Taken together, the contributions in this issue demonstrate that mutuality is neither a harmonious ideal nor a straightforward formula for successful relationships. It begins with acknowledging dependencies and bringing unequal power dynamics to light. It asks us to question familiar categories, rethink how knowledge is shared, and resist viewing our own positions as fixed or immutable. Whether in ecological learning spaces, art installations, the long-term monitoring of trees, or art education, relationships do not simply arise between subjects who are already fully formed. Rather, relationships also shape the people involved in them and transform the conditions under which they live together. Mutuality offers no definitive answers. Instead, it asks us to closely observe our relationships, to expose the conditions that define them, and to allow ourselves to be transformed by them. Perhaps this is precisely where mutuality begins: in the willingness to relinquish the assumption that we alone have the authority to determine what matters, who is entitled to speak, and to whom the world belongs.

Benno Hauswaldt, Martin Krenn, Malin Kuht

Editorial team for Issue 8: Mutuality