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Empowering diverse voices through multilingual writing and innovative digital education.

The Nordic Multimedia Writing LAB project empowers older youth and adults with diverse backgrounds, supports educators working in multicultural environments, and promotes multilingual writing through the innovative use of digital education tools and technologies.

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Course Content
Week 1: INTRO
This week introduces mimesis as an ecological and affective method of representation. Rather than merely replicating nature, we engage with what Tom Bristow calls the "environmental humanities' poetics of relation" (Bristow, Living Lexicon), drawing from Lawrence Buell’s environmental imagination to explore how memory becomes an instrument of environmental continuity and care. Inspired by Fritjof Capra’s Principles of Life, mimesis is reframed here as an analog act—a poetic tool for transmitting both biological and emotional ecosystems across generations. We move away from linear history toward a web of living memory. Practices: • Nature journaling and oral history collection from elder relatives or community members. • Begin a Memory Lexicon based on intergenerational ecological recollections. • Workshop: “Where does my memory touch the land?” Exercise: Compose a poem or poetic map that interweaves ancestral land stories with personal sensory encounters. Highlight disappeared ecosystems or endangered places, and reflect on how poetic memory operates as a form of ecological resistance (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble). ‘M’imesis – imitation / representation Mimesis is an entirely holistic, analogue mode of communication in which “the world is apprehended as variation on continuous dimensions, rather than generated from discrete elements. It would be valuable for our natural history collections and cultural archives (owned, indexed and maintained by humans for humans) to sustain such an understanding and feeling of variation. Doing so would help us to recognize the complex ways in which human organisms and their environments are “mutually unfolded and enfolded structures” and are each recomposed in and through their exchanges. Moreover, our collecting institutions’ interpretative grids could be calibrated to the ways that “evolution demonstrates the mutability and malleability of biology as against its permanence. This approach would trigger environmental emotions, which could be harnessed by sensitive curation of the visitor experience.
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Week 1: Mimesis – Roots & Recollection Theme: Writing Ecological Memory / Intergenerational Land Stories
Week 1: Practice – Nature Journaling and Oral History Collection
Week 1 - Quiz
Protected: Ecology of Memory: Transgenerational Ecopoetics in Multimedia

Where does memory touch the land?

by Elizabeth Torres (Madam Neverstop)

To re-member, to com-memorate, is actively to reprise, revive, retake, recuperate.

-Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway.

Memory is not linear; it moves and fluctuates with those who carry and pass it along. The memory of someone who has spent their entire life in one place is vastly different from that of someone whose experiences of displacement and migration, or a lineage of such experiences, fragment and divide memory into small, often elusive windows through time. These memories can be difficult to revisit and sometimes almost impossible to rescue, as the places they recall may remain unchanged, have disappeared, or have transformed forever. In my case, being a political refugee as a child, and then a migrant as an adult, means that most of the photographs, toys, and documentation of our journey, and of my past, are completely gone, and all I have now to return to is what I see with my eyes closed.

Going back to the places I remember proved that time can be a cruel enemy, for most of these locations, including my grandparents home, are almost fully gone. This doesn’t mean, in any way, that they don’t exist, for they’re colorful and alive in my mind, as long as I keep returning to them with my poetry.

Mimesis, in the context of this course, is understood as an ecological and affective method of representation. Traditionally, mimesis refers to the imitation or representation of nature in art and literature. However, in this course, mimesis is not about merely replicating nature but engaging with it in a deeper, more relational way. Tom Bristow’s concept of the “environmental humanities’ poetics of relation” emphasizes the interconnectedness of humans and the environment, suggesting that our representations of nature should reflect this relationship. My invitation is for you to tap into your memory and start tracing this very unique ecology.

Inspired by Fritjof Capra’s Principles of Life, mimesis is reframed as an analog act—a poetic tool for transmitting both biological and emotional ecosystems across generations. Capra’s principles emphasize the interconnectedness and interdependence of all living systems, suggesting that our representations of nature should capture these complex relationships. By moving away from a linear history and towards a web of living memory, we can create a more holistic and interconnected understanding of our ecological and cultural heritage.

This week we do it through two practices: nature journaling, and the start of your very own memory lexicon, which hopefully will help you learn a lot more about your own writing practice, and the places you revisit in your daydreams.

The practice of nature journaling and oral history collection from elder relatives or community members involves engaging deeply with the natural world and the stories of those who have come before us. You are encouraged to choose subjects, emotions, and territories to work from—territories in memory and in connection. Not everyone is fortunate to be able to tap the memory of living members of the same family, or who have connections and a recollection of the region, so here we will also use other resources to explore the place we want to focus on. So there’s the first point. We must have a place in mind to begin with. From here, we will expand the territory of our ecology.

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