Articles & Columns
Transdisciplinary Learnings and Local Knowledge: UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development Network Global Meeting
Ensuring that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) becomes an effective tool to face the current socio-ecological crisis is a significant challenge. It is therefore important to create instances to share successful experiences and initiatives in the field. It is in...
Regeneration and new narratives for a socioecological transition
Regeneration is "the process of renewal and growth that allows cells, organisms, and ecosystems to become more resistant to fluctuations or events that can alter them."(1) This has been one of the guiding concepts for the development of our programs...
Colaboratory Kitchen: Sovereignty Around Food Landscapes
The kitchen isn’t just a space to prepare food; it unfolds as a territory of emotional ties, memory and creative processes. It is also a place where cultural factors come into tension around gender and class, a frontier of flavors...
Smart forests: Community networks at the center of environmental technologies
Jennifer Gabrys, a researcher of the Sociology Department at Cambridge University, recently visited Chile, one of the case study countries of the projectSmart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies. The project explores the uses of digital technology for the monitoring...
Metaphors and learnings inspired on the behavior of Andean plants
What can we learn about caring for life from the plants of the Andean landscapes? The mountains of Chile are frequently perceived as the background landscape that accompanies us, where sports activities take place, or where people can enjoy panoramic...
Post-memory and phytopoetics: When the past becomes physical movement and record
As we approach the 50-year anniversary of the coup d’état, we speak with the philosopher Ángel Álvarez-Solís, who reflects on the relationship between memory studies, phytopoetics and plant critique. The need to articulate narrations from a sensory perspective as a...
Collaborative art as a form of socio-ecological resistance
The current demands of contemporary life and our permanent connection to technological devices encourage consumption, individualism and dematerialization. The omnipresence of screens, at the same time, can intensify the disconnection between humans and everyday elements of nature. In the face...
New routes to expand the limits of artistic creation
Claudia González and Sebastián Mejia reflect on the experiences they lived in the virtual co-creation residency (RE)Shape , which brought together cross-cultural views of creators from different countries. In this interview we address new creative possibilities, methodological links and perspectives...
Ferns: Plants do not move, they transform
Chilean film director Paz Ramírez recently premiered the short film “Helechos” (“Ferns”, in English), set to music made with plant vibrations. It was filmed during the Chilean social and health crises, and was shot in two locations: Santiago and Bosque...
Approval of the law that creates the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service (BPAS): “For the first time, biodiversity is placed at the center of the country’s environmental policy”
Pending the promulgation of the law that creates the Biodiversity and Protected Areas Service (BPAS), our director of the Conservation area, Amerindia Jaramillo, reflects on the progress and challenges involved in implementing this legislation. A historic day was lived this...
“In this century we have managed to recover the connection between art and nature”
Nearly a decade ago, a book on ecology sought to vindicate natural history and the value of observation as the basis of the discipline. With their approaches, the ecologist Aníbal Pauchard and the late researcher, Rafe Sagarin, influenced the field...
Biological invasions and global change: impacts of biotic homogenization and challenges for biodiversity conservation
The phenomenon of global change is defined as a set of environmental alterations driven by human activities, related to the modification of ecological processes that determine the ecosystem functioning. Within the components of global change, there are complex processes such...
“Artistic mediation is key to the resilience of societies”
From a cloudy cloud forest in Xalapa, Mexico, Antonia Isaacson reflects on the transformations of artistic mediation in Chile in the Latin American context. Currently, she lives in a nature reserve, a space in which she has activated biocultural experiences...
In the midst of the last forests: the need for an ecosystem approach
The native forests and the anthropic land uses are determining factors in the availability of water that flows through rivers, lakes, lagoons and other wetlands, and that finally run into the sea. Land-use changes such as deforestation and forest degradation...
Perceiving realities from the sonic realm in order to go beyond the visible
Fundación Mar Adentro: How did your research in sound art begin? Gregorio Fontén: Very early on. My interest in sound, song and creation began when I was a child, collecting different voices and joining conversations I heard from different people....
Artificial intelligence and biomaterials: the inspiration of the Atacama desert in creating products of global impact for the conservation of nature
Fundación Mar Adentro: You have had a career that crosses different disciplines: your undergraduate degree was in architecture, then your doctorate was in design and computing, and now you’re doing your post-doctorate in the faculty of chemical engineering. How did...
Current challenges in representativeness of terrestrial ecosystems in Chile’s protected area system
Fundación Mar Adentro: In the study–entitled “Updating the protected areas of Chile: analysis of representativeness and climate risk”–that you carried out for the Center for Public Studies (CEP - Centro de Estudios Públicos), you updated the information on the location,...
Collaboration, Decisions, and New Technology: The Mysterious Power of Mycelium
Fundación Mar Adentro: Which mushroom characteristics can you also find in humans? Gabriel Orrego: Mushrooms are curious, dynamic and genetically closer to us than to plants. Until a few decades ago, they were considered part of the plantae (plant) kingdom...
Fungiverse. A Journey to the Bioarchitectures of the Future
Fungiverse A broad rereading of the work confirmed the theory. In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses— simultaneously—all...
Nature Fund Chile: The importance of the new collaborative financing to protect our natural heritage
Fundación Mar Adentro: You’ve been working from the beginning on the founding of Nature Fund Chile, which began to take shape in 2017, when the Ministry of the Environment and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS Chile) visited the environmental fund...
Act Like Flowing Waters
Fundación Mar Adentro: Water has been a central theme of your latest works, such as in Ko ta Mapungey ka (Water is also territory), where the Guñelve appears as a symbol of resistance, facing a land “that doesn’t dry...
Forests of fire
Fundación Mar Adentro: How does Agencia Borde come about and its interest in investigating the limits of the notions of landscape, territory and its inhabitants? Agencia Borde (Sebastián Melo, Rosario Montero and Paula Salas): We are an art research project...
Sounds of Bosque Pehuén: encountering ancient time in nature
When did you begin exploring nature via musical composition? From early on it was an important part of my work; at first as an allusion to natural organics and paying attention to the different interpretations of native peoples, until arriving...
Climate change as an opportunity to build a better quality of life
What led you to specialize in climate studies? An experience in nature? A professor? No, the truth is that working in climate came about separately from an obvious interest in nature. I mean I’ve always had an interest in nature,...
Who brought the water?
We live in a time of dizzying changes both in society and science, and especially in astronomy. In the last decade, we’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets (planets that orbit stars like the Sun), most of which are completely different to...
The movement of plants is political
Interview with Fiorella Angelini, Chilean visual artist and director of “The Araucaria Project: My journey to discover the sacred”. Through her installations, analogue photography and video, Angelini explores various issues that affect nature, territory and identity. Her latest audiovisual work...
Animating Characters in an Incomplete World
Interview with Marcos Sánchez – artist and filmmaker Visual artist, animator and filmmaker, Marcos Sánchez will be participating in the Ars Electronica 2021 Festival as part of Fundación Mar Adentro’s Polygonal Forest platform. In this interview, Marcos reflects on the...
The artistic process as a game
Interview with Cristóbal León, artist and filmmaker. Co-Director of the award-winning film La Casa Lobo (The Wolf House), together with Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal speaks in this interview about the role of art in the climate emergency, the upcoming premiere of...
The Natural Resources Trap: How to Avoid It?
About 30 years ago, the book Trayectorias divergentes (Divergent Trajectories) was published, edited by Patricio Meller and Magnus Blömstron. In this book, Latin American and Scandinavian authors compared the divergent long-term trends of both groups of countries. One of the...
A Story and its Unforeseen Materialities
Interview with Cristina Sitja, illustrator and ceramist. Driven by an interest in the animal and plant world, Cristina Sitja's work takes different forms and materialities that invite us to observe what surrounds us. In this interview we talk about her...
Grasslands: Places of Pioneering Species
“Pioneer plants, those that are capable of living in the midst of an ungrateful environment, are, in fact, fragile; they die outside of that environment. Riches do not suit them.” – Gilles Clement, Garden in Motion When I arrived to...
Rituals and Treasures of the Pacific Coast
Interview with Begoña Ugalde, poet and founder of Ediciones Liquen. A poet and narrator, Ugalde has made nature a constant theme in her writing. In the last few months, she published a book together with her publishing house about a...
Flooding Spaces with Native Green
Interview with Magdalena Valdés, founder of Bosko and dedicated to creating fast-growing native forests. Magdalena’s interest in nature and concern for the loss of native plant species led her –a historian with studies in sociology– to investigate the Miyawaki method...
Cosmic Order, Invisible Energies and Cycles of Nature
Interview with Elisa Balmaceda, visual artist, teacher and researcher. Always interested in the cycles of nature, Elisa Balmaceda began working with the sun and later expanded her research to include subjects linked to ecology, the understanding of time and space,...
Voices of a Woven World: Poetics and Inner Sustainability
Our feet trace a path of twisted roots and earth adorned with pine needles alongside the frozen body of Suur-Kaksjärv, a lake enveloped by pine trees. I catch the glowing face of a four-month-old held against his mother’s chest as...
System Suspect Suffering: A Work by Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira
Transition to Nature Padece is the first result of a year-long process (and ongoing) of an artistic research by Chilean artist Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira that took place within both a lab as well as onsite on the damage that the araucaria...
Traditional Seeds: A Living Heritage in Need of Rescue
Interview with Thamar Sepúlveda – Seed Guardian and co-founder of Biodiversidad Alimentaria Traditional seeds are a natural wealth that is often unknown or forgotten, with a story that dates back to hundreds and even thousands of years. They have unique...
Algae, with a capital A
Algae constitute an entire world in and of themselves and are a group of plants that live in water. They are thalophytes, that is, they have a thallus in which roots, stem, or leaves are not differentiated, and can be...
The Wilderness Archive at Centro Cultural La Moneda
Remember the last time you walked through the aisles of a museum of natural history? Those cabinets full of specimens standing on a pin or glued to a board under screens of clear glass framed in varnished wood or against...
Conservation as a Citizens Movement
Interview with Bruno Monteferri, Director of Conservamos por Naturaleza Connecting urban dwellers with conservation projects, working with local communities, empowering privately protected areas, and creating a network of volunteers and massive environmental campaigns which have succeeded in impacting laws in...
Bio-art, Installation and Performance as Holistic Modes of Understanding the Human and Non-Human
Biological cultures, artistic methods as alternate forms of ecological sampling, and critical theory are some of the multiple resources that drives artist Jasmin Märker’s creative process. Our virtual relationship with Jasmin began the beginning of this year, we had just...
The Internet of Things: Environmental and Social Implications of Artificial Intelligence
How are we able to conserve human qualities, their particularities and unpredictabilities– those that differentiate us from algorithms–is the question. Technology seems to be evolving faster than ever and it is now a matter of urgency to reflect profoundly on...
Sustainable reactivation now
The impending social and economic crisis caused by the coronavirus in Chile is far from being fully understood. For thousands of people, subsistence has become an omnipresent phantom, both in their workplaces and in their own homes. For the most...
Circular Urban Metabolism: Cities as Living Organisms
One of the crucial discussions currently surrounding the climate crisis is closely related to the need to re-think our cities. What to do with waste; how to generate circular economy policies; and what you can do in your own home...
Anthropology, Science and Mapuche Society
The relationship between science and history, heritage, the Mapuche society –indigenous habitants of present-day south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina–, and capitalism, as well as the devastation of the ecosystems, were some of the issues we discussed with Diego Milos: chilean...
A Mycelium-Like Network
“We hear about precarity in the news every day. People lose their jobs or are angry because they never had them. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific Islands. But most of...
Privately Protected Areas in Chile: Biological corridors for ecological connectivity
Privately protected areas (PPAs) have been internationally recognized by scientists and experts as an important conservation strategy to face the current global biodiversity crisis. In this scenario, the development of private conservation initiatives in accordance with international standards and in...
Biomaterials for Societies of the Future
The instability that the current pandemic has produced over global economic logics as well as political and power structures, has emphasized the existing breakdown in how we relate to and connect with nature. A nature caricatured as an image of...
Messages from the Bat God: Towards a Decolonized Art and Education
The global health crisis has left a trail of images and ideas that our culture will take time to assimilate: the bodies of the victims and the evident absence of a symbolic space to deal with death; the return of...
Looking Back at our Dietary Past for a Better Future
“The current socio-environmental health crisis that we are living, requires rethinking what truly is essential as well as identifying the elements that will allow us to face quarantine and its effects on vulnerable sectors of society. A key element is...