[design for] the continuum

Debates around the rights of nature and environmental personhood increasingly turn on the preposition of representation: whether we speak about, for, or with non-human entities. Recent work on relational representation, for instance, argues that speaking with rivers or waterways requires an ongoing, situated relation rather than a purely symbolic proxy. Yet even in these more advanced eco-juridical models, the figure of the human representative remains largely taken for granted: a bounded individual presumed capable of "hosting" more-than-human perspectives without much attention to how such a capacity is formed.

This research starts from that gap. Before representation comes the formation of the representer. What kind of human subjectivity, sensorium, and relational disposition is needed for more-than-human (MOTH) beings to be intentionally and imaginally included in decision-making at all?

Answering this questions requires a shift in how we understand continuum and threshold in human–MOTH relations. Drawing from Luigina Mortari's idea of nature as a non-given that demands an open, generative encounter, and from agro-pastoral "grammars of cohabitation" in the Mediterranean (Enzo Bianchi), the project treats care as participation in a socio-ecological continuum that links bodies, ancestors, landscapes, and futures. In dialogue with Descola's typology of ontologies and Viveiros de Castro's contrast between "making souls" and "making bodies," this continuum is not only ecological but also socio-spiritual and political.

Design for the Continuum proposes a pre-deliberative, pre-representational response to this condition: somatic dramaturgies that work in the space of metaxy, staging thresholds as permeable zones where new relations to the continuum can be rehearsed. Through somatic, sonic and relational exercises—many of them emerging from Mediterranean "continuum communities" and then re-framed within design education—the project explores how designers, guardians and civic actors can be trained to perceive themselves less as autonomous individuals and more as dividual nodes in a wider ecology of care.

In this sense, the research is situated between design pedagogy and emerging experiments in design-for-MOTH-governance. Its central question is whether design can be reimagined as the formation of bodies capable of co-regulating with the living world, so that future practices of representation do not merely speak for nature, but emerge from lives already entangled with it.

By re-enchantment I refer not to a nostalgic return to "magic," but to contemporary efforts to counter Weberian "disenchantment" by restoring a felt sense of liveliness, relationality, and mystery in human–world relations without abandoning critical thought. Scholars in environmental humanities describe re-enchantment as a way of unsettling modern notions of a dead, mute world, foregrounding instead the affective and ethical force of vibrant, more-than-human ecologies.

Ecopedagogy names a strand of critical pedagogy (rooted in Paulo Freire) that links environmental and social justice, treating education as a space to read and transform the connections between ecological destruction, oppression, and global inequalities. Greg Misiaszek, for instance, defines ecopedagogy as a Freirean, dialogical approach that cultivates critical ecoliteracy oriented toward planetary justice and the disruption of anthropocentric, neoliberal forms of violence.

A dividual voice, in anthropological terms, is a self constituted less as indivisible unit—person as metaphysically "cut from other," point-like site of intention—and more as a relational, permeable node that draws its identity from ongoing exchanges with others and the more-than-human environment.

To speak of dividual voice, then, is to reimagine the person whose voice does not so much originate as flow through—a voice permeated by spirits, kin, landscapes, co-dwellers.