Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science
Azucena Castro and Gianfranco Selgas give a presentation in the "Ciclos de Cine Latinoamericano" at the inception of the project Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science. February 2022. Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies.
Rizoma: Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology, and Science is an emerging environmental humanities web-based platform for dialogue, discussion, and exchange of ideas on issues concerning the relationships between art, ecology, and science in the Latin American context. Rizoma aims to nurture a radical and critical space to speculate and experiment collectively in the elaboration and epistemic search for assemblages between culture and the environment. The emphasis on Latin America responds to a question of belonging, situated interest, and academic background that links us geoculturally to the region. Elaborating these ideas from centers of study located in the Global North, Rizoma engages in transdisciplinary dialogues with the Environmental Humanities, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, new materialism, posthumanism, postnature, as well as with radical forms of Latin American and Caribbean thought and epistemes.
The platform was conceived in Stockholm, Sweden, while we pursued doctoral studies at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University. Even though the Environmental Humanities have become an established field of research in the Nordic countries and Scandinavia, engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean has been scarce, often prioritizing other regions in the Global North and the Global South. Latin America and the Caribbean are, however, key to understanding the world-ecological order we inhabit and the global apparatus of exploitation, extraction, and commodification of human and nonhuman bodies. The region offers an essential object of analysis to illuminate historical, epistemological, and ontological conversations that not only can contribute to rethinking the unequal ecology of capitalism and the geopolitics of social, environmental, and ecological transformation, but also can help us better understand the socio-ecological and environmental issues, as well as the impact and consequences of climate change that bound our planet together. With Rizoma, we seek to fill that relevant gap in the Global North's periphery and contribute to the ongoing discussion on the importance of culture in making visible the environmental challenges that, in Latin America, relate to coloniality and extractivism.
The platform stems from the need to connect Latin American Environmental Humanities research with diverse practices, institutions, and approaches. In particular, we see the need for a public-oriented, community-based approach to relations between, for example, cultural studies, climate change, and energy issues. This collaborative project started at the beginning of 2020 when we hosted the itinerant Ciclo de Cine Latinoamericano with environmental topics at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Sweden, we were able to screen the films Amereida, solo las huellas descubren el mar, by Javier Correa, and Los decentes, by Lukas Valenta Rinner. After public gathering restrictions to containing the spread of infection were put in place, the Ciclos de Cine Latinoamericano continued online. This allowed us to connect the educational environment with a non-academic audience. For Environmental Humanities to be relevant and to stimulate transformations towards more sustainable societies, it is crucial, as we believe, to take a step further and reach broader audiences and diverse education environments and generations. What is more, Rizoma takes on the challenge to open scholarly work and academic settings up and make them more accessible for audiences that are scarcely considered and acknowledged by higher education institutions. Rizoma's central concern lies in making diverse knowledges extend, proliferate, and reach out.
This is why we have chosen Rizoma—rhizome—as the name for the platform. While Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have used the rhizome as a metaphor to apprehend multiplicities in an epistemological model, our initiative stresses the material and botanical meaning of the word. We hope to nurture an openness of thought and perception to diverse, overlapping ontologies. Put differently, we want to bring to the fore how pluriversal world-making from local, afro-indigenous, rural, marginalized groups from Latin America and the Caribbean can offer viable alternatives to capitalism and its predatory dynamics. In that sense, we use rizoma as a botanical metaphor for the proliferating, non-linear, unruly, and constantly growing underground forms of world-making that give place to unexpectedness. We insist on evoking the biological metaphor where the stem of a plant puts out roots and shoots, each of which can become a new plant, as a way of understanding how our ideas can sprout and be the answer to other questions that have not been posed yet. We draw on the connectivity power of this metaphor to devise transdisciplinary conversations, interviews, artistic expressions, and other forms of situated discussion that can help us revisit our past, engage with our present, and imagine desirable futures for human and nonhuman flourishing.
In Rizoma, we are interested in bringing to the fore the relations between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, in Latin American and Global South cultural expressions. We focus on entanglements between art/visual culture and literature, theory, science, technology, and activism, to think about our environmental predicament. We want to unearth perspectives that link past, present, and future, ancient and modern, culture and nature, technology, and ancient cosmology, but also to inearth them into the geological materiality, the rhythms of the earth, the atmospheric layers, and the multispecies worldling. We seek to provide a space for thinking with plants, animals, textures, and rhythms of the earth that question the divisions between humanity and nonhumanity legitimized by anthropogenic practices. Responding to climate change events constitutes for Rizoma an ethical gesture that runs through the conversations, collaborations, interviews, and other collective activities shared on the platform.
Finally, the platform is currently divided into two integrated sections: Entanglements and Conversaciones rizomáticas. First, Entanglements is a thinking-with, making odd kin with as a forum that gathers artistic, cultural, and theoretical interventions by artists, activists, and scholars disrupting the nature/culture divide. In that regard, we have organized three seminars so far: the relation between documentary filmmaking, toxicity, slow violence, and soil contamination in Chile—”Global Toxic Waste, Slow Violence, and Contaminated Soil: A conversation on ‘Arica’”—; the role of ecopoetry as a cultural phenomenon, epistemology, and critical practice to reweave humans and nonhumans—”Ecopoetry for Just Futures: Transcultural Poetic Practices in the Anthropocenes”—; and the relevance of political ecology to understand the socio-ecological crisis taking place in the Venezuelan Amazon—”Violence, Ecocide, and Global Corruption in the Venezuelan Amazon: Political Ecology Perspectives”. Second, Conversaciones rizomáticas consists of 1-hour conversations with scholars on recent publications exploring the multifaceted reach of Environmental Humanities research. The first conversación rizomática welcomed scholars Liliana Gómez and Lisa Blackmore, editors of Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Arts (2020). The discussion focused on liquids and bodies of water as departing points to reflect on how we can think with water, what forms of perceiving the territory offer fluvial art, literature, and forms of creative activisms, and how liquid ecologies can oppose hydro-extractivism. Our second conversación rizomática is scheduled for late September and will welcome scholar Kata Beilin to discuss transdisciplinarity in Latin American Environmental Humanities through her film Maya Land: Listening to the Bees and her recent dossier Climate change as a Cultural Problem: Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities and Latin American Studies, (2022). In this line, Rizoma welcomes entangled journeys and rooted actions in the hope of transformations toward alternative socio-ecological systems.
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About the Author
Azucena Castro is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, participating in the Focal Group materia. Her research centers on biocultural rights, multispecies relations, sustainability, and environmental humanities in Latin America.
About the Author
Gianfranco Selgas is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry, University College London, and an Affiliated Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, Stockholm University. His research focuses on the political and media ecology of extractivism, energy, and environmental humanities in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Works Cited
Amereida, solo las huellas descubren el mar. Directed by Javier Correa, Invercine, 2017.
Blackmore, Lisa and Liliana Gómez (editors). Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Arts, Routledge, 2020.
Beilin, Kata. “Climate change as a Cultural Problem: Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities and Latin American Studies,” LASA Forum, vol. 53, no. 2, 2022, pp. 8-13.
Castro, Azucena, and Selgas, Gianfranco. Rizoma. https://rizomalabeco.com/
Heffes, Gisela; Gren, Jonas; and Gren, and Marques, Nuno; poets. Moderated by Castro, Azucena. “Ecopoetry for Just Futures: Transcultural Poetic Practices in the Anthropocenes.” Poetry Reading and Discussion. Entanglements Series, Rizoma, 28 April, 2021, Virtual. https://rizomalabeco.com/2022/03/06/example-post-3/
Johansson Kalé, William, et al. “Open Talk–Global toxic waste, slow violence and contaminated soil- A conversation on ‘Arica’.”Youtube, uploaded by Romanska och klassiska institutionen, 18 May 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GV-6a614NY
Los decentes. Directed by Lukas Valenta Rinner, Santa Cine, 2017.
Moncada, Alicia; Antulio Rosales; and Terán Mantovani, Emiliano; Panelists. Moderated by Selgas, Gianfranco. “Violence, Ecocide, and Global Corruption in the Venezuelan Amazon: Political Ecology Perspectives.” Panel Discussion. Entanglements Series, Rizoma, 26 April, 2021, Virtual.