Avant-Garde Ecopoetic Networks in San Cristobal de Las Casas: Gertrude Duby Blom´s Photographs of the Lacandón Rainforest
Bio
Sarah María Medina studies and translates avant-garde poetry written in Spanish. Her interdisciplinary research interests include avant-garde poetics, decolonial translation theory, ecofeminism, affect theory, and queer ecology. Medina´s writing and translations have been published in Poetry Magazine, Asymptote, Prelude, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Her work is also found in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018), and in Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, centering LGBTQIA+ voices in a collection of contemporary nature poetry (Autumn House Press, 2022). Medina received her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative History of Ideas at University of Washington in Seattle, a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at Washington University, and she is currently pursuing a PhD in the International Writers Track in the Comparative Literature department at Washington University in St. Louis. A recipient of a Divided City Graduate summer research fellowship, her work focuses on the body poetics of Nahui Olin and Anita Brenner in Mexico City´s avant-garde, and the relationship between the body and nature, framing these works within a decolonial, ecofeminist, and queer urban ecological lens. Recently, she was awarded a Global Futures grant from Global Studies, where she will research avant-garde ecopoetic networks in San Cristobal de Las Casas, México, considering primitivism and ecocriticism in the photographs of the environmentalist, Gertrude ¨Duby¨ Blom, whose archives are located in Southern Mexico. Medina´s methodology draws on Latin American feminist theory, and ecofeminist-affect theory, considering the environmental impact on the body, placing transnational poetics in relation to experimental photography. The research is intersectional, considering inter-imperiality, sexuality, race, and the coloniality of gender, alongside queer ecologies.
About the Project
My research analyzes experimental poetic networks during the artistic period of the historical avant-garde (1909-1940s), but for the purposes of this research, extends into the 1970s, mapping a neglected transnational feminine genealogy of artists. While the research considers the triangulation of Paris, Martinique, and Mexico City, due to the transatlantic travel that occurred between the cities, the main node of this constellation is Mexico City, which hosted an international network of artists, who later circulated in San Cristobal de la Casas. The Swiss-born photographer Gertrude ¨Duby¨ Blom [1901-1993] who was in political exile, fleeing the war in Europe, and moving to Mexico in 1940, eventually settled in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. An environmentalist, she spent much of her life photographing the Lacandones, Indigenous Mayans, in the rainforest of Chiapas, documenting the environmental degradation of their ecosystems. The research question for my project is how did ecofeminism manifest in the work of Gertrude Duby Blom´s photographs of the Lacandón, and how does her work create an important intervention in the current Eurocentric narrative of the historical avant-garde? Furthermore, from a decolonial perspective, how did primitivism play a role in her work? I will visit the archive, which holds Blom´s work, located in the library of Casa Na Balom in San Cristobal de Las Casas, the research center overseen by Asociación Cultural Na Balom, a non-profit organization devoted to protecting the Lacandones Maya and the Chiapanecan rainforest.
