Creative Environments: A Workshop on Collaborative Methods for Researchers and Artists

In September we participated in a workshop organised by the BrigstowInstitute and the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol which explored the role of creativity in conducting and communicating environmental research. During this one-day event, participants considered how creative research methods and collaborations between researchers and artists can enrich our understanding of contemporary ecological challenges.

The organiser, Dr Paul Merchant, from the project Re-Imagining the Pacific,posed the following questions: 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 and local and international artists, and plenty of time for brainstorming and generating new ideas.

entre—ríos presented the project dynamics and this digital platform in the following talk:

Live Streams: Connecting rivers through digital collaborations

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, entre—ríos, a transdisciplinary network of artists, researchers, scientists and activists based in Europe and Latin America, has explored the question: How can we establish intimacy and ethical relations with bodies of water (and with each other) at a time when physical fieldwork is not possible? Led by practice-research, the network collaborates to cultivate “response-ability” (Donna Haraway) to more-than-human hydrological cycles. We depart from the urgent awareness that in the Anthropocene our rivers have become sick through intense industrialisation and rapid urbanisation. In recognizing that, in the late capitalist attention economy we have gotten sick too, we ask: How do we heal together and empathise our losses and crises? How do we slow down and share? By embracing the fact that we are mostly water, the body can be thought of as carrying seas and rivers.

Situating the body as a terrain of knowledge that questions the dogma of Western rationalism, our paper will discuss how artist-led, transdisciplinary encounters hosted online create channels to perform the “interpermeation” (Astrid Neimanis) of bodies of water. Focusing on collaborations with artists Genietta Varsi (Peru) and Leonel Vásquez (Colombia), we will contend that breathwork practices, deep listening and meditation exercises performed collectively in digital environments seed communities invested in ecological wellbeing. This presentation reflects critically and analytically on the methods devised to confront the challenge of renegotiating liveness (and liveliness) in an epidemiological present that has confined us to the stasis and stagnation of lockdown.

Workshop Program

Creative collaboration in theory and in practice

• The Silent Orchid Festival and Summer School. Camilo Uribe Botta (University of Warwick) and Matt Westbrook
• Creative practice ethnography, just transitions, and the heart ofBlyth. Clifton Evers (presenter), Maia Almeida-Amir, Anthony Zito, Mark Ireland, Greg Mutch (Newcastle University)Can visual culture protect the Pacific? Hadas Marcus
• Mapping digital environments
• Navigating the ontological multiplicity of the páramos around Bogotá through “agro-ecological sounds” and “multi-sensorial maps.” Hanne Cottyn (University of York), Santiago Martínez (Instituto Humboldt), Ana María Garrido (Instituto Humboldt)
• Map from Coast 2 Coast. Emi Koch, Nicolás Landa Tami and Rosemarie Lerner (Coast 2 Coast)
• Live Streams: Connecting Rivers through digital collaborations. Lisa Blackmore, Emilio Chapela and Diego Chocano (University of Essex)
• Reimagining the ocean. Four intermedial proposals
• A new video essay on the ocean in Chilean cinema. Catherine Grant and Paul Merchant
• Waste away coral. Ana Parrodi
• Liquid Noise. Dan Pollard
• [whalesong]. Xavier Velastín

Further information, including collaborative outputs of the workshop, will be published on https://reimaginingthepacific.blogs.bristol.ac.uk