CURRICULUM
LFTCR Field Art School and its students seek to engage in place-based learning and place-generated research, especifically at the Monteverde Cloud Rainforest.
Concepts such as kinship, relationality and reciprocity are guiding principles.
🌱 RESEARCH PROGRAM:
Virtually all forms, colours, designs, textures and structures in the natural world have a relationship of causality to something else —a call and response logic. For example, the shape of an anteater snout is an evolutionary response to the shape of ant colonies.
Because of symbiotic relationships, evolutionary pressures and competition for light and nutrients, the rain forest expresses an incredible degree of creativity, as seen for example in epiphytes plants. Simply put, a museum cannot compete with the raw creativity and aesthetic inventions of the forest.
To be able to see these values better, it requires fine tuning our perceptual sensibilities: an attentive, sensitive and slow type-of-looking. Walking in silence through a rainforest with this frame of mind is an absolute treat to our senses. A lot of the activities and workshops in this field school (on biomimicry, plant dyes, etc.) are thus designed to train us on what and how to see to discover this creativity and aesthetics.
Our research goals are to learn from the rainforest and see how we can use these lessons for artistic practices as inspiration or reference, directly or indirectly.
Among the school’s activities and workshops are:
- Hikes in the Monteverde Cloud Forest with local naturalist guides
- Learning about Epiphytes Plants and the work of Prof. Nalini Nadkarni, led by Nacho Loria
- Permaculture with a focus on Art and Design
- Native Plant Walks, led by Willow Zuchowski
- Natural Textile Dyes, led by Esteban Barquero
- Community Public Art Projects, led by Juan Ortiz-Apuy
- Bioconstruction, led by Lynx Guimond
- Forest Therapy, led by Gimena Chaves
- Rainforest Night Walks, led by Mark Wainwright
- Readings, Screenings and Group Discussions, led by Juan Ortiz-Apuy
COLLABORATORS
Carpenter, Chief Technical Officer & Board Member at Sail Cargo
Author, Nature Guide & Instructor for Tropical Ecology Courses
Botanist, Educator, and Illustrator