Ecopoetics
Workshop
A collaborative, critical, and creative work-group experience.
Next at Nature Art and Habitat Residency
Taleggio Valley, Italy, July 2023
DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL 28 FEBRUARY
Call for Applications
The organizing group of the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI) call for applications to Ecopoetry Workshop 2023, which will take place in the Taleggio Valley, Italy, 17-31 July 2023.
Ecopoetry Workshop was initiated in 2018 as a two-week residency with a focus on collaborative, critical, and creative approaches to the nexus of poetics and contemporary environmental issues. The first iteration was held in association with the Nature, Art, and Habitat Residency (NAHR) in the summer of 2019. After a hiatus due to COVID, the workshop will take place once again in the summer of 2023.
Rather than only providing time to write nature poetry, Ecopoetics Workshop is intent on gathering poets, multimedia and movement artists, theorists, philosophers, and researchers committed to advancing the way humans conceive of and enact their relationship with nature. The organizing group conceives of ecopoetics as an expanded, open-ended research program and aesthetic practice. While some members consider themselves poets, they are also filmmakers, theorists, visual artists, and musicians investigating and producing novel modes of poetic engagement.
The workshop is open to many different approaches, but is most dedicated to engagement with aesthetic and practical complexity, innovation, and what can be achieved through empathetic collaboration. In 2023, in concert with NAHR, and where the opportunities present themselves, we will concentrate on the theme of “air.” Participants will be encouraged to explore the function, mechanism, importance, and state of air from a range of natural, ecological, social, political and ecological perspectives, and to reflect on the impacts of air pollution and air quality degradation. For more context on how we will approach the theme of air, please consult NAHR’s 2023 residency page.
The Workshop schedule involves alternating days of structured and open time. On structured days, the group meets in the morning to discuss the day’s theme (eg. the politics of breath in site-specific art). In the afternoon, it embarks on a creative exercise in the environment surrounding the town of Sottochiesa, where we stay. On open days, participants can work on their personal projects or meet in groups as they please. There are many walking paths through the mountains, and streams, towns, and other places of interest to visit. At the halfway point of the workshop, a ‘work-in-progress’ event will be held, providing the opportunity for feedback, and at the end of the workshop there will be a project presentation event.
Participants will be strongly encouraged to fully complete an object or text by the end of the workshop.
To Apply
Please fill out our application form here: https://forms.gle/zHtdDJvxZ5SbqWHK8
The form will ask for the below, which you might like to prepare in advance:
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A personal biography detailing relevant past artistic, academic, and professional experience (300 words max). Please include full name, email address, phone number, and place of residence.
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A “statement of intent” (in lieu of a “project proposal”) detailing what concepts, modes, materials, or discourses you are looking to engage with during the workshop (1000 words max). You may like to discuss ongoing projects here, but we are interested in how they will be developed at this specific site, during this specific workshop. You should also include some thoughts on how you might engage with the environmental theme of “air” in your work.
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Links to any online portfolios or other evidence of relevant previous work published or exhibited.
A maximum of 8 participants will be invited to join the organizing group of Brooke Bastie, Courtlin Byrd, Brent Cox, and Simon Eales. Preference will go to applicants whose statements of intent are most closely engaged with the concerns of Ecopoetics Workshop and the Topological Poetics Research Institute. A shorthand gauge for measuring such a closeness is: creativity (is the intended work innovative?), criticality (is the intended work rigorous and relevant?), and collaborative (would the intended work both contribute to and benefit from being developed in a group context?).
Cost
Two weeks apartment accommodation at Soggiorno Mazzoleni in Sottochiesa, reading and workshop materials, and facilitation fees: 850.00 euros.
Travel and food costs are the responsibility of each individual participant. Some meals will be provided.
Previous participants have had great success with obtaining institutional funding (eg. University travel grants). We encourage participants to apply for such funds available to them as soon as possible.
Any funding that the organizing group can raise between January and July 2023 will be dedicated to off-setting the cost of participant attendance.
Deadline
[EXTENDED]UNTIL 28 FEBRUARY 2023.
Here's the application form again: https://forms.gle/zHtdDJvxZ5SbqWHK8
Info Call Recording
Here you can view a recording of the Zoom Information Call we recorded on 27 January 2023.
In it, the organizers introduce themselves and talk about the history of Ecopoetics Workshop and its relationship with NAHR, the location, the theme for this year, the schedule, and then field some questions.
Ecopoetry Workshop Organizers
Brooke Bastie, Courtlin Byrd, Brent Cox, and Simon Eales.
Simon is originally from Melbourne, Australia and now lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He is studying towards a PhD in SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Program, where he has taught courses in writing, poetry, and literature since 2016. He was a NAHR Fellow in 2017, is a performance artist, and has published writing in The Music, Rabbit, Cordite, Don't Do It, and independently.
Brent also studies and teaches in SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Program. He has a MFA from University of Washington, Bothell, in Creative Writing and Poetics. His critical work focuses on experimental and innovative poetics of the 20th and 21st century, aesthetic theory, and transtemporal, transpatial, and transdisciplinary art. He is also a video-artist and poet exploring the creative-critical cross-section of poetry, time-based art, and sound. He runs MonoD Press and TPRI.
Courtlin lives in New York City, and is from Tennessee and California. She attended Vanderbilt University for Creative Writing and the USC School of Cinematic Arts for Film Production, and now makes associative poetic videos, writes verbose visual art, and teaches media studies. Her work can be found at https://theoppositeofshadows.wordpress.com/.
Brooke is a PhD candidate and instructor in English at the University of Buffalo. Her academic work focuses on contemporary American and Indigenous poetry through the lens of spatiality. For her dissertation, she is writing on what she terms coterminous territories—a contested or extra-legal spatial formation that generates multiple, often incompatible experiences of lived socio-political identity within the same space. To understand this phenomenon, she uses the work of poets such as José Felipe Alvergue, Anthony Cody, Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, and Craig Santos Perez, amongst others.
Contact
If you have any questions at all, please do email us via the form below. We will get back to you as soon as we can, and will aim to be as helpful as possible.