Italy Workgroup July 2023

The Ecopoetics Workshop 2023: Italy was an outrageous success.

Participants from Canada, the UK, Portugal, and the United States gathered for two weeks in July 2023 to work together on their own, and collective, poetic projects. We heard incredible talks from experts in our field: Orchid Tierney, Jonathan Skinner, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Joanna Makowska, and Nuno da Silva Marquez.

You can get to know our wonderful 2023 participants below:

Fani Avramopoulou

Fani is a poet, artist, teacher, and labor organizer based out of Philadelphia and Baltimore with roots in Athens, Greece. She works at the juncture of mess and method, against authority and in uneasy dialogue with convention

Tessa Bolsover

Tessa is a poet and interdisciplinary artist based in Durham, NC. She is a founding editor of auric press and works across sound studies, visual media, ecological thought, and feminist studies.

Hear Tessa read on the album Salutations, pressed by RVNG.

Sam Creely

Sam is a Toronto-based writer, editor, bookmaker, and educator whose work engages anticolonial and queer methodologies, turning syntax against institutional systems of logic or sense.

See Sam's project, DanceNotes here.

Roman DuBrule

Based in British Columbia and a lifelong musician, Roman researches the ways in which art and media affect time and memory amidst the end of the world.

Mackenzie Ground

Mackenzie is a nehiyawiskwew and a writer from and currently based in Enoch Maskekosihk Cree Nation and Edmonton amiskwacîwâskahikan, Alberta and Treaty Six territory. She is a member of the Writing Revolution in Place research collective.

Read Mackenzie's poem, mend in the balsam, here.

Amanda Hurtado

Amanda works at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is the author of S ACE P (Timglaset, 2020 & Editions Eclipse, 2014) and CELL (MonoD Press, 2016).

View Amanda's book, S ACE P, at Eclipse Archive, here.

Olga Mikolaivna

Originally from Kyiv, Olga lives in San Diego and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation.

See Olga's website here.

Samantha Walton

Samantha is an academic, poet, and small-press publisher who leads the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University. She has a recent monograph on Nan Shepherd, and works poetically on the eco-gothic and fragmented lyric, as in Bad Moon (Spam Press, 2021).

Program for the Workshop

Sample Workshop Schedule

Based on Ecopoetics Workshop 2019

MONDAY Day 1: You arrive at Soggiorno Mazzoleni. 6pm: Introduction, Orientation, Meal.

TUESDAY Day 2: Theme: PASTURIZATION: the conversion of nature into private acts, property, consumable liquids, and taste.//AND// Nature as model for data: does nature resist incursion on its privacy?

WEDNESDAY Day 3: Open.

THURSDAY Day 4: Theme: PROCESS: writing taking the mechanization of nature a focus. What is the relationship between pastures and machines?

FRIDAY Day 5: Open.

SATURDAY Day 6: Theme: OBSERVATION: the attempt to convert nature into words via the senses; to construction of new taxonomies as a result //AND// Human as nature: capturing the feeling of being one with nature, or wanting, or rejecting oneness with nature. Did our attempt to see ourselves as both one with nature, and distinct from it, lead to all this badness?

SUNDAY Day 7: Open.

MONDAY Day 8: Theme: MAPPING: ways of transversing time. How can we use maps, lists, and guidelines to taxonomize nature in a way that does not lead to its destruction? How can we map more harmoniously? Must we map?

TUESDAY Day 9: Open.

WEDNESDAY Day 10: Theme: NEGATING NATURE: with silence, the indoors, valorization of death, the artificial. If mapping is a positive engagement with nature, then what is the opposite of mapping? What are the implications of resisting nature, and how can that be done? What are the aesthetic implications?

THURSDAY Day 11: Open.

FRIDAY Day 12: Theme: NATURE CAPITAL: asking how nature has been co-opted for the accumulation of capital. We study the local economies of the Taleggio Valley from the small grocery shops, the bars, the farms, and disappearing cheese industry.

SATURDAY Day 13: Open and Print Day: for the construction of any final projects. Space for furious rendering of work and notes taken.

SUNDAY Day 14: 6pm: Exhibition/Reading/Celebration.

MONDAY Day 15: Leave the valley.

Over two weeks we read, work, write, create, and walk together.

Individual projects are of course encouraged, just as much as collaboration on group, and otherwise multi-person, projects.

In preparation for your time at EcopoetIcs Workshop, we will ask that you read a list of texts that we will send you. We hope that the group's common grounding in some of ecopoetics' most important ideas will improve the quality of our discussions.

We will also ask that you give extensive consideration to the kind of work that you would like to produce in the workshop. Different participants will be at different stages of their creative process. Some may be close to publishing a manuscript, others may be starting a new one, and others again may be exploring new modes to work in. All is welcome.

At this stage, the outline for the workshop goes: 'one day on, one day off'. 'On' days will involve optional morning mindfulness practice, group discussions on the theme or focus for the day, and a possible excursion. 'Off' days will involve the optional morning mindfulness practice and free-space to explore your own work, group work, or the environment at your leisure.

There will be the option to eat together, but only a few meals will be planned in advance. We want to encourage collegiality, but will not regiment it.

ANY QUESTIONS? NEED MORE INFO?