This project expands traditional oral history methodologies by recording the voices of farmers of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) embedded in the soundscapes of the food forests they cultivate. The resulting situated multispecies voicescapes will be used in the creation of pedagogical material for students in rural schools and beyond.
Jorgge Menna Barreto, Ph.D. is a Brazilian artist and educator, whose practice and research have been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. In 2014, he worked on a postdoctoral research project at Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, Brazil, where he collaborated with a biologist and an agronomist to study relations between site-specific art and agroecology, centring around agroforestry. In 2020 he completed a second postdoctoral research at Liverpool John Moores University, England, which led to the work presented at the Liverpool Biennial in 2021. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written on the subject. He has translated authors from English into Brazilian Portuguese, including Miwon Kwon, Rosalyn Deutsche, Hito Steyerl and Anna Tsing. Menna Barreto has participated in art residencies, projects and exhibitions worldwide. In 2016, he took part in the 32nd São Paulo Biennial with his award-winning project Restauro: a restaurant set up to work as a system of environmental restoration in collaboration with settlements of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement [MST]. The project travelled to the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2017, where the artist worked with a wild edibles expert, a botanical illustrator and local organic growers. In 2020, as a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands, he launched a periodical called Enzyme in collaboration with artist Joélson Buggilla. In Geneva, Switzerland, he has collaborated on the MFA in Socially Engaged Art at HEAD – Haute École d’Arts Appliqués, where he is working on a research project focused on ecopedagogy. In 2021, Menna Barreto joined the Art Department of University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Art.
Date | Time
February 9, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 13th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.
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