Labor, Coffee, & Ecology

Applications Open Until 18:00, 24 March 2024 (US Eastern Time)

This is the application form for the Topological Poetics Research Institute's (TPRI) ecopoetics workshop 2024, which will take place in Manizales, Colombia from August 5-19 at Café Tío Conejo, a working coffee farm.

ABOUT 

ecopoetics workshop was initiated in 2018 as a two-week residency with a focus on creative, critical, and collaborative approaches to the nexus of poetics and contemporary environmental issues. The first iteration was held in association with the Nature, Art, and Habitat Residency (NAHR) in the summer of 2019. After a hiatus due to COVID, the workshop took place once again in the summer of 2023 in association with NAHR in Italy's Taleggio Valley.

We understand "ecology" as a mode of thought and practice characterized by the phrase "everything is connected to everything else." Hence, ecopoetics emphasizes connections and entanglements - of thought, of aesthetic practices, and of disciplines. The workshop is open to participants from a broad swath of thought and practice. Our approach is "non-disciplined," which is not to say non-rigorous. Rather, we are interested in fostering study and practice in the entangled fringes between and beyond discipline, with the belief that bringing together practitioners with unique skill-sets can produce surprising emergent ecological phenomena that may transform our understanding of ecology. In other words, we understand "poetics" in a very expanded sense, and welcome practitioners and researchers from nearly any field who are excited about collaborative approaches to discipline, genre, form, and media, from poetics to philosophy, multimedia art to embodied movement practice, critical theory to social science to anthropology to architecture. The organizing group conceives of ecopoetics as an expanded, open-ended research program and open-set of aesthetic practices. In short, we are a group of non-teleological researchers committed to advancing the way humans conceive of and enact their relationship with nature. While some participants have considered themselves poets, our participants have also been filmmakers, theorists, media sculptors, movement artists, designers, philosophers, literary theorists, performance  and sound-artists, musicians and more investigating and producing novel modes of poetic engagement.

The workshop is open to many different approaches, but is most dedicated to engagement with complexity, aesthetic and practical innovation, and what can be achieved through empathetic collaboration. 

2024 THEME: Labor, Coffee, and Ecology

Our Summer 2024 workshop will take place on a working coffee farm in Manizales, Colombia: Café Tío Conejo.

https://www.tioconejo.coffee/

We will concentrate on the theme of “labor,” especially as it relates to coffee and ecology. While coffee need not be the subject of your own work, it is nevertheless a dazzling lens on life today, from contemporary geopolitics to colonial history, from questions of labor, value, capital, and economics, to culture, cosmology, and society. Indeed, coffee is intimately tied to the development of democracy, colonialism and globalization, and fueled more than one revolutionary political movement, such as in France and Haiti. The workshop will have ample time for you to pursue work of your own choosing, in addition to offering activity, collective thinking, and collaboration around questions of labor, coffee, and ecology.

In many regions of the world, coffee is the second most consumed beverage after water. Well over 5 billion people on Earth consume coffee yearly, making drinking coffee a nearly ubiquitous social practice. And yet, few people who drink coffee know much about how it gets from the farm to their cup. Growing, processing, and distributing coffee is extremely labor intensive, much more so than tea, its non-water rival. It also depends on an extremely complex and heterogenous global infrastructure of labor, one largely determined by colonial history. At the same time, coffee farms are often beautiful immanent sites of ecological relation, with many coffee farms (especially in the specialty coffee world like Café Tío Conejo), also functioning as sites of scientific study in agroforestry and biodiversity. Hence, a coffee farm is a uniquely rich site for ecopoetical investigation, practice, and study. In 2024, we will concentrate on the theme of “labor,” especially as it relates to coffee and ecology. Participants will be encouraged to explore the function, mechanism, importance and state of labor from a range of economic, ecological, social, and political perspectives, and to reflect on the impacts of global capital as it intersects with environmental destruction, sustainability, and catastrophe. At the same time, participants will receive a hands on education in coffee farming, from growing, to picking, to processing, to distribution and roasting.

For more context on how we will approach the theme of labor, please consult our expanded call list on our website.

SCHEDULE

The workshop schedule involves alternating days of structured and open time. Generally speaking, on structured days, the group meets in the morning to discuss the day’s theme and a selection of texts (e.g. theories of labor and value in relation to aesthetic practice). In the afternoon, we will embark on a creative exercise in the environment surrounding Café Tío Conejo's farm (e.g. a collaborative exercise oriented around picking coffee and cultural production). On open days, participants can work on their personal projects or meet in groups as they please. We will also occasionally be joined by scholars from the field on zoom for readings, lectures, and presentations. There is ample space and accommodation to comfortably work on the farm in a more writerly/scholarly mode and/or in a more materials/media arts mode. And there are plenty of interesting ecological sites to explore. At the halfway point of the workshop, there will be a ‘work-in-progress’ event providing the opportunity for feedback, and at the end of the workshop there will be a public project presentation event. Participants will be encouraged to complete an object, text, or other outcome by the end of the workshop. There are also opportunities to visit ecoparks in the area, hot springs, other farms, and more, depending on the will of the group. While we will have a good amount of highly scheduled time, it is also important to us to keep some time open for spontaneity and exploration as the workshop progresses. In addition, Manizales, Colombia is home to several universities, and there may be potential for community/scholarly collaboration as well.

GUIDELINE FOR APPLICANTS

A maximum of 10 participants will be invited to join the organizing group of Brooke Bastie, Brent Cox, and Simon Eales. Preference will go to applicants whose statement of intent is most closely engaged with the concerns of ecopoetics workshop and the Topological Poetics Research Institute. A shorthand gauge for measuring such a closeness is: creativity (is the intended work innovative?), criticality (is the intended work rigorous and relevant?), and collaborative (would the intended work both contribute to and benefit from being developed in a group context?).

ACCOMMODATION

The farm boasts several wonderful refurbished buildings. There is a main house with a large open-air kitchen, and shared work-space. Participant rooms will be in two satellite buildings off the main house. There is a combination of private rooms and shared rooms.

FARM NOTE

Participants should apply giving consideration to the fact that we will be holding our workshop on a working coffee farm in a semi-tropical region of the world with an altitude of around 7,000 to 10,000 feet. The geography of the farm is both beautiful and dynamic. It is situated on a hillside and buildings are connected by very well-constructed dirt trails, and some of the buildings have unattached shared bathrooms and showers. You should expect to be doing some hiking and encountering some rugged terrain, occasionally walking through high grasses and other plants, so hiking boots and good thick pants should be brought along. There may be opportunity for more advanced hiking trips in the region, and Colombia is certainly a premier destination for all manner of adventurous exploration. During the workshop, you should expect some easy to moderate trail walking. The farm frequently hosts folks of all ages and ability, families and individuals alike. 

COST

Two weeks accommodation at Café Tío Conejo, three meals daily, all reading materials, and facilitation fees: $1200 USD. Travel and other food costs are the responsibility of each individual participant.

If you are invited to be part of the workshop, we will ask that a non-refundable deposit of $350 be paid to secure your place. The remainder of the fee must be transferred to the Workshop's PayPal account by the 1st of June 2024. 

If participants are affiliated with an institution of some kind, we strongly encourage them to seek out funding from that institution. Our participants have had great success with this in the past. We will continue working to secure funding between now and the workshop. What we raise will be used to offset the costs of the workshop for participants. 

DEADLINE

18:00, 24 March 2024 (EST)