November 15, 2022

Sintonía: Art and the Earth

Creative Concepts and Creative Process

Event Series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment

Showing the Sintonía: Art and the Earth Video

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.

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 HumanitiesCampion 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.

Photo courtesy of Blanca Botero

Participants

Blanca Botera

Blanca Botero

Blanca Botero 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. 

Anna Deeny Morales

Anna Deeny Morales

Anna Deeny Morales (moderator) works in poetry and music as a librettist, translator, and literary critic and is an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. Her recent works in opera include ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts, which debuted at the Kennedy Center with the Georgetown University Orchestra and members of the Chiarina Chamber Players in 2022. Deeny Morales is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of Tala by Gabriela Mistral.