Ephemeral Care With Land and Waste: Children's Artistic Responses in Ecuador

• In Event: 21.040 - Children's Common Worlds in Times of Climate Change and "Post-Truths"

Abstract

There is a strong consensus in current environmental literature about the challenging effects of waste materials in developing countries (Ma & Hipel, 2016). This is especially true in Ecuador, as waste (such as plastic) is deeply woven with/in local landscapes. Yet, while waste poses significant risks to children’s health, they are also intimately entangled with Ecuadorian natural-cultural geographies. In collaboration with Santana school in Cuenca, Ecuador, this poster presentation focuses on children’s artistic processes in a project that linked waste with caring for the land. Rather than thinking of waste as external to the land, children engaged with waste as of-the-land.

Inspired by Ecuadorian artist, Juana Cordova (2018), this poster shares children’s responses as we pursued what Vintimilla (2017) calls small acts of ‘ephemeral care’ with the land. Through artful pedagogies of slowing down and paying attention, we aim to recreate caring relations with the land that disrupt neocolonial, global north-south power axes and recuperate aesthetic and ancestral traditions in Cuenca, Ecuador.

Using a common worlds research framework (Common Words Research Collective, 2015), this poster will share children’s responses to resist capitalist logics, such as progress and profit, and rethink the role of the human amid increasingly precarious ecological conditions. Thinking with studio processes (Kind, 2018) and visual/video ethnographic methods (Pink, 2009, 2013), we center the arts as a primary mode of pedagogical inquiry and post qualitative data collection. Data sources include art work, photo/video poems, and anecdotal conversations with educators and children.

Following Stengers (2018), this poster presentation challenges quick-fix waste management solutions, and draws attention to the need for slowing down and attending to situated-land specific responses. In order to sustain ongoing attention to the land in times of rapid waste solutions, the poster will respond to the following two questions: What processes could be put in motion to attune children and ourselves with the land and its more -than-human inhabitants, and simultaneously respond to Ecuador’s waste crisis? And how might we recreate relations with what is of-the-land without falling back into the search for new purities?

The poster is significant because it engages with situated pedagogies that ethically insist in finding alternative logics to capitalism and managerial approaches to education. Also, this research is based in solid interdisciplinary encounters between pedagogy and the arts. Such interdisciplinary encounters have the potential to destabilize the stagnant and neo-colonial educational orientations - which is an imperative transformation in the 21st century.

Authors

• Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, York University

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario

• Alex Berry