Querencia: Finding One’s Place in Nature

Querencia — a Spanish word without direct English equivalent — evokes the place where one feels most wholly themselves, in deepest harmony with land and spirit. In Querencia: Finding One’s Place in Nature, aural historian and author Jack Loeffler presents a richly layered retrospective weaving soundscapes, photographs, and essays into an immersive meditation on belonging — tracing countercultural lineages, ecological thought, and Indigenous ways of knowing that challenge dominant narratives of place. Created in honor of his 90th year, this exhibition is an invitation to reconsider our ethical relationship to the planetary commons and the commons of human consciousness. 

Querencia: Finding One’s Place in Nature

Exhibition Dates: July 3 – August 19, 2026

Opening Reception: July 3, 5-8 p.m., H+H Arts 662 1/2 Canyon Rd, Santa Fe, New Mexico

*QUERENCIA is made possible in part by a grant from H+H Arts.

Listen to the Collage

The radio programs below, which comprise the major body of the sound collage, are selected from different radio series produced by Jack Loeffler that were broadcast over Community Public Radio stations, both regionally and nationally spanning a period of 20 years. This sound collage is approximately two hours long, and each of the components may be downloaded and listened to separately.

The listening ranges through Counter Culture, Radical Environmentalism, Indigenous Mindedness, and Bio-regionalism/Thinking Like a Watershed as revealed through widely diverse perspectives of peoples Loeffler has recorded, many of whom are friends of longstanding. The sound collage and accompanying Querencia exhibition provide a broad range of perspectives that provide alternatives to the current systems of attitudes that prevail in the U.S. and beyond — in a time when corporate economics and attendant governance run counter to the health of our planetary biosphere.

Program 1 Enrique Lamadrid’s recorded spontaneous definition of the Spanish concept of Querencia, a Spanish noun that has no English language equivalent.

Program 2 introduces the listener to radical environmentalism and the Black Mesa Defense Fund, a group of early environmentalists who, at the behest of Hopi traditional elders, attempted to halt the strip-mining of coal on their sacred landform, Black Mesa, to provide coal to two coal-fired power generating stations. One of these power plants required coal to be slurried through a 273-mile-long pipeline using water pumped at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute from the Pleistocene aquifer beneath Black Mesa. Twenty-five percent of the energy generated by the other power plant, the Navajo Generating Station to be located on the shores of Lake Powell, was to provide power to pump water from the Colorado River over the mountains to the central valleys of southern Arizona. This became known as the Central Arizona Project. This program also features the voices of environmentalists who came into prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Program 3 Clashes and Contentions focuses on problems associated with governance and distribution of the Colorado River waters and is a portion of the six-part documentary radio series titled ”Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West.” Produced in association with a traveling exhibition of the same name; sponsored by the Humanities Councils of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California; administered by the Arizona Humanities Council; and funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation.

Program 4 is the first of a 10-part radio series titled Encounters with Consciousness produced by Jack Loeffler and funded by the Christensen Fund of San Francisco. It features voices of some of the extraordinary people Jack has been privileged to meet, record, and befriend, many of whose perspectives challenge our present system of cultural attitudes in the U.S.

Program 5 is a brief statement by the late Dr. Edward T. “Ned” Hall, a prominent cultural anthropologist and author who pointed out the importance of ethnicity within the human species.

Program 6 provides examples of different sub-movements of counterculture that emerged during that period.

In 2020, Jack Loeffler donated his entire aural history archive and papers to the Chavez Library at the New Mexico History Museum.