Net-ecologies

General Ecology is a project that operated, between 2018 and 2025, as a department within Serpentine, London, working across curatorial, live arts, performance, and organisational theory. Encompassing events, convenings, networks, infrastructural and long-term research projects that held ecology and the environment at their core, it aimed to embed environmental subjects and methods throughout Serpentine, from the organisation’s internal, less visible, structural parts to its most visible components of public programming. In this conversational chapter with Lucia Pietroiusti, currently Head of Research and Emergence at Hartwig Art Foundation, formerly Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, and Founder of General Ecology, the ideas behind the prototyping of this project are discussed to understand where conceptual and operational thinking might merge and give rise to institutional change.