Eco-activist Film and Visual Art From Latin America

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This project examines the interconnections between film and visual art, and environmental justice activism in Latin America, a region which combines the greatest biodiversity on Earth with some of the gravest eco-political and -territorial conflicts. Environmental justice movements have been gaining prominence and developing in recent years, and practitioners in visual forms such as film, video, installation and performance are responding to the intensification of socio-environmental threat and campaigns against it, working with or as activists in Latin American countries including Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, producing visual forms which are both explicitly activist and aesthetically experimental. The project will identify and analyse recent and emerging processes of co-creation and collaboration between artists and environmental activists, as well as artworks and films produced, and pay attention to how resulting artworks are deployed within activist campaigns.The project seeks to understand how visual forms are being used in pursuit of environmental justice goals, and to explore emergent narratives and images of environmental justice activism, and the ways in which visual forms document, conceptualise, make visible and aesthetically mediate urgent issues and struggles. In order to respond to environmental crisis, Indigenous biocentric and relational forms of knowledge are increasingly seen as crucial, even whilst global conversations about ecological and climate breakdown remain dominated by Western academic and scientific discourses. The voices of those most affected -- the 'peripheral' peoples of Latin America -- are marginalised. The works studied, and the project itself, respond to a need for a diversification of perspectives, and the project will pay attention to the ways in which artists and artworks render the views of affected communities visible and audible to the wider world. It will seek to delineate the ecological and political narratives, discourses and epistemologies that emerge in the works studied, and the concepts they bring to planetary-scale discussions about environmental justice and ecological crisis. Of interest for the project is the idea that alternative relationships to the nonhuman -- which in some cases stem from or relate to Indigenous thought -- are essential to any response to environmental crisis, and that activist artworks are engaged both in agitating for change, but also, often through aesthetic experimentation, in representing these shifting relationships both within the artwork as well as through the relationship to the artwork they elicit in the viewer. Outputs will therefore characterise this work in terms of the environmental and political discourses, narratives and epistemologies it features, as well as the ways in which its aesthetic organisation aligns with its activist intent, reconfiguring human/nature binaries and overcoming narrative and aesthetic challenges commonly understood as besetting the representation of ecological crisis.The Fellowship's early phase will be devoted to fieldwork in Latin America, to carry out primary and empirical research on activist-artist collectives, projects and artworks, as well as to undertaking videographic training at a US summer school, to allow me to communicate my research in a different format, the video-essay. During the later phase, my time will mainly be devoted to writing and presenting work at international conferences, in order to communicate findings to scholars at the intersection of film, art, Latin American and environmental humanities/ecocriticism, as well as to organising public engagement events including a film season, to ensure I communicate findings to public audiences including Latin Americans in the UK, activists, artists, environmentalists and others interested in these issues. The Fellowship will lay the groundwork for a book-length study to be completed after its end.