Sintonía: Art and the Earth

Sintonía: Art and the Earth – Creative Concepts and Creative Process

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

Why is art needed in times of crisis? Art has the power to generate new understandings of our relationship to the earth in this time of pollution and global warming. Avoiding distanced representations of nature, Blanca Botero’s work involves coming into attunement with unusual viewpoints, not necessarily human, in order to critique the way humans use everything we share with the rest of the living creatures on the planet. In this presentation, Botero will explain how her work arises from four creative concepts: attunement, membrane, travel, and scale. She will present each concept within its context, the thought process behind the concept, and the creative process that led to these installations, drawings, and photography. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, will provide opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple will moderate a Q&A session following the presentation.

Online. Open to all.

 

Participants:

Blanca Botera is a Colombian and Swiss artist based in Bogotá, Colombia. Using drawing and various technological media, she builds immersive installations that explore unusual, not necessarily human, points of view to address consumption of the earthly resources that all creatures share. She also works as mentor in Chicas STEAM, a program sponsored by Bogota’s Science Museum and the Colombian governmental agency for communications and information technologies, which offers girls ages 12 to 15 a safe space to explore science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president at Georgetown University. Scott was on the editorial board which relaunched Critical Survey from Oxford University Press. Scott previously served as the pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

 

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

 

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk