Fechas: 18 de septiembre al 18 de diciembre (12 sesiones)
Lugar celebración: Modalidad online
Duración: 30 horas síncronas, 40 horas de trabajo individual
Nº máximo de alumnos: 20
Nº mínimo de alumnos: 7
Precio de matrícula: 200 €
Idiomas utilizados: inglés
Introduction
Jute, snakes, clay, petroleum, landscapes, Jupiter’s moons, mycelium, rope, and the axe. The sea and hormones. Gender and oil paint. If your work brushes against ideas or materials that belong to the realm of the natural, and you have ever wondered how they came to be, what worlds and histories converge within them, this seminar offers the space and tools to follow those questions.
Our method will be genealogical, rigorous, and intuitive. We will move away from the fantasy of singular origins and instead trace the relations, contingent encounters, and agencies through which the natural takes shape. Together, we will create a space to slow down our reading practices and experiment with becoming detectives, archivists, archaeologists, and librarians of the ways nature continues to intrigue us.
We will meet online each week and cultivate asynchronous collective spaces for reading, writing, and image-making. During the week, we will read and study materials such as field guides, ethnographies and hybrid books in which authors and landscapes become entangled in processes of making and unmaking, magazine articles that transform ways of seeing and reshape state policy, treatises that brush against—or fully embrace—the mysticism of geological scales, the history of drugs, or the sounds of the sea. We will also watch films, visit online exhibitions, and listen to visiting artists, activists, and thinkers.
In the face of these materials, we will ask questions such as: How do we write the nonhuman? How do we describe it? Where does authorship situate itself in relation to the natural—does it expose, explain, demonstrate, describe, dream, speculate? Does it seep, melt, pollinate? Does it devour, inform, protect? How do we rewrite what has been naturalized?
Attendees will be able to:
- Explore the philosophical traditions and historical unfoldings that shape different aesthetics of “the natural”.
- Critically engage with discourses of nature.
- Exercise and refine the methodological tools of disciplines such as science and technology studies, anthropology, and critical art studies.
- Apply to their own work the potentialities of these explorations by building an archive of relevant tools and theories.
- Receive a completion certificate from the University of Granada
Course program:
Module 1 — Fridays September 18th, 25th, and October 2nd — 17:00 CET
Many Worlds
As an introduction, and in keeping with the spirit of the seminar, we will begin in the middle. During these first weeks, we will forage through ideas proposed by authors, artists, and activists who have unsettled the history of the concept of nature, with the aim of rendering our common sense a little stranger. We will read and listen to the work of the caracoles Zapatista, Marisol de la Cadena, Philippe Descola, Lorraine Daston, Carolyn Merchant, Ursula K. Le Guin, María Zambrano, Mafe Moscoso, Pierre Hadot, and others.
Module 2 — Fridays October 9th, 16th, and 23rd— 17:00 CET
Interconnections
In the following module, we will focus on ideas of interconnection and symbiosis, tracing their relationship to the various becomings of the concept of ecology. What happens when nature becomes something that must be protected? What kinds of politics does this make possible, and which ones does it foreclose? How does it become entangled with the notion of landscape? What are the ethics and aesthetics of interconnection? We will read and listen to the work of gardeners, environmental activists, filmmakers, and anthropologists, including Derek Jarman, Lynn Margulis, Alexander von Humboldt, Ansel Adams, Stacey Alaimo, and others.
Module 3 — Fridays October 30th, November 6th and 13th — 17:00 CET
Dreams
Nature as a repository of beauty and goodness: how does the notion of the natural world as a space of purity travel and mutate, and where do its risks and possibilities reside? How does feminist critique intersect with conceptions of nature as a moral domain? In these sessions, we will delve into aesthetics as a moral and political category—one capable of enacting explicit or implicit forms of violence while also nourishing new possibilities for resistance. Drawing on the constellation of definitions assembled during the first half of the seminar, we will also begin tracing our individual archives and organizing the first presentation of final projects.
Module 4 — Fridays November 20th, 27th, and December 4th — 17:00 CET
Weird Times
These weeks will focus on how the aesthetic becoming of nature across different temporalities—utopian, speculative, evolutionary, comparative, and crisis-driven—gives rise to specific aesthetic languages, some intentional and others emerging as unforeseen consequences. We will visit online exhibitions and read the work of artists and theorists such as McKenzie Wark, Marta Echaves, Linda Stupart, Johannes Fabian, N. K. Jemisin, Anna Tsing, and others.
Module 5 — December 11th and 18th — 17:00 CET
Final Projects
These final weeks will be devoted to presenting and collectively engaging with participants’ final projects, as well as planning a collaborative closing project.
Recommended bibliography
Michel Foucault, Rachel Carson, Helen Macdonald, María Zambrano, Sara Gallardo, Humboldt, Walt Whitman, Carolyn Merchant, Katherine Yusoff, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mafe Moscoso, Derek Jarman, etc.
Course faculty
Mercedes Villalba, Ph.D, is a writer and researcher. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology, History of Science, and Feminist Methodologies from the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Fervent Manifesto (2019), A las Plantas (2022), the poetry collections Colores and A los botánicos, as well as numerous articles, poems, translations, and essays exploring the making and unmaking of art and nature. Her Fervent Manifesto has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Kichwa, and is part of the permanent collections of Printed Matter, SAIC, and MACBA. Her forthcoming book, Triangulaciones, will be published by Cielo Santo in late 2026. She is currently working on two new books: one on milk and another on ceramics.