CALAS

Urban Ecopoetics: Photography, Poetry, and Science in Dialog

It would be presumptuous to claim that art and literature are panaceas for the planet's threatened biodiversity, ever-warming earth, and endangered oceans and forests. But art and literature can certainly chart ways in which we can think of seemingly separate things in a coherent, interacting, and mutually protective way. Hence, this crossover scholarship project including photography and poetry proposes an alternative approach to the relations between art, nature, and urban culture. Turning research about the anthropocene into an artistic way of thinking ecocentrically rather than anthropocentrically, this project envisions new ways of reflecting and connecting nature and culture in an urban context. While the images and poems, to different degrees, try to break down the boundaries between art, nature, the urban, and the human, they also reveal the complexity and perhaps utopian desire of what it means to radically leave behind an anthropocentric view. After all, there is a human eye behind the photographs and a human mind behind the poems. The project includes a photo exhibit to be presented in the lower level of the Museo de Ciencias Ambientales at the Centro Cultural Universitario de la Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG) during the FIL de Guadalajara 2023 and book publication to follow. This project led by Wilfried Raussert, award-winning photographer and author, is conducted in collaboration with Ann Fisher-Wirth, award-winning poet and environmental studies scholar,  the Museo de Ciencias Ambientales at the Centro Cultural Universitario de la Universidad de Guadalajara (UdeG), and the CALAS-CUCSH UdeG office.

The copyright of the attached image belongs to: photo (copyright Wilfried Raussert) "Woman inhaling tree" (copyright Wilfried Raussert)