Witnessing environments

Abstract

This article offers a conceptual and historical introduction to the significance of witnessing in relationship to environmental questions for the HAU special section “Witnessing Environments.” The articles in this special section take as their focus the often fragmented ways in which witnessing gains traction—as both practice and ethos—across environmental interventions. They also chart the ways that the pairing of “witnessing” and “environment” reconfigures both terms, with environmental questions, their politics, and their mediatization at once challenging and providing emergent spaces of creativity and experiment in relation to witnessing.