Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
---|---|---|---|---|
772.62 KB | Adobe PDF |
Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
When we talk about empathy, we usually refer to a “transposing” emotional process
towards other human beings (often less fortunate, more fragile or co-dependent beings),
sometimes towards animals (mostly mammals), occasionally towards works of art (where
the concept originated), but very seldom towards soil, rocks, seas, clouds, mineral, vegetal
and nonvisible features of our environed Earth. My proposed reflection on eco-empathy
focuses on our co-creative sympoietic embodied relation with more-than-human
environments, or what we commonly term natural landscapes.
Philosopher Bruno Latour recently observed how “economy, the science of managing
limited resources, has become an argument for forgetting all limits” (2020), decrying how in
the name of globalization we have finally succeeded in universalizing the same economizing
and calculating humanoid over the whole surface of the Earth. In effect, so-called
globalization has accelerated a process of territorial imperialism whereby wildlife
sanctuaries, vast expanses of forests, agricultural lands, and even urban parks are being
destroyed, to the point of extinguishing many animal and plant species, causing
environmental degradation, and turning humans into “development refugees”.
However, geopower refers not only to the ways that power is exerted over and
through the Earth (as drawn from Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower), but also to the
more-than-human forces of the Earth that so often disrupt humanly regulated
environments, and whose material manifestations are both aesthetic by themselves and also
reimagined in artistic form (Val Plumwood; Elizabeth Grosz). Drawing on questions
pertaining to the aesthetics of the Earth’s geopower, this communication explores the
aesthetic embodied experience of more-than-human natural scapes and spaces, ranging
from the intimate playful observation of the poetics of seeds (Gaston Bachelard), to the
sublime and terrifying beholding of the vastest unattainable mountains (Caspar David
Friedrich, Sebastião Salgado, Godfrey Reggio). By dialogically connecting our affective
intensities with these scapes and spaces – as in the Home-Tree action research project – we
may learn to experience our belonging to the world, and be able to “detach the figure of the
Earth from that of the Globe”, i.e., from an image that “gave shape to the imperial idea of a
universal power grab” and control (Latour).
Description
Keywords
performative arts ecological ethics regenerative agriculture community-based local action
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Corrêa, Graça P. "Eco-Empathy, or towards a co-creative sympoietic embodied relation with more-than-human environments", Social Solidarity Economy & The Commons International Conference Proceedings 2024, Lisbon: ISCTE University of Lisbon, 2025.