Writing the “Homeland” and Its Borders: of Meaningless Passwords, Poetic Transparencies, and Photosynthesis in Latin American Eco-poetics

media release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. The events are free and open to the public.

Room 206 Ingraham Hall - 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706.  

Please note this lecture will be given in Spanish.

About the presentation:

What does it mean to think about ecology from a poetic perspective (saber poético)?

The color blue has the tint of a wounded animal, he says. Writing is a wounded animal, writes Mexican poet León Plascencia Ñol, award-winning writer of the City and Nature José Emilio Pacheco Literary Prize.

For contemporary Latin American artists such as Plascencia Ñol, the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra and the Argentine visual artist Nicolás Janowski, to render ecology as an instrument of poetic and artistic knowledge means to rearticulate concepts and realities such as “nation-state”, “homeland” or “border lands”, particularly as we consider our multiple planetary crisis —public health, socioeconomic, environmental, or migratory experiences, among others.

This presentation, then, is a study of their work through this conceptual and planetary lens.

It centers on Plascencia Ñol’s “poetic transparencies” as visual and rhythmic variations in which homeland and landscape reveal our artificial nature and its impact on our vulnerable planet. Guerra’s “meaningless” words, in her lyrical landscapes, turn into keywords for understanding human and non-human existence as a slow process of deeply reimagining our place within the intelligence of the ecosystem. Meanwhile, Janowski’s “Adrift in Blue,” a photographic echo of the southern tip of the American continent, Tierra del Fuego, translates the wastelands inhabited by the Yámana, the region’s indigenous community, into a photosynthesis of blue tones. His visual poetry is a reflection on death as origin, questioning our current reality and how we adapt to inhospitable environments. The poetic initiatives of these artists reimagine our sense of belonging and community through our connection to the land and to values that extend beyond the human.

About the presenter:

Sarli E. Mercado, Ph.D. Literary critic, poet, translator, Sarli is the author of Cartographies of Exile: On the poetry of Juan Gelman and Luisa Futoransky [Cartografías del destierro: En torno a la poesía de Juan Gelman y Luisa Futoransky] (2008). She has published and presented her research on contemporary Spanish American poetry, visual arts and urban and non-urban spaces in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. At UW-Madison, she is teaching Professor of Spanish Language, Literatures & Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and co-directs the 4W Living Poetry-Women in Translation Circle (4W-WIT) co-founded with Lori DiPrete Brown.  She also collaborates with the Museum of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. With 4W-WIT she has published Montañas and Three or Four Ríos (2022) bilingual anthology of the City and Nature José Emilio Pacheco Literary Prize and A Lantern: Radical Light/Linterna Luz Radical Bilingual Anthology (2023).