Estudios con hojas: prácticas artísticas performativas para una ecopoética en tránsito

Abstract

This research-creation takes the form of an intricate thesis that develops studies on leaves in their multiple polysemic dimensions: plant leaves, sheets of paper, and screen leaves. The studies converge in processes that connect artistic and pedagogical aspects from an ecopoetic perspective. The thesis is structured around three main artistic works: Dramaturgia telúrica (2021), Sismografías corporais (2017) y De los mundos de plantación a las marañas mundo (2025). These works explore plant performativity through the relationship between decomposition and composition, understanding leaves as entities with immense capacity for transformation and resistance, both botanically and sensibly. The research establishes speculative dialogues between seemingly distant species—such as the capim leaf and the palm leaf—revealing unexpected, challenging, and also imagined kinships. Methodologically, it proposes an entangled investigation that operates through speculative exercises of destruction and fabulation with poetic formats that activate performativities. There are also transitions between languages (Portuguese-Spanish), territories (Brazil-Colombia) and knowledge that trigger sensitive writings based on Brazilian and Colombian artistic/theoretical references with other parts of the world. This research-creation prioritises processes over products, emphasising the capacity of the leaf litter of reflections: ideas that mix, decompose and recompose, generating new substrates for doing. Sensitive crops and sensory occupations emerge as study practices that question established plant categories such as ‘invasive’ and ‘weed’ and propose alternative ways of relating to the plant world through leaves.