sofia lopez mañan

Nature is a category that we invented to classify things. It’s wrapped in romantic ideals that objectify it, turning it into an entity that responds to our deepest desires, fantasies, and fears. Designed for human understanding, it draws a line between the human world and the non-human through an arbitrary aesthetic filter. This dualistic construction opposes nature-culture, nature-human, natural-artificial, giving Nature the quality of being elsewhere and being something different.                   

 This project tackles the idea that the principle of dysfunctionality and environmental empathy lies in understanding that what we’ve known as “Nature” has nothing to do with Ecology. Framed in an era of ecological emergency, A Nature Book seeks to stimulate ecological awareness and critical thinking about our personal and social relationship with “Nature,” encouraging reflection on ecology as coexistence. From Darwin to Morton, a variety of narratives from different thinkers, archival images, photographs, and illustrations converge in this project. Its purpose is to challenge our denials and prejudices, leading us to observe how we look at and construct narratives based on an environment that is a projection of ourselves.