Creaturing

Creaturing: 
Geo-zoo-botanical Diplomacy and the Modern Metropolis
Martín Cobas
Robertson Visiting Professor Lecture

Mon, Sept 29, 5PM
Campbell 153

A “stone fallen from the Moon,” an Orchidaceae Brasiliana, antiophidic serotherapy; the rarefied mineral constitution of a meteorite, epiphytic life, a life-threatening “epidemic” unfolding in the arrière-pays. This talk explores the entangled lives of meteorites, orchids, and serpents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil, and the institutional trajectories that led them to the Museu Nacional, the Jardim Botânico of São Paulo, and the Instituto Butantan. These object-subjects serve as protagonists in a broader narrative about modernization, scientific systematization, and the emergence of new interspecies ecologies.

At the center of this exploration is the concept of the creaturely—a term used to describe the liminal spaces of interspecies relationality that emerge between humans and nonhumans amid processes of modernization and their entanglement with avant-garde cultural forms. What would it mean to locate the modern in the “outside” of modernity—in the Amazônia, Pantanal, or Sertão? What agency do these nonhuman actors exert in shaping our existential domains? How do they mediate in a world of ontological unease?  

Drawing on extensive archival research, a wealth of visual materials, and theoretical insights from ontological anthropology and critical plant and animal studies, this talk examines how these object-subjects mediate between local cosmologies, wondrous exoticism and “global” scientific regimes with their geopolitical innuendo. Rather than passive specimens, they become micro-ontological diplomats. Creaturing, then, becomes a method—a critical tool to intervene in and mobilize core oppositional narratives, revealing and theorizing hitherto unexplored ecologies of knowledge, and foreshadowing some of the lessons we might learn from the “other” in designing a more hospitable world.

This event will be recorded and made available on the School of Architecture's YouTube Channel.

About the Speaker

Martín Cobas is the Fall 2025 Robertson Visiting Professor at the UVA School of Architecture. Cobas is Professor of Architectural History and Design and Co-director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the Universidad de la República (Montevideo), where he previously served as Chair of the Department of the History of Architecture and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. 

An architect and writer, Cobas’ research explores the histories and theories of modernization in Latin America, with a particular focus on Brazil. Drawing on extensive archival research, fieldwork, and cross-disciplinary perspectives — including ethnography, anthropology, media studies, literature, and the visual arts — his scholarship interrogates a series of oppositional narratives (e.g., nature/culture, animal/human, affective/rational) and geographic demarcations, advocating for complex continuities rather than categorial distinctions. Through the concept of the creaturely modern, his scholarship reframes the relationship between the built and natural environments, and architecture’s intense filiations with extra-human sentient life.

Supported by the Robertson Visitng Professorship.