Art History and Visual Culture Research Seminar: Screening Of Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light

Released in 2010, Patricio Guzmán Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary film-essay that reflects the intertwined stories of the tragedies of Pinochet’s regime in Chile and the research being done by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory. It does so by focusing on the place both narratives come together, the Chilean Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. Through its articulation of geographical site with political and cosmological histories, Nostalgia for the Light highlights the complex web of causation that sustains the contemporary world, therefore calling for a rethinking of the human in the wider landscapes of geo- and cosmological time.

The screening will be introduced by Anthony Fothergill (English).

The 2015/16 Art History and Visual Culture research seminar series, chaired by João Florêncio under the theme of “Ecopoetics,” will bring together speakers from a wide variety of disciplines – from art history and visual culture to theatre and performance, geography, law, and sociology – to explore the ways in which the realm of the visual intersects with ecological debates, thus reflecting on what it might mean to build an oikos, a home or dwelling place, predicated on more ethical modes of engagement and cohabitation with the human and nonhuman other.