Interview: Gathering visual narratives around nature
We spoke with Maya Errázuriz, Catalina Valdés, and Nélida Pohl, editors of Recolección. Artes en defensa de la naturaleza en Chile (Fundación Mar Adentro/Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad), about the four-year process that gave rise to this publication, which grew out of a policy brief carried out together with the University of Bristol in 2022. The book brings together 68 projects, seven essays, a methodological guide, and a timeline that interweaves art and ecology without establishing a hierarchy between the two disciplines.
Gathering stories told from curiosity, love for nature, and uncertainty in the face of the socio-ecological crisis was the impulse behind Recolección. Artes en defensa de la naturaleza en Chile, a publication launching this Thursday, July 30, at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (MNHN), which will soon have a digital version as well. The project, brought together by three editors, emerged from an organic research process whose depth and enthusiasm made its transformation into a book inevitable — a book that is, at the same time, an archive tracing the intersection of art and ecology from the 19th century to the present.
The publication, with a prologue by ecologist Sara Larraín, brings together essays by Consuelo Biskupovic, Gabriela Simonetti-Grez, Pablo Chiuminatto, Sofía Rosa, Camila Marambio, Bárbara Saavedra, Fernanda Oyarzún, Cristian Vargas Paillahueque, Carolina Castro Jorquera, and Carla Pinochet Cobos; a photographic narrative by Josefina Astorga, Sebastián Mejía, and Marcos Zegers; 68 initiatives spanning from the Norte Grande to Tierra del Fuego; and a methodological guide for developing nature-related projects, created together with the Museo Interactivo Mirador (MIM).
Maya Errázuriz, Director of Art and Publications at Fundación Mar Adentro; Nélida Pohl, Director of Communications at the Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB); and Catalina Valdés, curator and historian of the relationships between the arts and the natural sciences, are the editors of this collective record of voices which, across Chile, interweaves art, environmental science, and the defense of nature in a publication dedicated posthumously to the scholar and artist Pablo Chiuminatto and to the founder of Librería Libro Verde, Rodrigo Moren.
FMA: This book’s journey began in 2022 with a policy brief on art and science. How did that document come about, and what made you realize that the information you had gathered needed to overflow that format?
Catalina Valdés (CV): It was after one of the policy brief launches. Pablo Chiuminatto was there — the scholar who opened up the field of environmental humanities in Chile with a landmark book on literature and ecology (Futuro esplendor: ecocrítica desde Chile, co-written with Andrea Casals). He told us we couldn’t leave all of this in a four-page summary. As researchers, we knew the content completely exceeded that mega-summary of compilation and accumulation. For me, that was the moment we said: “yes, let’s do this.”
Maya Errázuriz (ME): The document came about thanks to the initiative of Paul Merchant, from the University of Bristol. I had connected with him on an earlier project, and he reached out to tell us about the possibility of funding a policy brief on art and science. At first the proposal covered Peru and Chile, but we narrowed it down to Chile. Catalina then joined, and she put together the team with Nélida, Carla Pinochet, and Fernanda Oyarzún. The policy brief aimed to present relevant information about how funding bodies and public and private funds, both in Chile and abroad, could better support art-science collaborations, while also helping to address the socio-environmental crisis in a more integral way. To assess the state of these connections in the local context, the team of researchers carried out a mapping and gathered testimonies from various civil society actors working at that intersection. As the work progressed, I realized that the amount of information being gathered called for a longer format. On top of that, we were often approached by people asking for some kind of database or information about artists, initiatives, or actors working at this intersection, and how to access that information — which pointed to a real gap in accessing information about this growing artistic scene in Chile. This was something that had been on many people’s minds; for example, I once took part in a gathering organized by the 14th Santiago Media Arts Biennial – The Fourth World (2019–2020) to map residencies linked to wild territories, where Catalina was also present.
Catalina Valdés (CV): That was a starting point — maybe not point zero, but a very early one in this attempt at gathering. That biennial was focused on art, science, and ecology, and, right in the middle of the estallido social (Chile’s 2019 social uprising), we organized that gathering out of the need to recognize one another.
ME: Afterward, it was very hard to summarize everything that Nélida, Catalina, Fernanda, and Carla had initially gathered. There really was material for a book.
Nélida Pohl: It distressed me to see that enormous folder, full of information and valuable reflections, that the policy brief format — short by definition, aimed at an audience that takes action — simply couldn’t hold. It couldn’t just stay there; we had to move on to the book phase.
ME: From the start we were driven by the idea of creating an archive, of making this movement visible. It’s important to contribute to the record of milestones and actions that aren’t fully known outside the niche. Throughout the process of creating this book, it’s been exciting to see these projects expand: you’d move one rock and four more projects would appear underneath. The method used for the policy brief interviews — interviewing one person, who would then recommend another, and so on — helped voices circulate. We wanted a book that wasn’t about us writing about our own work, but rather a compendium of voices saying: “let’s get to know each other.”
NP: Along the way, I’ve seen how knowledge about nature reaches people through the sensory and the aesthetic, through experiences that are often hard to put into words. That’s where art offers itself as a way in for that knowledge. And only once that knowledge and affection for another species exists can we expect people to truly commit to environmental causes. From science, I saw that artists had great interest in these topics and that science wasn’t managing to convey them: there was a lack of ways to share information with an art world that was very eager to contribute.
CV: In my experience working on the 14th Media Arts Biennial, my curatorial proposal was that every exhibited art project should have some degree of dialogue with scientific research. And the same thing always happened: you had to justify at length why an artist would be interested in talking with a scientist, or why, say, a volcanologist would benefit from meeting a particular artist, and convince people that both were working to investigate very complex materialities. That somewhat hierarchical relationship between the natural sciences and nature-based art is deeply entrenched. However, the landscape has changed recently: there are now master’s programs devoted to socio-environmental thinking from the humanities, the arts, and philosophy. And science itself now demands much more outreach and public engagement, which often overlaps with artistic projects. Transdisciplinarity went from being an exception to a desirable way of thinking about projects.
FMA: Four years have gone by. How did you organize yourselves to shape a book that includes not only essays, but reviews, a timeline, and a methodological guide, all within the context of such a broad network of people involved?
CV: Almost every Friday morning started with a meeting. We reviewed projects, made lists of milestones, publications, authors, exhibitions, concepts, places. We invited the essay authors: Pablo Chiuminatto, who brought in Sofía Rosa; Camila Marambio, who added Bárbara Saavedra and Rosario Ureta; Consuelo Biskupovic, who invited Gabriela Simonetti-Grez; Cristián Vargas; Carolina Castro, who interviewed a great many more people; and Fernanda Oyarzún and Carla Pinochet, with whom we started the policy brief. We spoke with many artists who are also ecologists, naturalists, activists. We read, we looked for references from inside and outside Chile, from the present and the past. We learned a lot.
ME: There were pauses; each of our personal project timelines got in the way and we couldn’t manage to meet. The problem was that, over time, we kept discovering more projects, and deciding where to draw the line became difficult: we worried about excluding someone simply out of not knowing about them. But at some point it becomes unmanageable, and we accepted that some projects would be left out. What was lovely was positioning the book not as a grand compendium of art and ecology in Chile, but as one step, a record of stories.
NP: I’ve been part of other multi-year editorial projects, but ones where you only needed to coordinate with five or six people at most. Here we needed not only the 11 or 12 essay authors, but also the time of the people responsible for the 68 projects reviewed, plus the contributors to the methodological guide — more than 90 people in total. I’m very proud that this is truly a collective effort.
CV: There are life processes at play too. I live in another country and lost a bit of the rhythm of office work; dispersion is part of my environment, I inhabit it. It was lovely to see how, even with very different working rhythms — Maya put out a biennial in the middle of it, Nélida worked on books and other projects, I did exhibitions — those projects were all connected in some way. There’s a certain coherence among this team of editors, and that fed the book and the desire to keep making it. The initial sense of purpose remained clear throughout. And something very significant: during these years, two of the book’s inspirations sadly passed away, which turned it even further into an ethical responsibility.
FMA: The book opens with a prologue by Sara Larraín, Por un arte radical (“For a Radical Art”). Why did you think of her, beyond her political career, to welcome readers?
CV: I want to add another point of origin for this movement, in historiographical terms: a gathering organized by Ignacio Acosta at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), where he invited activists to speak about their work, in 2018. That’s where I heard that Sara had trained as an art teacher and worked for many years in UC Chile’s Department of Aesthetics. It’s a somewhat hidden side of her. When I remembered her while we were making the book, I realized she’d be a very fitting person to write the prologue. What she talked about had to do with how, after an environmental catastrophe or a socio-environmental conflict, an experience of art turns into conversation — even for someone who can’t rationally explain it, because it passed through the visual, the aesthetic. We also needed a voice from the generation that had opened up that path and that field earlier on, one that converged with political struggle. Sara embodies that too.
ME: I’d also stress that the world of art and science is broad. The policy brief spoke about those connections only in summary form, focused especially on the socio-environmental crisis. For the book, on the other hand, we wanted to give it its own specificity: the intersection between art and environmental science, since most of the projects reviewed came from the visual arts, moving toward environmentalism. That’s why, when thinking about a prologue, we were clear it needed to be someone recognized within environmentalism, someone who could bring in that audience. The three of us are deeply involved with art, but also with conservation and the ecological sciences. In our projects there are many artists who don’t know the history of either environmental science or the defense movements in Chile. The timeline gathers stories that are scattered across their respective fields. Sara moves between both of those histories.
NP: From ecology’s side, I see that most people, on hearing “ecology,” think more of defense than of research. For me it’s important to bring those worlds closer together: environmentalism can have scientific knowledge behind it, and that reinforces the care of nature. That’s why it was important for “defense” to be in the title, and for the timeline not to present science and environmentalism milestones as separate things. Artists and activists need scientific knowledge to enrich, with evidence, the content of their artistic, activist, and artivist actions.
FMA: Now, regarding the essayists: how did you build that list, given the crossing of disciplines involved — anthropologists, biologists, sociologists, people with experience in the performing arts, perspectives from Indigenous culture, and curators as well? Was there a criterion from the outset?
NP: This list was built gradually: we needed voices from academia, from activism, and also from the environmental humanities — a universe largely unknown from within the exact sciences. We also saw that many projects emerge from affected communities, several of them Indigenous, and we needed a voice to speak to that. There are a lot of people working in the environmental field who don’t know each other — not even within ecology, which is a small circle — and it was very important for them to get to know one another, and for artists and scientists to know what’s happening across the country.
ME: We always worked with certain categories or notions, milestones, typologies, acts that function as anchors in the history of environmental or nature-based art: the legacy of scientific illustration; residencies that foster artistic research in nature; rock art and the cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples as foundational precedents; the land art movements of the 70s, intertwined with activism and political events. We also identified how institutions today, faced with the urgency of climate change, try to join this discussion, whether or not they instrumentalize art in doing so. Those precedents helped us think through the topics we needed to address in the essays, how this artistic movement is built, and its challenges and contradictions. We also aimed at different audiences, to tell the history of environmental activism, as well as address our country’s extractivist history.
CV: At the same time, there were names we knew had to be included, like Camila Marambio, a real pioneer in contemporary art through her work at Matucana 100, and later with the Ensayos conservation and research residency at Parque Karukinka, a reference point for many other residencies. Another figure we wanted was Pablo Chiuminatto, a pioneer of environmental humanities in Chile, whose article calls out the indiscriminate use of the term “eco,” now applied to just about anything — the “ecosystem” of companies, of the internet, of finance. You hear that everywhere today.
ME: The world of literature also became relevant. There were important earlier books that we mention in the timeline, because they offer certain precedents. And I think the essay by Pablo Chiuminatto and Sofía Rosa also connects us to something that exists in this field: a language gap. In the work between art and science, there’s this challenge of stopping to think about how we name things.
CV: And there was also a blind spot: the question of self-criticism, or the contradictions within the field, which Carla Pinochet had already worked on in the policy brief. It was hard to tackle, because we know that many projects receive funding that comes directly from extractive industries. It was important to have her essay, which problematizes the issue, because it’s very evident in many cases: the conflict of funding, greenwashing, how aestheticizing a problem can sometimes create even more problems.
NP: On the other hand, we worked hard to achieve good territorial representation. I’m very happy to have included projects from almost all of Chile, because that doesn’t exist in systematized form anywhere else. That matters a great deal, especially in regions where knowing that these projects exist can be a driving force for the people working there.
ME: Other criteria we applied when selecting the projects to include in the reviews were, on one hand, to favor projects, initiatives, drives, and lines of work that were collective and sustained over the long term, rather than individual or isolated gestures. At first we thought about creating categories for the reviews, such as “residencies,” “institutions,” “educational projects,” among others, but many projects could fit into several categories, so the reviews are instead ordered alphabetically by name, which highlights the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of this work. It’s also important to be explicit that the reviews consider projects we ourselves have had contact with and/or worked with and built ties to over the course of our individual careers. It’s a selection that acknowledges these are projects we know, and that there are undoubtedly many, many more still left for us to discover.
CV: That was a turning point halfway through the process. We were working with the names of specific artists, people, and residencies, and suddenly Maya proposed the shift: to select by lines of work, by projects. That was so as not to fall into that logic — so typical of art history — focused on the “individual genius.” It’s common in compilation publications of this kind to follow that line, that authorial order. So we said: let’s review projects, moving away a bit from the logic of individuals.
FMA: And how did the need to include a timeline come about, and what did this exercise involve, given that it’s fragmentary and not necessarily exhaustive?
NP: With the reviews, we couldn’t cover everything: we were reviewing contemporary projects, and the past remained pending. There were too many precedents; we couldn’t offer just a Polaroid of the present. We thought: this is a book about art and ecology, so there had to be milestones from both academic ecology and nature-defense movements. And from art too: exhibitions, works, gestures like Cecilia Vicuña asking Salvador Allende to create Seed Day — how could we not mention it? It’s a milestone. There’s also a great deal of published work that has fed this conversation for decades, and that had to be there. We went back and forth a lot trying to categorize the timeline, but I think the final design solution got it right.
FMA: And, on another note, how did the idea of including a methodological guide in the book come about, and how did the collaboration with the MIM team develop?
NP: The idea for the methodological guide came from thinking about young audiences just starting out in their careers, students from all the disciplines discussed in the book, who might need more practical support around the word “ecological,” since a lot of people think it’s just about recycling, when there are many other dimensions in which a project can be sustainable — socially, financially, in terms of material and energy use, and so on. We wanted to put together a guide of recommendations, and we looked for precedents to draw on. The collaboration with the MIM came about because we knew Josefina (González, museum designer) and Simón (Pérez, deputy director), and we knew these topics could interest them. Besides, environmental science is a relatively recent but very strong interest of the museum’s. We couldn’t be the ones lecturing; instead, we wanted to collaborate with those who know more. That’s how the methodological section came about.
CV: It’s a long-running conversation that had already been taking shape. For example, at the Media Arts Biennial, Enrique Rivera was director of the Corporación Chilena de Video and later went on to head the Fundación Tiempos Nuevos, which runs the MIM. There’s a continuity around that figure, someone attentive to these issues. At the Biennial there was already concern about exhibition design, so that it wouldn’t literally end up in the trash at the end of the process. And the MIM has, from its very beginning, a museum-production workshop where they build their own devices: nothing comes pre-made, and restoration is considered before disposal. That workshop is a space for reflection in pedagogical and material terms, where sustainability is a key point. It’s a fertile space for thinking about that, unlike other museums that outsource, stockpile, or throw away the infrastructure of their exhibitions.
ME: Yes, and another precedent for that guide was the network Fundación Mar Adentro belongs to, Green Art Lab Alliance (GALA), which had already produced regional sustainability guides — one for Asia, another for Europe, drawing on projects from those contexts. At one point I had conversations with Simón Pérez, who told me they were asking themselves those same questions, attending gatherings on how to reduce museums’ carbon footprint. I also met people from that network working on the topic, and it seemed to me that not many institutions in Chile ask themselves those questions the way the MIM does. We give priority to the questions that arise when we take on these projects, questions that aren’t only about exhibition design, but about how we treat each other as a team, how we relate to communities, how we situate ourselves within a territory. In many gatherings around the residencies, we ask ourselves those questions: how not to fall into extractive practices. They’re questions we keep asking ourselves.
FMA: The book features a parallel narrative through the photography of Josefina Astorga, Marcos Zegers, and Sebastián Mejía. How did the decision to incorporate a visual narrative come about?
CV: The photographs were an excellent idea of Maya’s that came up during the layout process itself. It shows, once again, the flexibility we kept right up until the last moment, right before going to print.
ME: Initially we saw that, in terms of design, this would be a book where text takes center stage — not only in content, but also in art direction. It was very hard to think of visual representations for the topics at hand. Many of the images that come to mind when you picture these themes visually are landscapes or works by artists, and we didn’t want to include images that offered a passive, purely observational gaze. We thought a lot about what the visual language of this book would be, what kind of visual culture we wanted to give it. In the final stretch of editing, we felt something was missing — visual breathing room that would let another narrative emerge alongside these many concepts. That’s when it occurred to us to reach out to these photographers, with whom we already had a relationship, and with whom the Foundation has done many projects. These are photographers asking themselves ethical questions about photography, or about the creation of this visual culture, and who bring to light concepts that connected very well with what we address in the book. In Josefina Astorga’s case, she’s currently working on a plant-developing project, also thinking about the good-practices guide: what good practices we want to bring into photography. Marcos’s work proposes a very interesting aesthetics of extractivism. Sebastián Mejía, meanwhile, has this sensitivity for connecting with less-celebrated, less-looked-at kinds of nature — everyday natures. Each of them, from their own stance, adds another layer of reflection on what, ultimately, the visual representation of these subjects is.
About the interviewees
Maya Errázuriz
Curator and editor, with a degree in Art History and Architecture from Boston University, and studies in Editing at UC Chile. For the past ten years, her practice has centered on the link between art and ecology. She is Director of Art and Publications at FMA, where she leads curatorial research and the Bosque Pehuén residency program. Her recent curatorial work includes De lo invisible (MAC, 2025), Trueno, 16th Media Arts Biennial (2023), and Vegetation ünter ström (Bauhaus Dessau, 2021).
Nélida Pohl
She holds a degree in Sciences with a major in Biology and a master’s in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the Universidad de Chile; a PhD in Biology from UC Irvine; and a master’s in Science Communication from Imperial College London. She is Director of Communications at the Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB), a professor, an independent consultant, and former president of ACHIPEC (2018–2021). She co-founded the Postgraduate Diploma in Science Communication at the Universidad de Chile. She works to foster dialogue between science and art.
Catalina Valdés
Independent curator, with a PhD in Art History (EHESS/UNSAM). She researches the relationships between the arts and the natural sciences, and is an author and editor of publications on the history of landscape and scientific imagery in 19th-century Chile and South America. As a curator, she accompanies artistic research projects that engage in dialogue with ecology. She lives in São Bento do Sapucaí, Brazil, where she runs the Livraria do Bosque, a cultural center devoted to books on the environment.
