Environmental Arts: Film, Literature and Photography

Catalog description

The climate crisis has pushed artists and scholars to reflect on how we relate to the environment, and to critically assess the concepts that have guided our approach to ideas of nature and the nonhuman since the advent of modernity. We are witnessing a global effort in developing new means of inhabiting the world, and the arts offer a privileged space to investigate these possibilities. This mostly asynchronous course explores environmental aesthetics through multiple media, theoretical perspectives and geographical contexts. With a focus on Hispanophone cinema, literature and photography, we will cover topics such as the urban/rural divide, extractivism and decoloniality, the problem of scale in our understanding of the Anthropocene, the construction of landscape and the relationship between art and the nonhuman. The course will be taught in English, no knowledge of Spanish is required.