The specifics of ecological destruction often take a cruel turn, affecting those who can least resist its impacts and who are least responsible for it.
Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects gathers contributions from multiple disciplines to investigate intersectional questions of how the changing planet affects specific peoples, communities, wildlife species, and ecosystems in varying and inequitable ways. A multisensory, artistic-archival supplement to the University of Colorado Boulder’s 2020-2022 Mellon Sawyer Environmental Futures Project, the volume enriches current conversations by bridging the environmental humanities and affect theory with insights from Native and Indigenous philosophies. It highlights artistic practices that make legible the long-term durational effects of ecological catastrophe, inviting readers and viewers to consider the emotional resonance of poems, nonfiction texts, sound-texts, photographs, and other artworks that grapple with the less visible loss and prospects of environmental transformation.
This multimodal, multisensorial volume pushes the boundaries of scholarship with an experimental, born-digital format that offers a set of responses to collective traumas such as climate change, environmental destruction, and settler colonialism. The artists and authors honor the specificity of real historical and material injustices while also reflecting the eclectic nature of assorted feelings in response to them, working through them in creative and border-crossing ways.
With contributions from Robert Bailey, Nina Elder, Erin Espelie, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Maya Livio, Erika Osborne, Craig Santos Perez, Kim Tallbear, Julianne Warren, and Kyle Powys White.
"The compelling juxtaposition of poetry, music, video, audio, photography, printmaking, and traditional essays is among Deep Horizons' considerable strengths. I don’t know of any other project quite like this one. The subject is timely—indeed, urgent—and the innovative approach to archiving environmental change will interest scholars and artists in a range of disciplines and resonate with a wide audience." —Jennifer Ladino, University of Idaho
Brianne Cohen is assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is author of the book Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke, 2023) and co-editor of the volume, The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2016). She has published in journals such as Representations, Art Journal, Afterimage, Third Text, and more.
Erin Espelie is a filmmaker whose works have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Whitechapel Gallery, Anthology Film Archive, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and more. She is associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies & the Moving Image Arts and the Department of Critical Media Practices and co-founder and co-director of NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Bonnie Etherington is Lecturer in Literary and Creative Communication at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington, in Aotearoa New Zealand. Previously, she taught for the University of the South Pacific and was the Environmental Futures Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, and her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous protest literatures of Oceania. Her scholarly work has been published in The Contemporary Pacific (2022), Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) (2022) and Studies in the Novel (2022). Her novel, The Earth Cries Out (Vintage NZ, 2017), was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was born in Aotearoa and raised in West Papua.
Open Access
