Your scholarship has centered on media, translation, and indigeneity within the context of the Kuna people in the Darién Tropical Rainforest in Colombia and Panama. Tell us about this research.
 
Vargas: I started doing media projects that led to a personal and media collaboration with a group of families from the oldest Kuna community located on the Colombian side of the Darién, cooperation that has spanned over thirteen years and has ranged from film projects for national televisions to digital humanities projects funded by the Processing Foundation. In my theoretical research, I study the Darién tropical rainforest and its people and how they modulate the flow of people and boycott old and new infrastructures imagined by external actors in the rainforest, such as the Pan-American Highway.

Tell us about how your creative practice aligns with your scholarship and about the significance of collaboration in your creative process.
 
Vargas: Creative practices influence my scholarship research and vice versa. It goes in circles; after some time, the creative component shows me new connections and goes on in what seems to be endless feedback. During my first research trips, the children in Darién laughed at me because I was constantly stuck in the mud; I turned that anecdotal element into a documentary film, and throughout the years, mud became a central element of my vision of Darien’s media history.
 
Community-based practices and collaboration outside academia is a challenging endeavor. Some of my friends thought I was suspending traveling to Darién after I finished my dissertation, but that was not the case; the dissertation was an excuse to think about this rainforest, and I do not feel I will stop finding projects or excuses to go back. After all these years, it has become part of my daily life, and that long interaction is also an affirmation that you are doing things right as people keep trusting you and vice versa. In my class, we criticize extractivist positions as a recurrent topic in ecomedia, but in academia, we can do extractivism as well. I prefer to go slow with my collaborations to avoid the temptation of an easy path. Collaboration with a community is based on personal connections, and they are fragile, especially in long-distance interactions.

In what ways do your academic research and creative endeavors influence your teaching? How do you integrate your experiences from both arenas into your pedagogical approach?
 
Vargas: Videobrasil is a media festival that unites artists from around the world. It takes place every two years in Sao Paulo. Last semester, one of my video installations was selected as part of a historical retrospective celebrating the 40th anniversary of Videobrasil. Now that I am in an Art history department and a Global Studies program, I cannot ignore my impulse to explore the connection between new media, the global south, and Art history using this media repository.  
 
From the beginning, Video artists were aware of the fragility of their medium and thus extensively documented their works, forcing a historicity to an emerging art field. Curiously, if you check our classes, you will notice a void in new media history. How video artists produced their works in Venezuela, Burkina Faso, or the U.S. told a story about accessibility to technology, presenting a fascinating global picture of technical and artistic influences. So many ideas have begun to emerge in my mind around classes, projects, and topics related to the history of art and new media from a global perspective. 

Tell us about your course “Ecocinema in the Global South.”
 
Vargas: This is a theoretical and practical class, a mergence between being immersed in a film festival where we study documentaries and experimental films released in the last two years and a theory class focusing on the various facets of ecocinema and art practices. We became filmmakers during the second part of the semester, as some of the final projects would be video essays instead of written ones. We are studying Films from the Philippines, Argentina, Kenya, the US, Mexico, Colombia, Finland, and China.
 
The students want more opportunities to establish practices between art history and studio art. I am adding global studies to the equation, and my next class, ideally, will be a mix of students from these three disciplines. I want to keep exploring ways of blurring the line between theory and practice in my classes.

How has teaching in the Global Studies program and the Art department impacted your approach to teaching?
 
Vargas: Serving different disciplines in the same class allowed me to apply what I have been learning in my own research; this is to think of an object of study from different disciplines. Students remind you of this in class; for example, you cannot go that deep into art history references as it is not obvious that everyone would make sense of those connections. But it is good to hear when art students share their art historian analysis with the rest of the class. Film analysis is an excellent object of intersectionality; it is something that Global Studies students find familiar, and art historians could see how practical it is to use art history to understand film theory.
 
The class is an ongoing conversation between peers, or at least that is what I try to project in our sessions. I am not an expert in global culture, and I cannot fully understand the specificity of a community in Kenya for one week before jumping into an environmental conflict in the Philippines in the next class. I am more of a facilitator trying to highlight what we need to focus on, what is the relevance, and the challenging aspects of the films we study. Then, students jump and fill in the gaps. I am not limiting their essays to the references they should use. For example, I found it fascinating how my student Cameron, who wrote about a Kenyan film for one of her essays, used a remarkable Kenyan scholar to write about Western framing and the insertion of African tropes in cinema.

What are your next steps during your time at UVA?
 
Vargas: I plan to produce a short experimental film in Darién this summer. The idea has been postponed for a few years, but I think now is the right moment to try it again. It is a non-fictional archaeological piece with a humorous outcome.
 
UVA presents an excellent opportunity for me to continue my field research. I am planning a new digital humanities project in Darién and intend to create programs on using and reusing lithium batteries in my host community. We will likely face this challenge in the coming years as lithium batteries will lose performance and require a second life. Using a national grant four years ago, Kuna people in Arquía installed lithium batteries and solar panels in all their settlements. We do not know how high humidity and excessive heat all year round affect the performance of those systems. Our creativity and resourcefulness will guide us in finding the best response, as taking them out of Darien will not be an easy option. I have seen previous grants that bring interesting technologies to Darién, but those projects are not designed for the long term. The lack of clear renewing, recycling, and repurposing plans for those technologies has a significant footprint on environmental issues in the region.

Vargas will present his work on April 12 from noon to 1 pm in Campbell Hall 160, organized by the Art department—email [email protected] for more information.