Running October - December 2023, Living Futures Saturdays is a monthly event series featuring climate-engaged presenters from a variety of disciplines. Join us as we listen, learn, and create community and new knowledge.
Our October 7 event will feature presentations from artist Claire Alexandre and ecologist and musician Diego Ellis Soto, followed by community conversation and connection. Individual tickets are now available for in-person attendance at perfect lovers in Durham, NC, or via livestream. For discounted tickets to all three fall LFS events, check out the Series Pass.
Presentation Topics:
Claire Alexandre
“The Land is a Portrait: Grounding the Black Diaspora in Earth Pigments”
Diego Ellis Soto
“Listening to the Natural World: Narratives Blending Ecology, Environmental Justice, and Music in Cities”
About the Presenters
Claire Alexandre
I am a Diaspora child, abolitionist feminist storyteller and student of ecologies who weaves autobiographical reflections with ancestral wisdom. Through mixed media paintings and street art, I elaborate detailed portraits that highlight the myriad of ways Black and Indigenous freedom has historically been and will continue to be intimately intertwined with a power of landscape literacy and environmental reciprocity. By exploring what soil pigments, botanical dyes and inks lend to my artwork, I seek to not only connect with ancestral artistic practices but also look at how time and colonialism materialize in the earth's layers and local floras. I consider my paintings portals that carry the responsibility of offering alternative versions of the world, ones that celebrate the leadership of Queer and Trans BIPOC femmes in this time of climate collapse.Diego Ellis Soto
Diego is a Uruguayan PhD candidate in Ecology at Yale University and a NASA FINESST Future Investigator. Working at the intersection of ecology, technology, conservation, and environmental justice, he researches how animals move across the world under increasing human threats and a changing climate. In addition, he is increasingly interested in how our access to biodiversity data is shaped by our socioeconomic status and how past and present social inequalities amplify current disparities in environmental sciences. As a music producer Diego blends sounds from biological concepts and technologies, with music theory, for example by making eight termites jam together or installing microphones on an urban farm to make farm birds sing a song. Diego weaves together a vision for teaching about the natural world through artistic expressions, telling a story of magic and science, of art and music.