un-writing nature
Información importante
Dirección
Antonio Collados Alcaide, Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the University of Granada
Coordinación
Mercedes Villalba, writer and researcher, Ph.D. Postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Granada
Introducción
Jute, snakes, clay, petroleum, landscapes, Jupiter’s moons, mycelium, rope, and the axe. The sea and hormones. Gender and oil paint. If your work brushes against ideas or materials that belong to the realm of the natural, and if you have ever wondered where they come from, how they came to be, what histories lie behind the assemblages that compose them, this seminar aims to provide the space and tools to pursue those questions.
Our methodology will be genealogical, rigorous, and intuitive. In other words, we will move away from the illusion of pure origins, striving instead to trace the complex networks of incalculable agencies that culminate in the current state of a debate or a “natural” material. Together, we will create a space to slow down our reading practices and experiment with becoming detectives, archivists, archaeologists, and librarians of the ways in which nature intrigues us.
Artists and curious minds working in any discipline are welcome, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of a project, or simply drawn to the subject itself. We will meet online each week and cultivate asynchronous collective spaces for reading, writing, and image-making.
We will read and study materials such as field guides, biographies of dogs, hybrid books in which authors and landscapes become entangled in processes of making and unmaking, magazine articles that transform ways of seeing and reshape state policy, treatises that brush against—or fully embrace—the mysticism of geological scales, and ethnographies of the sea, forests, and sky. Films, videos, and animations about drugs, gods, and birds.
In the face of these materials, we will ask questions such as: How do we write the nonhuman? How do we describe it? Where does authorship situate itself in relation to the natural—does it expose, explain, demonstrate, describe, dream, speculate? Does it seep, melt, pollinate? Does it devour, inform, protect? How do we rewrite what has been naturalized?
Attendees will be able to
- Explore the philosophical traditions and historical unfoldings that shape different aesthetics of “the natural”.
- Critically engage with discourses of nature.
- Exercise and refine the methodological tools of disciplines such as science and technology studies, anthropology, and critical art studies.
- Apply to their own work the potentialities of these explorations by building an archive of relevant tools and theories.
- Receive a completion certificate from the University of Granada
Idiomas utilizados
Inglés
Module 1 – Fridays September 18th, 25th, and October 2nd
| 17:00 CET | Many worlds: as an introduction, and in keeping with the spirit of the seminar, we will begin in the middle. During these first weeks, we will forage through ideas proposed by authors, artists, and activists who have unsettled the history of the concept of nature, with the aim of rendering our common sense a little stranger. We will read and listen to the work of the Zapatista snails, Marisol de la Cadena, Philippe Descola, Lorraine Daston, Carolyn Merchant, Ursula K. Le Guin, María Zambrano, Mafe Moscoso, Pierre Hadot, and others. |
Module 2 – Fridays October 9th, 16th and 23rd
| 17:00 CET | Interconnections: in the following module, we will focus on ideas of interconnection and symbiosis, tracing their relationship to the various becomings of the concept of ecology. What happens when nature becomes something that must be protected? What kinds of politics does this make possible, and which does it conceal? How does it become entangled with the notion of landscape? We will read and listen to the work of gardeners, environmental activists, filmmakers, and anthropologists, including Derek Jarman, Lynn Margulis, Alexander von Humboldt, Ansel Adams, Stacey Alaimo, and others. |
Module 3 – Fridays October 30th, November 6th and 13th
| 17:00 CET | Dreams: nature as a repository of beauty and goodness: how does the notion of the natural world as a space of purity travel and mutate, and where do its risks and possibilities reside? How does feminist critique intersect with conceptions of nature as a moral domain? In these sessions, we will delve into aesthetics as a moral and political category—one capable of enacting explicit or implicit forms of violence while also nourishing new possibilities for resistance. Drawing on the constellation of definitions assembled during the first half of the seminar, we will also begin tracing our individual archives and organize the first presentation of final projects. |
Module 4 – Fridays November 20th, 27th, and December 4th
| 17:00 CET | Weird times: these weeks will focus on how the aesthetic becoming of nature across different temporalities—utopian, speculative, evolutionary, comparative, and crisis-driven—gives rise to specific aesthetic languages, some intentional and others emerging as unforeseen consequences. We will visit online exhibitions and read the work of artists and theorists such as McKenzie Wark, Marta Echaves, Linda Stupart, Johannes Fabian, N. K. Jemisin, Anna Tsing, and others. |
Module 5 – December 11th and 18th
| 17:00 CET | Final projects: these final weeks will be devoted to presenting and collectively engaging with participants’ final projects, as well as planning a collaborative closing project. |
