PEOPLE

Valeria Meiller, Project Director and Editor. Valeria works on the ancestral lands of the Payaya people, Yanaguana, known as San Antonio since the arrival of the Spanish in Texas in 1631. Today, Yanaguana is home to an Indigenous population estimated at 30,000 and reaffirms the presence of the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan nation in their territory for over 14,000 years. There, Valeria teaches the arts and literatures of Abiayala while she researches what it means to think in situated modes, with the land and the territory, in the context of an ecological crisis of planetary scale. Her most recent book project, (In)Defense of the Land: Biodiversity and Linguistic Diversity in 21st Century Poetry of Abiayala, examines how Indigenous and Afro-diasporic poetry from the 21st-century posits plurilinguism as a site of environmental preservation. Her other book project, Necroterritories: Slaughterhouses and the Politics of Death, draws on her PhD dissertation to examine how the colonial introduction of cattle in the River Plate basin shaped a post-independence cultural narrative around slaughtering sites.

www.valeriameiller.com
@valeria_meiller

Whitney DeVos, Editor. Whitney was born and raised on the unceded ancestral territories of the Gabrielino Tongva peoples, whose homeland Tovaangar includes the San Gabriel Valley and greater Los Angeles basin in California. The Tongva language is part of the Uzo-Aztecan language group, and shares the same root as Nahuatl spoken in Āltepētl Mēxihco and the Anahuac basin, where Whitney currently calls home. She is a writer, scholar, and translator specializing in literatures of the hemispheric Americas. Her work focuses on how, historically, poetic production has contested settler epistemologies, historiographies, temporal frameworks, racial formations, and cultural narratives. Much of her current translation work focuses on autochthonous languages of the hemispheric Americas, Náhuatl in particular. In 2022-2023, she returned to Tovaangar to teach as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pitzer College, before resuming her studies in Nahuatl with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and a Global South Translation Grant, funded by Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities.

www.whitneydevos.com
@whitnefied

Javiera Pérez Salerno, Editor. Javiera was born and raised in Tandil, a city in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires. His family home still lies just a few blocks from the thorny foot of a mountain range, the area’s characteristic landmark. As a child, she believed all peoples of the world lived like that, without horizon. Then she became acquainted with the pampas, where she felt the absence of protective stone. Later, she moved to Buenos Aires. She held close to the lesson of her childhood environment: whenever a road begins to incline, one has no choice but to ascend. Today, she lives between Tandil and Buenos Aires, constructing a hybrid life where the city is traversed by the sierra. Javiera is a scriptwriter and digital content producer and holds a B.A. in literary studies. For five years, she was a transmedia specialist for the public television channel Canal Encuentro. In 2020, she was the curator of digital space for the Buenos Aires International Literature Festival [FILBA]. She currently works for the independent publishing house Caja Negra Editora, in addition to facilitating literary workshops for teenagers and co-organizing the Lobos Rural Poetry Festival.

linktr.ee/bicivoladora
@labicivoladora

Clarisa Chervin, Graphic and Digital Design. Clarisa is a graphic designer who received her degree from the University of Buenos Aires. Her work focuses on publishing projects, branding and web, especially those related to arts and culture. She is a team member of the Visual Identity Direction with the University of San Martín, and co-directs the publishing project Espuma Editora. Clarisa was born and raised in Buenos Aires, a port city with an elusive relationship to its river and waterways. Throughout its history, local streams have been redirected to prevent flooding, and encroaching urbanization projects on both coasts have contributed to the erasure of the original landscape. Yet she also harbors a close relationship with the Paraná River, which she has visited on numerous trips to Corrientes province, where her father was born. There, by way of contrast, the river is part of the daily landscape of the city, integrating urban life with nature.

www.clarisachervin.com
@clari.chervin

Celeste Precioso, Sound Design. Celeste is the sound editor of “Ecoteca,” Ruge el bosque’s acoustic forest. A graduate of the Andy Goldstein School of Photography in 2010, she later turned to film and tot editing her own materials. Her first explorations in audiovisual art were of a documentary nature, taking form in a series of short films titled “Brief essays on intimacy.” In 2015, she began studying cinematography at Punto Cine, but dropped out the following year. In 2019, she was admitted to the Torcuato Di Tella University Film Program, where she made her fictional short film “El universo desbocado” [The Runaway Universe] and her documentary debut, “Hi, Sweety,” the latter of which was shown at festivals such as the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and the Queer Lisbon International Film Festival, among others. Obsessed with details and textures, Celeste was born in the Caballito neighborhood at the center of Buenos Aires. That environment, full of constant movement and flows of information, led her to become obsessed with image and sound. She is especially attracted to landscapes charged with textures and flat level planes. She lives with two cats who get along better with her than with each other. A fan of long bus trips, she prefers the mountains to the beach. In 2012, she went to live in the Brazilian Highlands, where she learned to tend a garden and to overcome her fear of spiders.

@celesteprezioso
vimeo.com/celesteprezioso

Federico Durand, Music. Federico is a musician who creates introspective sonic spaces using repetitive, minimalistic melodies, the cyclical character of which invokes dreams and the secret life of gardens. His live performances are an organic process based on improvisations with a lyre, music boxes, cassettes, synthesizers, small objects, and pedals. He has performed and recorded in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Colombia, France, Switzerland, and Japan, collaborating with artists including Chihei Hatakeyama, Andrew Chalk, Stephan Mathieu, and ILLUHA, among others. Together with the Japanese musician Tomoyoshi Date, he forms Melodía, an ambient improvisation duo that has released three albums to date. In collaboration with the U.S.-born Taylor Deupree, he is a part of This Valley Of Old Mountains, a duo that released their debut album in 2020 with the independent record label 12k. Federico spent his childhood at his grandparents’ house in Muñiz, in Greater Buenos Aires. The house, one of the neighborhood’s first, was constructed on land that once housed extensive nurseries: though he never saw them, they somehow always seemed to hold a strong presence in the stories he was told as a child. His grandparents had a chicken coop and lots of plants. Strong in his memory is the backyard: home to a pine tree, tangled with an orchid, ferns, an orange tree, a tangerine tree. Hidden by privet, a door connected the house with the neighbors’ garden. Sometimes, on summer afternoons, he’d enter into that other garden, with its fox grapevine and orchard. As a child, he liked playing by himself, collecting stamps, and riding his bicycle through tree-lined streets and into vacant lots and an abandoned factory. Now, from time to time, he dreams about climbing roofs and dividing walls. He lives in the Sierras of Córdoba with his family in a house, also with a garden, though this one looks out upon the mountains.

spoti.fi/3IyFQZt

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Analía Iglesias, Art. Analía Iglesias is known as @afroana_ on social networks. One might say she became a collagist by chance, a saxophonist through the musical heritage of her ancestors, and a multimedia artist by following a constant urge to venture into new forms of expression. She began her exploration of herself as an artist and visual designer through various forms of collage, illustration, and animation. Designers say she is very much a visual artist and, visual artists, that she is very much a designer, so she just says that she likes to create universes full of color, infinite curiosity, and love. Her work is a mixture of graphic art, illustration, and collage. Analía uses digital art as a form of storytelling, one that proudly centers the ancestrality she dwells within. A powerful means of social critique, all art, she believes, should be politically committed to our collective experience. Her work takes Afrofuturism as its primary axis, a way of breaking with capitalist schemas of evolution and progress, and of understanding where we come from in order to know better than ever where we are headed. This quest, grounded in her African and indigenous roots, combines media, research, and the arts in order to convey–and materialize–the idea of an Ancestral Future.

@kilava__

Sofía Stel, Proofreader of Ruge el bosque. Volume 1: ecopoetry of the Southern Cone. A sociologist who has worked for almost ten years at Caja Negra Editora, Sofia was born in Buenos Aires. Since her childhood, a profound sense of justice has guided her in studying, thinking, and taking action in ways that contribute to dream-making a world based on greater solidarity, and the dismantling of oppression and domination: not only for human beings, but for all animals. An avid reader from a very young age, she once remarked: “When I grow up I want to live off reading.” Today, surrounded by books, page proofs, and translations, she can say her wish has come true. And since, when something is desired very strongly, the entire Universe conspires to make it so, she is hopeful that more just forms of interspecies cohabitation will be realized.

Sol Correa, Proofreader of Ruge el bosque. Volume 2: ecopoetry of Mesoamerica. Sol was born in Villa de Mayo, a town in the Buenos Aires suburbs, where she lived until the age of twenty-seven. Her childhood was filled with activities shared with her brother, like fishing for tadpoles in ditches, holding bowling competitions in the street, and going around the neighborhood selling empty bottles. More introspective pastimes included classical dance classes and hours of reading Bécquer’s rhymes and Poe’s short stories. Always a person holding many different sides, today she holds a B.A. in literature, a diploma in book arts, and a Masters in performing arts, all granted by the public university. She is a Power Jump instructor and writes poems. Her first collection, Porfía (Kunstflug, 2022), pays homage to Marosa di Giorgio and Ovid through its sensual, childlike, and fierce encounter with nature and things. Since 2017, Sol has managed a craft book publishing house, Buchwald, an endeavor that each day invites her to reflect on the fate of the book as an object.

Stefanie Naoun, Research Assistant. Stefanie was born in the autonomous municipality of San Diego, Venezuela, on land that once belonged to the group of hunter-gatherer peoples known as the Arawak. The Arawak were displaced with the onset of urban development; located in northern Venezuela, San Diego is part of the metropolitan area of Valencia, a city surrounded by a mountain range abutting the Caribbean Sea, the Cordillera de la Costa. Stefanie grew up in a house at a remove from the city, with a view of the mountains. Surrounding her were plantations of yucca, corn, cassava, cacao, and sugar cane. Oranges and mandarins were also cultivated on a large scale. With a certain wistfulness, she often recalls the morning mist, chirping crickets, and pristine air. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Letters at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where today she continues her studies at the graduate level.

@its-stefanie22