[CFP] JE “You Are Here: poetic gestures and creative ecologies from the garden”
La Journée d’études intitulée “You Are Here: poetic gestures and creative ecologies from the garden” aura lieu à l’Université Paul Valéry Montpellier le 17 octobre 2025.
L’appel à communications en anglais est diponible ci-dessous.
L’appel à communications en français est également consultable ici.
Les propositions de communication (400 mots) et une courte notice biobibliographique (100-150 mots) sont à envoyer à Molly Gilbertson (molly.gilbertson@etu.univ-montp3.fr) et Bota Koilybayeva (botakoilybayeva@gmail.com) avant le 16 mai 2025.
CFP
You Are Here: poetic gestures and creative ecologies from the garden
One-day conference organized by Molly Gilbertson (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) and Bota Koilybayeva (DALC, Charles University Prague)
Date: October 17, 2025
Location: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
This one-day symposium seeks to explore the work of writers and artists whose imaginative approaches to poetic practice engage with an evolving consideration of the place of humans in the natural or more-than-human world, in a time of ecological instability, unpredictability, and urgency; whose ecopoetic engagements – on and beyond the medium – echo the dynamic and complex nature of our ecosystems and our entanglement with the non-human. The debate this conference aims to foster will build from the concept supported in the field of ecopoetics and ecocinema according to which diverse forms of activism unfold from the same imaginative processes of art and literature. How do film and poetry engage with the real world, with the real bodies that interact with the fertile soil of words and images?
Borrowing from the notion of “imaginative activism” developed by ecopoets Jonathan Skinner and Brenda Hillman (Hume 2012), forms of activism may be envisioned as a means for holding together our aesthetic and political attachments to the natural world. Brazilian experimental filmmaker and visual artist Ana Vaz sees her artistic practice as ‘thinking with her feet’ and thus ‘filming with her feet’, highlighting filming itself as a kind of thinking which presupposes an awareness of one’s ground, a constant attunement to the changes in ecosystems and landscapes. Moreover, Vaz’s imaginative activism is manifested in unearthing hidden injustices through the medium of film, particularly Brazil’s colonial past. In her introduction to the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (2024), editor and American poet Ada Limón encourages perception and performance of our ecological attachments to turn towards other forms of creative engagement, for poetry “to not just be in wonder at this planet, but to offer something back to it, to offer something back together”. Limon’s tour of national parks across the United States in 2024 is one such example of the communal role she ascribes to poetry. Both Vaz’s and Limón’s projects raise the question of how poetic creation and performance, through imaginative processes, can incite new ecological possibilities to unfold from gestural poetics and experimental engagements with performance.
The ecopoetical foundations of Limón’s experimental stance are expressed most fully when her poetics invites us to envision her creative practice as belonging to both gardening and poetry. As though a gardener-poet, her work suggests a kinship with other contemporary North American poets (Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Camille Dungy) who engage with performance not just as a method for voicing the other, but as an interactive process between poets, audiences, and the gardens they cultivate. Thinking of language and performance as though an “instrument of investigative engagement” (Joan Retallack), gardener-poets present a different kind of experimental posture, in which the gestural and discursive performance are entwined. The body’s physical practice in the garden entwines subjective sensitivity with the intricate workings of the garden ecosystem. Borrowing from the work of ecological philosopher David Abram, such encounters of the sensing (body, poet, audience) and the sensitive (the natural world, language) create intricate weavings between the human and non-human in which performance is not simply verbal utterance, but a creative, expressive gesture of the body’s ecological attachments.
Our interest in the creative ecologies of gardener-poets and artists engaged with ecopoetics focuses on their creative processes; how their engagement in ecological practices becomes a part of their poetic practice. As suggested by Poetry in the Natural World, the subtitle of You Are Here, the poetry is not necessarily about the natural world but in it; living as a part of the natural world is integral to these writers’ creative ecologies and poetic ethos. We might think of what Donna Haraway describes as sympoiesis, different beings and things entwined in interactive creative processes, making with. “Creaturely poetics”, as developed by Anat Pick, opens co-creation to all creatures, or living beings and bodies that are “material, temporal and vulnerable”. In a world and time where our understanding of ecology reveals complex interdependencies on many scales of being, thinking of the garden as a locus of sympoiesis may open reflections on how we can live and create with other creatures. Creaturely poetics as a paradigm describing the ongoing intersubjective ‘making with’ between humans and non-humans extends beyond the confines of the garden. In Sweetgrass, a 2009 American documentary, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash follow the last generation of sheep herders in the mountains of Montana. The herders’ life and labor are immanently and inescapably intertwined with the bleating of the sheep.
We might wonder then, about the potential political meaningfulness of the performative in these imaginative ecologies. How does imaginative activism stretch ecopoetics beyond language and lyric, turning towards other mediums and processes to englobe the wildly diverse, entwined phenomena of environmental issues? American poet Ross Gay’s garden poetics has long addressed the entanglement of the natural world with historical systems, in particular how the latter are performed in the soil. In Gay’s book-length poem Be Holding (2020), questions of photographic representation and reception, institutional racism, Blackness, and flight are explored through entangled verse inspired by plant and fungal life. What are the politics of one’s work in the garden? “My garden’s boundaries are the horizon,” wrote the British gardener, filmmaker and visual artist Derek Jarman, who cultivated his respite from consumerism in one of the most ecologically exhausted places – the flat and barren shingle shore in Kent with a looming Dungeness nuclear power station. For American writer, scholar, and gardener Camille Dungy, the cultivation of her personal garden in the polluted urban soils of Denver leads to reflections on how seeds, the food they bear, and the work of gardening all intersect with American colonialism, slavery, institutional repression and strategies for survival and emancipation (“From Dirt” 2019). Gardens can also be places of hope and belonging when combining scientific knowledge with indigenous poetics (Kimmerer 2013). If we take a more critical stance towards gardens, how do we navigate the tension between the elitism of the private garden and the spiritual, ecological and political commitments of both private and community gardens?
Tending to the friction at these junctions of disciplines, mediums, languages, cultures, ecosystems, and species, the work of artists living through present-day ecological crisis is ecopoetic not simply because it takes up questions of ecology, but because their creative practices are situated in an ecological constellation of interactions.
These practices or creative ecologies engage audiences to participate in the creative processes in intriguing ways, moving our attention beyond the poem itself and towards the worlds they are made from. This one-day symposium looks to entertain questions on creative practices that not only conceptualize or represent, but partake in new ways to be in and with the world.
The symposium aims to foster discussions at the intersections of ecological poetics, the more-than-human cultural narratives, ecocinema, ecocriticism, the history of natural sciences and environmentalism. We invite papers exploring the following themes:
– Ecological poetics and creative ecologies in anglophone literature
– Gestural poetics, politics and performance in the arts/ literature
– Gardens as a contested space, the tension between the private and political
– Imaginative methodologies and collaborative aesthetics inspired by the natural world
– Sympoiesis, poetic ethos and community engagement
– Reframing the garden as both topos and practice in anglophone literatures and cultures
– Body-driven narratives in ecocentric artistic practices
– Cinema and poetry as perception and performance
– The intersection of ecopoetics of the garden and the visual language of film – Ecophenomenological approaches to ecopoetics and ecocinema
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Bénédicte Meillon (19 février 2025). [CFP] JE “You Are Here: poetic gestures and creative ecologies from the garden” Écopoétique. Consulté le 24 mars 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13cb5