Kristoffer Noheden and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Nature as Myth and Document: Surrealist Ecologue in the Americas’

Fijalkowski, Krzysztof (2025) Kristoffer Noheden and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, ‘Nature as Myth and Document: Surrealist Ecologue in the Americas’. In: in Iveta Slavkova, Anne Marie Butler, and Donna Roberts, eds., Surrealism and Ecology. Lo Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press 2025.

Abstract

The edited volume Surrealism and Ecology is the first scholarly publication devoted to the relationship between the international surrealist movement and ecology since the 1920s. This chapter argues for the new concept of a surrealist ‘ecologue’, an enhanced communication between individuals, locations and cultures, between humanity and nature, but also within nature itself. The primary focus is on surrealist art and writing of the 1940s in the Americas, a decade in which surrealism’s ‘ecological turn’ aimed to re-orient knowledge and belonging towards the Earth’s natural forms and environments as a critical rejection of anthropocentricism and global catastrophe. Works by the surrealist poets and artists of the Caribbean are a particular area of concern, where ‘ecologue’ forms part of an explicitly anti-colonial current that combines the political and the poetic in a re-alignment of humanity’s place in nature.

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