Carolina Montejo

Articulating the bio-socio-political framework of my academic research with the poetics of my filmmaking have manifested an undulating flow during my three years

of candidacy in the Visual Arts MFA Program at UCSD— one in which text and image have moved simultaneously between the precision of words, the plurality of oral

tradition, the atmospheric components of sound, the performative possibilities of the body, and the constancy of the the material world through the moving image. Each of these

components are present in Rizomas as branches that touch on documentary practices, ethnographic collaborations, poetry and voice-over narration, 3D modeling and animation,

analogue and digital technology hybrids, as well as social and environmental advocacy.

Initially interested in psychedelics as well as anthropological views of ayahuasca history and chemistry, I approached the works of authors Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Richard Evan

Schultes, and Michael Pollan. Their work provided a historical outline of the development and effects of psychedelics in western cultures and the diverse experiences and

knowledge systems they set in action across the American continent. They also furnished a context to address the problematic relations between plants and humans and how they

intersect with colonial-era patriarchy, the extraction industries, and the larger capitalist system that underwrites them. Consequently, I came to terms with how these facts have

greatly impacted the environment, as well as the social wellbeing of diverse communities in the Global South, especially those where sacred plants—traditionally used by

indigenous cultures—have become synonyms of war and violence.

Eventually guided by the history of ecofeminism—a philosophical and political position that examines and confronts patriarchal binary structures that have historically oppressed

nature, as well as fem bodies and the environment— I came to develop a series of installations, performances and audio visual pieces that inspired each of the sequences present in

Rizomas. Additionally, and upon receiving the Tinker Field Research Grant, I was able to collaborate with 'Red de Mujeres Construyendo Futuro', a group of women from

marginalized communities of Bogotá, who have been resisting diverse toxic systems, such as patriarchy and class oppression, through actions towards food sovereignty via

community gardens.

This three year process of learning—and unlearning—was accompanied by the an experimental approach to the film script and by way of additional research on the biological

workings of geophyte plants as non-hierarchical systems of cooperation; and of liverworts as evolutionary-resistant organisms that presented models for utopian ideals found in

the plant kingdom. These developments gave way to the figure of the rhizome as a guiding principle for an alternative film script, and to the term 'ecofemitopia', a site for feminist

eco-pluralistic thought, where social relations, biological realities, and diverse subjectivities could reimagine and rebuild the earth, as well as resist the exploitation of human and

more-than-human bodies. Within 'Rizomas' these ideas are developed in the sequence 'Welcome to the Ecofeminist System', a sci fi poem accompanied by images from the 1999

archive of Dr. Lawrence Jensen and Andrew Chung of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and their animations titled 'The Secret Life of Plants'.

In 2019, after performing my piece 'Untitled Matter' at a single standing Dracaena Draco Tree at St. James by the Sea (Project Blank), I I thought of what it meant to touch a

body in correspondence with intuitive perception and among diverse types of matter that were more than human. Influenced by 'Chipko' and the 'Green Belt Movement', as well as

Abramovic's Balkan Erotic Epic, I proceeded to connect with the matter of the tree by touching, smelling, listening, climbing, holding, and attempting to establish reciprocity with its

living force. As an adaptation for Rizomas, I invited friends to different locations including small local forests, and urban settings to perform their own intimate interactions with

trees. With a handheld digital camera and minimal direction, I documented them as they embraced, caressed and related to their presence. Off-camera, and through voice

recording, the collaborators narrated memories of a time when they felt most attuned to nature.

Proposing a recognition and critique of the prefix eco in the vanguard of our culture, I asked questions such as: How can a material home in such urgent need for plural and

interspecies ethics travel through spacetime entangled with the acutely active human imagination? Within Rizomas, the sequence titled Virtual Ecology presents a version of

plant-human relationality as an intersecting point for eco-techno-imagination.

Using the building information modeling software Autodesk Revit and Lumion, the piece approaches memory as a starting point for manifestation and enmeshment. In between

live action performances appear computer generated landscapes and humanoid figures that tangentially reference the story and introduce a home within the mountains inhabited

by animals, plants, and people. The distinct aesthetics of the images and the camera movements bring forward the idea of home we have consented on through decades of

mediated real estate bonanza and postcolonial luxury architecture. The intention of this rendered depiction is to give a new use to a tool centered in uniformity and marketed land

expansion, and instead, create through it a simultaneous domicile for subjectivity and world-building. In this place designed with samples of repurposed materials and built to

incorporate community views with intimate space, justice looks like birds talking to people, plants and insects growing among objects, and difference as non-exclusionary. From a

transversal view, the people in the urban setting bridge the artificial possibility with their voice, pastoral gaze, and relatable materiality. In this sequence, home exits the ‘domicile’

and becomes a state of mind in which personal history and generational aesthetics are indexes of the mobility and all encompassing nature of the ecosphere.

Informed by nomadic subjectivity, ecocinema, and sensory ethnography through the works of Rosi Braidotti, Paula Willoquet Maricondi, and Sarah Pink, among others, I

found a framework of perception, place and imagination as an opportunity to continue engaging with ecocentric ideas of wholeness and entanglement as a guiding ethos.

Simultaneously, memory and oral tradition attempted to blur spatial and material hierarchies that extended the concept of location into the realms of speculation and critique. Such

transits were highlighted by the film’s jumps between styles, viewpoints, and voices, which eventually arrived on the concept of Bradiotti’s nomadic subjectivity and its acute

awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries, in which the nomad has a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it, and in which there are multiple places to call home

and rest up on. (Braidotti, 2011).

Personally, my intention with Rizomas was that of a micro-political action that affirmed life —both human and more than human—and proposed a counter hegemonic ecofemitopia.

Such practices and gestures were nurtured by my role as a Teaching Assistant in the Dimensions of Culture Writing Program at Marshall College and my interaction with a diverse

array of social justice frameworks and histories regarding race, gender and class.

Finally, the incorporation of the 16 mm sequence 'Release the Nomad Within' —which I perform with my daughter—addressed birth as an action that Hannah Arendt (1958) has

proposed as the realization of freedom, the capacity to begin, to start something new, to do the unexpected and affirm the reality of the world. This sequence explored the

materiality of film and its analogue technology, while also being concerned with its translation of intimacy, mediation and possibility. The hybrid approach of digital compositing on

16 mm footage personally alluded to a potential reconciliation that I search with most of my work, and that in this instance, was the appeasement between nature and one of its

many elements, humanity.

Thank you: Babette Mangolte, Alena Williams, Michael Trigilio, Anna Joy Springer, Ricardo Dominguez, Teddy Cruz, Paul Sepuya, John Welchman

Carlito Espudo, Andre Salehian, Adriene Hughes, Lev Kalman, Richard Narvaez

San Diego Botanic Garden & Lux Art Institute

Andrew Utt & Nancie Greenfield

Asociación Colombiana San Diego

Carolina Montejo

BIO

Carolina Montejo is a Colombian-American artist and filmmaker based in Southern California.

She is currently a candidate for an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, graduating in Spring 2021.

Using film & video, performance, and installation, her experimental works are concerned with feminist eco-pluralistic thought, as well as human and more-than-human embodiment and intersubjectivity. Additionally, Montejo’s work outlines a framework of justice, utopia, and activism that seeks to disrupt and question diverse systems of oppression, while building new community frameworks of ethics, beauty and revolution.

Her academic research focuses on ecofeminism, intersectional climate justice, ecocinema, and urban ecology. She is a member of Green New Deal at UCSD and is a Teaching Assistant in the Writing Department at Thurgood Marshall College.

STATEMENT

My art practice is informed by future and ancestry, by psychedelic experience and intellectual inquiry. For the past 12 years I have been sorting through information and engaging with materiality to arrive at a world that is still, as always; patriarchal, oppressive, and legally unjust. I denounce my inconformity through art, but along the way I also find beauty. Sometimes I look to nature for answers, and at others, to artifice. Among these, I shift through groundedness and speculation seeking to reestablish broken links between life forms, as well as building new environments for them to inhabit. The outcome takes shape through visual and literary poetics that decenter the self without denying determination, and experiment with form and concept in the spirit of revision and renewal.