environmental comics — Journal — Carys Boughton

Last summer, I was incredibly lucky to be selected for Tinta Plural / Plural Ink – a cross-cultural comics residency focused on the sustainability questions facing the industry. It involved two weeks of travelling around Colombia, alongside the Colombian artist also selected for the residency – Paula Carvajal – to have conversations with people across the comics industry about environmental sustainability, with a view to creating a comic based on the learnings. The residency was set up by Entreviñetas, an organisation dedicated to supporting the comics community across Colombia, in collaboration with Thought Bubble, a Harrogate-based comics festival, with funding from the British Council’s Circular Culture programme.

The two weeks began with six days in Bogotá, participating in Festival Entreviñetas – hosting a roundtable conversation on comics and sustainability, attending workshops, and speaking to as many artists, writers and publishers as we could about the significance of environmental sustainability to their work. We then travelled to Buenaventura, on the Pacific coast of Colombia, with a handful of other comics artists to take part in another comics festival there and learn about the differing meanings of comics and sustainability to communities that have been particularly harmed by the combined forces of capitalism and colonialism. Finally, Paula and I travelled to Cali, where we met a group of people working in comics for a sustainability-focused discussion, and learnt about some of the city’s rich art and design culture through a tour with Patricia Prado, creative director of design studio Casa Ternario.

After the fortnight of travel and conversations, Paula and I set to work on creating a 16 page comic inspired by what we experienced. Part way through this process, I also attended Thought Bubble festival to share a preview of the comic and have further conversations with exhibitors and visitors there about comics and sustainability. The comic is now finished and will be launched via an online event before the end of this year.

The whole experience was incredibly enriching. I had never visited Colombia before (nor anywhere else in South America), and it was brilliant to have the opportunity to do so through the lens of two of my great passions: comics and sustainability (once I’d recovered from the irony of flying halfway across the world for that purpose). I met so many brilliant people, including many other artists with an interest in the cross-over between comics and agroecology – such as Diego Zhaken, who has made a beautiful comic about a community growing project in Bogotá that he’s part of, and Azul de Bolsillo, a publishing studio dedicated to art and comics that explore people’s relationships with plants and their environments.

The opportunity to befriend and collaborate with Paula was really special too. There’s something really remarkable about meeting someone from such a different context with whom you have so much in common. From the get-go we were aligned about how we wanted to approach the subject – exploring the relational problems at the heart of the sustainability crisis and, correspondingly, emphasising the importance of the role that connection and community (between humans and other living beings) plays in any potential ‘solutions’. This really helped to make the challenge of condensing a complex subject into just 16 pages a little lighter and more joyful. And, while our drawing styles are quite different, with deep mutual respect for one another’s work and a commitment to fluidity, we were able – we believe – to create a coherent visual narrative.

I’m not going to say anymore about the content of the comic or the conversations that we had on this subject as I would like the work to speak for itself when it is eventually published. So for now, please see the sample pages below and watch out for an announcement on my instagram about the launch. You can also check out a few more photos and thoughts (in English and Spanish) about the experience in this post.

With immense thanks to the whole team at Entreviñetas – particularly Daniel Jiménez Quiroz, Director of Entreviñetas – the whole team at Thought Bubble, and the British Council.

This is an edited extract from the dissertation I wrote as part of my MA in authorial practice illustration at Falmouth. Although the thought of anyone reading my slightly clumsy academic writing makes me cringe, I have decided to share this — and the full dissertation (linked below) — because I am interested in connecting with people over the ideas and questions contained within it. If any part resonates with you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

*Zoom out:* a go at one of Aidan Koch’s *environmental comics* exercises

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, biologist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) is a passionate, lyrical call for a restoration of Indigenous ecological knowledge; knowledge guided by the fundamental understanding that all life is connected in a web of kinship, sustained by a ‘moral covenant of reciprocity’. It stands in defiant contrast with the dominant human culture that, as Peruvian scholar Aníbal Quijano has argued, has been shaped by a colonial epistemology, which separates ‘Man’ (read: the white, male European elite) from ‘Nature’ (all other life) so that ‘Man’ may exploit ‘Nature’ at will (Quijano 1991/2007). Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer points to the role language plays in shaping human relationships with all other life. She notes that there is a fundamental difference between western languages — particularly English — and Indigenous languages: that the latter have a ‘grammar of animacy’. Grammar, Kimmerer states, is how we ‘chart relationships in language’, and the grammar of animacy reminds the speaker of their ‘kinship with all of the animate world’. Unlike English, which generally reserves personhood for humans, most Indigenous languages speak of all living beings as people, as family. This not only renders it impossible to perceive of other living beings as exploitable — they are kin, not “natural resources” — but reflects how all living beings have unique perspectives on the world, from which human beings might learn. This — maple, beaver, bear as teacher — is a core tenet of Indigenous ecological knowledge that Kimmerer gifts the reader with stories of throughout Braiding Sweetgrass.

Meanwhile, Aidan Koch is an artist based in Landers, California — the unceded ancestral land of the Serrano people. Koch’s practice is multifaceted — blurring the borders between fine art, illustration and literature — and comics run like a river throughout. A prominent facet of her work with comics is environmental comics, an ongoing project exploring the powers of comics to sensitise people to the interconnectedness of the living world, at a time when rife insensitivity to this is driving climate and ecological crises. Koch emphasises that comics are ‘activated by relationality’, with first the comic’s creator, and then the comic’s reader, asked to create meaningful relationships between multifarious elements. This, Koch suggests, means that comics have particular potential to draw out the ‘interconnectivity between objects, materials, time, and living beings’. So with environmental comics, Koch proposes a set of comics-generative starting points for consciously cultivating this sense of interconnectivity. There is great resonance between this and Kimmerer’s discussion of the grammar of animacy: if comics are intrinsically relational, and the grammar of animacy is an expression of the relationships between all living beings, then can comics evoke a grammar of animacy — in both verbal and visual language?

In the dissertation, I explore this question by discussing the significance of animacy in more detail — within Kimmerer’s writing, other Indigenous scholarship and linguistics, particularly Mel Y Chen’s Animacies (2012) — and reflecting on my experience of trying Aidan Koch’s environmental comics prompts, in dialogue with observations from comics theory about how the art form brings worlds to life.

Click the link to open a PDF of the dissertation: ‘The life that pulses through all things: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Grammar of Animacy’ and Aidan Koch’s Environmental Comics practice’