This hybrid, synchronous symposium focuses on the place of the arts within the environmental humanities, and how creative work helps us become attuned to more-than-human forms of intelligence, agency and sentience, and is held on May 14th, 2025. It brings together three artistic research practitioners based in Norway, the Netherlands, and the UK for three talks on the theme of more-than-human worlds in artistic research. In the morning, presentations taking place at three of Europe’s leading centres for the Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the University of Bristol. The talks can be attended in-situ and will be brought together over Zoom. In the afternoon, various interactive workshops will be held locally.
Sign up for the Zoom event through this form.
Please find the full schedule with all details below.
Part I
Schedule (CEST): 10:30 – 12:45 (VU New University Building, room 3A-06 and Zoom)
This symposium will focus on artistic research within the environmental humanities, and how creative work helps us become attuned to more-than-human forms of intelligence, agency and sentience. The environmental humanities are held together by the core idea that there is an interconnectedness between humans and other beings – other animals, minerals, plants, landscapes, ecosystems – and that this relationship provides fertile ground for imagining new ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological frameworks that challenge extractive and hierarchical models of knowledge. This symposium brings together three of Europe’s leading centres for the Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, the University of Bristol, and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to explore and strengthen this core idea around the theme of more-than-human worlds through artistic research.
Through this international one-day workshop, we will explore how artists, educators, and scholars can learn from nonhuman beings – not simply as subjects of representation, but as active participants in creative processes – through artistic research practices. Whether through multispecies storytelling, more-than-human invitation, or sensory immersion in the land, we will consider how practices as diverse as drama, textile making, or web-crawling can reveal more reciprocal and responsive ways of knowing by engaging with more-than-human ways of being. Through a series of live-streamed talks, we explore answers to the questions:
- How can artistic research give agency to the more-than-human/to non-human actors?
- How can more-than-human agency be translated for human outputs and audiences?
- How can artistic research be used to understand and embody the nonhuman?
- How can artistic research with the more-than-human foster engagement with environmental issues?
The morning talks aim to synthesize knowledge across diverse mediums, materials, and contexts, to highlight the importance of artistic methodologies in understanding and working with the more-than-human world in meaningful and impactful ways. These will then be explored in more detail through various interactive workshops held locally at each institution (please see the individual communications that follow for further details).
This part features talks from Helene Espedal-Selvåg, Selena Savic, and Ali Mathews.
Helene Espedal-Selvåg
“Hibakujumoku – Messages from the Silent Witnesses: Artistic Conversations with the More-Than-Human”
In this talk, I will introduce the concept of Hibakujumoku, trees that survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and explore their symbolic significance of resilience and hope. I will share insights into my artistic practice and the Hibakujumoku project, focusing on how I worked with the mother trees, Ilex rotunda and Diospyros kaki, to create an immersive experience at Stavanger Botanical Garden. Finally, I will reflect on how the project encourages empathy and responsibility, with the aim of building a deeper connection between humans and the natural world.
Bio
Helene Espedal-Selvåg (b. 1967, Stavanger) is a Norwegian artist whose work bridges the space between nature and humanity. Through a variety of mediums, including video installations, textiles, sculpture and drawing, she explores the intrinsic value of nature and the relationships between humans and the natural world.
Selena Savic
“Pedagogies of Invitation”
In this talk, I explore the inclusivity of the posthuman turn in the humanities, extending it to encompass technology such as AI, social media, the Internet, and web crawling. Through the lens of ‘invitation’, I will problematise human-centredness in the design of the environment, engage with bias and uncertainty in computational modelling, and attend to the non-human by questioning the directionality of invitations, drawing on the work of Braidotti, Hayles and Wolfe, and by extension Michel Serres, Donna Haraway and Max Liboiron. In the context of art and education, this perspective shifts the focus from questions on learning from or with more-than-human to teaching how to dream up convivial situations and technologies.
Bio
Selena Savic is an Assistant Professor for Proto-history of Artificial Intelligence and Machines in the Arts at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her PhD at EPFL and, after a SNSF-funded postdoc at ATTP, TU Vienna, worked as a lecturer and the Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme at the Basel Academy of Art and Design. She develops critical and creative approaches to data, at the intersection of computational processes and postcolonial critique of technology. She researches, teaches and writes about digital archives, computational modelling, feminist materialism and posthuman networks in the context of art, design and architecture.
Ali Mathews
“If Matter is Matter, Then What Does It Matter?”: Mycology as Metaphor, Mycology as Existentialist Gateway Drug
This artist talk will expand on the research, devising and design process for my touring performance Mushroom Language: A Fungal Gothic (2021-present). Drawing on the fields of mycology, mycoforestry & forest ecology, as well as poetic musings from posthumanist scholars and artistic iconoclasts, I will discuss my journey into finding “mushroom language” as one defined by creative translation, (reverse) anthropomorphism and poetic acts of sensory engagement. I define “mushroom language” as
a) the ways in which fungi communicate with each other, with trees and with the broader ecosystem;
b) fungal lexicons used by mycological experts with sets of knowledge in lab-based mycology, field/applied mycology, fungal foraging, mycoremediation & sustainable forestry;
c) burgeoning lexicons used by artists working with fungi and forest ecology as subject matter – including my artistic team of collaborator
Bio
Ali Matthews (she/her) is an artist, performer and researcher working across performance, music and video. She has made and toured work around the UK as well as to Ireland & Germany. Her work focuses on intersections between the eerie and the humorous, specifically the ways in which speculative fiction and horror genres can more broadly be used as creative stimuli. As a pagan-curious person, she makes work that explores the porosity between human and more than human worlds.
PART 2: Afternoon – Local Workshop:
12:45:13:45 Lunch
14:00-16:00 Workshop by Benedetta Pompili at the VU ART SCIENCE Gallery
Conversing with Matter: Moulding the Quenched
This tailored 2.5–3 hour workshop reframes the ongoing project Conversing with Matter, focusing on the intersection of design, ceramics, and social practice through the use of local and more-than-human resources recovered from industrial and architectural waste.
Following a brief introduction to the development of a design practice rooted in material experimentation and ecological awareness, participants will engage in hands-on material research. The session centers on the use of local river clay sourced from the Maas River, which will be applied to a mould collaboratively developed with artist Winnie Herbstein.
Participants will be divided into groups to press the clay into the mould, shaping the panel collaboratively. A glaze composed of treated asbestos—alongside other recovered materials—will be prepared and applied by the participants. The resulting panels will be cut to size, fired, and permanently exhibited in the Utrecht Material District archive.
This event is part of the exhibition Water Views (please note it is a closed event).
Bio
Benedetta Pompili (IT, 1995) is a social designer based in Amsterdam. A dedication to materials with a focus on their cultural and environmental impact identifies her practice. Her research and design works become journeys to learn, retrace, and share knowledge by thinking and acting in an interdisciplinary way.
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