This research project understands surrealism as an ideological form of ecological thinking. Long before ecology became a key political category, the surrealist movement developed a way of thinking in terms of connections: between humans and nature, the inner and outer worlds, dreams and matter, myth and science. Nature appears here not as a system to be classified, but as a living network of relationships, transitions, and metamorphoses.

Starting from Romantic genealogies and the scientific upheavals of the early 20th century, the study shows how new models of exchange and openness are emerging in art, biology, physics, and anthropology. In the work of Max Ernst, André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Toyen, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim, and others, nature is not represented, but rather explored as a dynamic context: in mimetic shifts, dissolved natural realms, and unstable identities.

Surrealism thus appears as a laboratory for a relational worldview—as a poetic exploration of an ecological way of thinking that fundamentally questions the separation of culture and nature.

From September 2019 to June 2020, Julia Drost pursued her research as a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, as part of the annual theme Art & Ecology, and is now continuing her work at the DFK Paris.