Pacific – Centre for Environmental Humanities

Creative Environments: a workshop on collaborative methods for researchers and artists

Friday 17 September 2021

Call for Contributions

The Brigstow Institute and the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol invite contributions for a workshop on the role of creativity in conducting and communicating environmental research. During this one-day event, participants will consider how creative research methods and collaborations between researchers and artists can enrich our understanding of contemporary ecological challenges.

Amid growing scholarly interest in art-science collaborations and in transdisciplinary and co-produced research, what can be learned from existing best practice, and what innovations are needed in order to further cultivate ‘arts of attentiveness’ (van Dooren et al., 2016) to our environments? In seeking to answer these questions, the day’s activities will include presentations from academics, a showcase of work by local and international artists, and plenty of time for brainstorming and generating new ideas.

The workshop forms part of the AHRC-funded research project Reimagining the Pacific (PI Dr Paul Merchant). The event will be held in person at the University of Bristol, subject to covid restrictions, but may switch to an online format if necessary. Virtual participation will be facilitated. The workshop may lead to a co-authored publication or other output (format to be discussed at the event).

Contributions are invited in a variety of formats (the following list is not intended to be exclusive):

presentations showcasing examples of academic collaboration with artists and creative practitioners, or the use of creative research methodologies
readings or performances of material created as a result of such collaborations
(audio)visual materials to be displayed at the conference venue and online
theoretical reflections on the co-production of knowledge

Submissions from early-career researchers are particularly welcome. Please send a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to paul.merchant@bristol.ac.uk by 15 July 2021.

Reposted from Reimagining the Pacific.

Banner image: “Local surfers from above #chicama #surf #peru” by neverything; licensed under CC BY 2.0

CEH member Paul Merchant has published new research on the Pacific Ocean in Chilean cinema in the Bulletin of Latin American Research.

”Collecting What the Sea Gives Back’: Postcolonial Ecologies of the Ocean in Contemporary Chilean Film’ addresses the entanglements between ecology and postcolonial politics in the films of Tiziana Panizza and Patricio Guzmán.

The abstract, from BLAR, is:

This article proposes a new mode of understanding the entanglement of ecological and postcolonial questions in contemporary Chilean filmmaking, through the lens of directorial subjectivity. Both Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017), and El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán, 2015) contest hegemonic structures of belonging by constructing an alternative ‘oceanic archive’. Yet where Guzmán’s metaphorical meditations on indigenous connections to the ocean risk collapsing into romanticism and replicating colonial visuality, Panizza’s reflexive conception of filmmaking as a situated and embodied practice facilitates a subtler understanding of cinema’s political engagement in this sphere.

You can read and download the article here.

Dr Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American film and visual culture, with particular emphasis on the countries of the Southern Cone and, more recently, Peru and Bolivia. He has recently completed his first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015.

Header image credit: Tierra sola (Solitary Land, Tiziana Panizza, 2017)

Tag: Pacific

Creative Environments workshop: call for contributions

Collecting What the Sea Gives Back: a new paper by Paul Merchant