Eco-activist Film and Visual Art From Latin America

该项目研究了电影和视觉艺术之间的相互联系，以及拉丁美洲的环境正义活动，该地区结合了地球上最大的生物多样性和一些最严重的生态政治和领土冲突。近年来，环境正义运动日益突出并得到发展，电影、录像、装置和表演等视觉形式的从业者正在应对社会环境威胁的加剧，并开展反社会环境威胁的运动，与包括阿根廷、哥伦比亚、厄瓜多尔、墨西哥和秘鲁在内的拉丁美洲国家的活动家合作或作为活动家开展活动，创造出既明确激进又具有美学实验性的视觉形式。该项目将识别和分析艺术家和环保活动家之间最近和新兴的共同创作和合作过程，以及制作的艺术品和电影，并关注由此产生的艺术作品如何在活动家运动中部署。该项目旨在了解视觉形式如何用于追求环境正义目标，并探索环境正义行动主义的新兴叙事和图像，以及视觉形式记录、概念化、可视化和美学调解紧迫问题和斗争的方式。为了应对环境危机，土著生物中心主义和相关形式的知识越来越被视为至关重要，尽管有关生态和气候崩溃的全球对话仍然由西方学术和科学话语主导。那些受影响最大的人--拉丁美洲的“边缘”人民--的声音被边缘化了。所研究的作品和项目本身都满足了观点多样化的需要，该项目将关注艺术家和艺术品如何将受影响社区的观点呈现给更广泛的世界。它将试图描绘的生态和政治叙事，话语和认识论中出现的作品研究，以及他们带来的概念，以行星规模的讨论环境正义和生态危机。该项目感兴趣的是，与非人类的替代关系-在某些情况下源于或与土著思想有关-对于任何应对环境危机都至关重要，而活动家的艺术作品既参与了变革，也经常通过美学实验，在表现这些变化的关系，无论是在艺术品，以及通过关系的艺术品，他们在观众中引起。因此，成果将在环境和政治话语、叙事和认识论方面对这项工作进行评估，以及其美学组织与其活动家意图保持一致的方式，重新配置人类/自然二元关系，克服通常被理解为困扰生态危机表现的叙事和美学挑战。该奖学金的早期阶段将致力于拉丁美洲的实地考察，对活动家艺术家集体，项目和艺术作品进行初步和实证研究，并在美国暑期学校进行录像培训，让我能够以不同的形式交流我的研究，视频散文。在后期阶段，我的时间将主要用于撰写和在国际会议上展示作品，以便将研究结果传达给电影，艺术，拉丁美洲和环境人文/生态批评交叉的学者，以及组织包括电影季在内的公众参与活动，以确保我将研究结果传达给公众观众，包括英国的拉丁美洲人，活动家，艺术家，环保主义者和其他对这些问题感兴趣的人。该研究金将为研究结束后完成一本书的研究奠定基础。

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.