Database

The ‘Interspecies Council’ is a methodology created by Phoebe Tickell in 2021 to introduce more-than-human ontologies and perspectives into decision-making and policy-making. It is a transformative group practice which can be used in organisational, community and government settings.

“The indigenous view of the world - not just in the Andes but in different cultures like the Mayas, Hindus and so on - is an articulated unfragmented view. There are four dimensions: the spiritual part, “Munay”, the political and organisational part, “Aity”, the productive part to do with economy, “Ruray” and then knowledge, education, “Yachay”... But these don't act separately, they act all at once, they interact and complement each other and they're not separate. All this interrelatedness finds completion in “Summak Kawsay”, the fulfilment of a well-rounded life. That's how the world is conceived, which is why the concept of development (economic only, in other words progress) doesn't exist for us...

The Archipelago Summit 2025 gathers leading thinkers, artists, technologists, and organizations exploring how Europe can reimagine its infrastructures—digital, ecological, and cultural—for a more sustainable, democratic, and inspiring future.

Joanne Yao è Professoressa in Relazioni Internazionali presso la Queen Mary, University of London. In precedenza ha insegnato alla Durham University e alla London School of Economics, dove ha conseguito il dottorato nel 2017. Ha inoltre lavorato nel settore pubblico statunitense e per organizzazioni non governative internazionali, tra cui CARE International. La sua ricerca si concentra sulla storia e politica ambientale, le relazioni internazionali storiche, le gerarchie e gli ordini internazionali, e lo sviluppo delle prime organizzazioni internazionali. Il suo primo libro, The Ideal River (Manchester University Press, 2022), analizza la costruzione del concetto di “fiume ideale” nell’immaginario geografico europeo e l’istituzione delle prime organizzazioni internazionali.

EVIDENCE

A poetic meditation on our intimate connection to nature and the fragility of the environment, On Behalf of Nature evokes the Buddhist notion of different realm categories, uniting heaven and earth by way of human beings. Drawing further inspiration from writers who have sounded the alarm on the state of our global ecology, Meredith Monk and her acclaimed Vocal Ensemble create a liminal space where human, natural and spiritual elements are woven into a delicate whole, illuminating the interconnection and interdependency of us all.

The present thesis investigates the concept of assembly performance as a distinct category within the field of participatory performance and its potential to foster democratic activation among spectators. - the thesis contends that assembly performance holds significant potential to reimagine democratic participation by fostering embodied, plural, and reflective encounters among citizens. It advocates for further experimentation with this form as a means of countering political passivity and neoliberal individualism in the public sphere.

This article analyzes how autonomous more-than-human political communities emerge in practice. We study an agro-ecosystem in the Catalan Sub-Pyrenees, where a peasant land use cooperative runs a regenerative farm. Through interviews and observations, we map and explore different more-than-human alliances, solidarities, and contradictory and conflictual relationships. We discuss the political practices through which this political community is constituted and reproduced, with a specific focus on multispecies care and the harm that it can bear. To complement these empirical insights, we embrace a speculative political ecology to further explore how specific practices of inclusion-exclusion, conflict-harm, and alliances-mutual aid (can) play out in morethan-human political communities. Finally, we discuss the possible types of autonomous political praxis in, for, and with more-than-human political communities in-against-and-beyond capitalism and the state. This article thus proposes an empirical account of more-than-human anarchisms in action, as well as collective and situated speculations on their potential for emancipatory, autonomous, and egalitarian more-than-human collective futures.

"the points of contact, the expansions, the overlaps, the interpenetration, the traces taken up and re-appropriated and re-signified, the elements that compose and unite the body and its surroundings making it "a part of."

There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human and planetary intelligences. We are conducting an exploratory research project to learn who is conducting new governance experiments in Europe to map the field, learn from best practices, and share these findings.

Equador: La Natura o Pasha Mama, dove la vita si riproduce e realizza, ha il diritto di avere pienamente rispettata la sua esistenza, il mantenimento e la rigenerazione dei suoi cicli vitali, della sua struttura, delle sue funzioni e dei suoi processi evolutivi. Qualsiasi persona, comunità, popolo o nazionalità può esigere dalla pubblica autorità l'adempimento dei diritti della natura. "

From self-determination to social participation, somatic healing to collective repair, political recognition to ecological engagement, listening is vitally influential in negotiating our most fundamental challenges. Through thoughtful examinations of listening's role across society, Poetics of Listening convincingly shows listening to be not only important to social struggles, but a form of poetic imagination and communion. It moves listening toward a broader application and view, which includes the ability to listen across human and more-than-human worlds, to listen into or with one's body, or to listen out for futures to come as well as addressing unfinished histories, and it challenges us to think more broadly about what it means to hear and be heard within today's complex environments.

TOUCH SANITATION SHOW is a two part environmental art exhibition by artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles. This immense multi-media installation celebrates daily urban survival by revealing New York sanitation as our primary maintenance system. Ukeles focuses on sanitation workers who she feels are stigmatized because we – the public – are generally unwilling to recognize that the individuals who take the garbage don’t make the garbage. Five years in preparation, this exhibition has resulted in a new kind of public art. This is the first time a public service agency has collaborated with such intensity in a serious cultural project. Virtually every unit of the Department of Sanitation has participated with the artist in the creation of these environmental art works.

Situated in the conceptual horizons of the new materialist paradigm, material ecocriticism views matter in terms of its agentic expressions, inherent creativity, performative enactments and innate meanings. It asks us to rethink the questions of agency, creativity, imagination, and narrativity. Taking into account material-discursive practices (Karen Barad) and material-semiotic processes (Donna Haraway), material ecocriticism claims that matter is endowed with meanings and is thick with stories, manifesting as “storied matter.” In other words, there are multiple stories of cosmology, geology, history, ecology, and life embodied in every form of materiality. This essay discusses how matter and meaning coalesce in these narrative potentialities of the physical world, or “narrative agency,” a material ecocritical conceptualization of matter’s expressive capacity.

Diversity is in the interest of all life. Therefore, direct political representation of the sea and the life within it is necessary. The Embassy of the North Sea was founded on the principle that the North Sea owns itself. Our aim is to represent the plants, animals, microbes, and people in and around the North Sea in the cultural, legal and political public domain. We have plotted a route through to 2030, firstly learning to listen to the sea before we learn to speak with it. Finally, we will negotiate on behalf of the North Sea and all the life that it encapsulates.

January 30 2025, we collectively rewrote, with over 230 participants, the UN political declaration ‘Our Ocean, Our Future, Our Responsibility’ from the perspective of seagulls, jellyfish and polymetallic nodules. After presentations by scientists about these entities, we split up in three groups to start negotiating the chosen texts from a non human perspective. Not an easy job to crack these political anthropocentric writings, but doing this exercise together gave a glimpse of what an ecological democracy could look like… The outcome of our efforts and the rewritten texts will find their way into the Third UN Oceans Conference (UNOC3) in June in Nice

Zoöp is the title of a form of organisation for cooperation between human and nonhuman life that safeguards the interests of all zoë (Greek for 'life'). The Zoöp model makes the interests of nonhuman life part of organisational decision making.

As a multi-sensory artform, opera has the potential to not only tell stories but to integrate the tangled, interconnected nature of existence itself. Composing is thus a process of a co-creation—a way of inhabiting the rhythms of the world, where music becomes part of the perpetual becoming of all living things.

this project focuses specifically on the representative model version of Rights of Nature. In this framing, the issue of a ‘lack’ of a voice for Nature is addressed by providing a ‘guardian’ or other representative. This representative is tasked with ‘speaking’ for Nature and ensuring that Nature is able to pursue its own interests. The main formulations of this representative have come through legislations, the courts, local ordinances, non-legal community declarations, or indirectly through open standing.

he research reported in this contribution deals with issues and questions that fall under the umbrella of the topic of alternative biopolitics in future scenarios: how can we co-design with more-than-human actors? In which way can symbiosis between different entities be achieved? What is the meaning of interspecies justice, and which should be the steps to follow to fulfill it? And, finally, maybe the most significant question to focus on: how can communication between different entities be fostered? The designed provotype consists of a fictional event (“The first Multispecies Symposium”) which takes place in 2100, further helped the researchers in opening new reflections that made it possible to experiment with participatory design and to finalize a tool that can be used to share and expand reflections about futures without hierarchies, not human-centered, sustainable progress and hope, participative futures.

Lifeworlds is an intimate dialogue with our planet’s ecologies and with those who are translators and bridges between the human and beyond-human. Our guests are farmers, lawyers, scientists, investors, indigenous scholars, artists, and many more — with them, we explore the mindsets, skills and actions required to forge deep connections with nature and to enter into close relationship with the lifeworlds of other beings. Why does this matter? We believe that it is through the doorway of inhabiting and understanding multiple perspectives that we can begin to heal a modern culture and psyche that is steeped in duality. We have lost our place as humans amongst all life. This is our prayer and call for healing, play, engagement and wonder.

For human music and song emerged from a world that sings, hums, beats, chirps, and human translations of these sounds have captured our imaginations from our tribal origins through to the first recordings of humpback whales that spurred anti-whaling conventions in the 70s and electronic synthesizers.

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«gli esseri umani abbiano da essere costruiti e plasmati e che, in un certo senso, nella loro vita non conoscano una sola nascita, quella biologica»

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Tanna is a powerful 2015 film set on the remote Pacific island of Tanna, telling the real-life story of Wawa, a young girl promised to another man in a peace deal between warring tribes, who falls deeply in love with Dain, the chief's grandson, leading them to defy tradition and flee, forcing their communities to confront ancient customs versus modern desires for individual freedom, all filmed with members of the local Yakel tribe

L’origine del concetto di magia aveva a che fare con il funzionamento della natura, con la continuità tra mondo umano e mondo naturale. Questa magia è legata ad un mondo naturale incontrollabile, impossibile da regimentare. Questa magia è l’incanto del mondo: è connaturata ad un mondo creativo, vivo, che riserva sorprese, non manipolabile. Poi c’è una magia popolare che si usa per difendersi. Mi riferisco alle credenze popolari, alle scaramanzie, ai culti religiosi: sono forme di autodifesa, di autotutela. E infine, c’è una magia che serve a controllare, e che per lo più è praticata dall’alto.

The unlearning comes in a remote region of Quebec when, before his epic 100-mile journey trekking and kayaking downstream, he’s instructed by Rita, an Innu poet, activist and sage: “Don’t think too much with your head … You will be transported by the river – who will speak through you.”

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