Juan Pablo Cárdenas

My research focuses on how literary and visual art from Latin America articulates interspecies-identities, cosmo-ecological worldviews, and non-anthropocentric representations of “human” and “not human” figures such as animals, plants, and other natural phenomena. Theoretically, I extend the scope of ecocriticism by integrating Amerindian cosmologies into my analytical framework, not as the subject of investigation, but as a philosophical tool in itself.

As an artist, I create sculpture, installation, and video in an exploration of the symbolic role of what archeologists and anthropologists call biofacts: materials that were once part of a living organism, like feathers, bones, and seeds. Specifically, my interest is in the symbolic meanings attributed to biofacts in material funerary rituals and cosmological narratives, integrating the bodies of the “non-human” into the fold of the construction of our own identities as “human.”

My key aim as an educator is to create awareness about the interconnected and ever-changing entanglements between all constituents of the environment and our own species.  Generating a sense of interspecies empathy, that can act as a critical and ethical tool to better meet the many and urgent challenges of an intensifying global ecological crisis remains my overarching goal as a researcher, visual artist, and teacher.