Abstracts for CARPA 9 conference

Published 20.5.2025 | Updated 20.5.2025

Thursday 28 August

Ian Garrett

Teaching Eco-Scenography: Pedagogical Frameworks for Ecological Design for Performance at York University

This presentation shares a pedagogical model developed for teaching eco-scenography through an integrated lens-based framework, as implemented in the undergraduate and graduate courses on ecological design for performance at York University. Drawing from ecoscenographic principles and grounded in Tanja Beer’s “3 Cs” of co-creation, celebration, and circulation, the course reframes traditional scenographic education by centering ecological ethics and sustainability at every stage of the design process. 

The course is structured around a series of topical lenses—site-specificity, community engagement, sustainable technologies, Indigenous collaboration, more-than-human performance, and universal design—that guide students in developing a holistic, systems-thinking approach to performance design. Each lens introduces new perspectives, ethical considerations, and case studies, encouraging students to engage deeply with the social and ecological contexts of their work. The course culminates in the development of student-led design projects that integrate these approaches, blending conceptual, technical, and relational thinking. 

This presentation will detail how this lens-based structure offers a replicable model for embedding ecological thinking into performance pedagogy. It will reflect on the successes and challenges of this framework, particularly in its capacity to support interdisciplinary learning and to foster long-term sustainable practices beyond the classroom. Drawing on student projects and responses, the session will also reflect on how teaching eco-scenography empowers emerging artists and designers to see themselves as stewards of change in a climate-affected world. 

This pedagogical model responds to the urgent need for transformative approaches to performance education that are not only technically sustainable but also culturally, socially, and ecologically just. By sharing this teaching practice, the presentation contributes to the growing international dialogue on ecological design and performance pedagogies, offering insight into how training institutions can reimagine their role in fostering climate-conscious creativity. 

Biography 

Ian Garrett is a designer, producer, educator, and researcher in the field of sustainability in arts and culture. He is the director of the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts; producer for Toasterlab, a mixed reality performance collective and media production company; and Associate Professor of Ecological Design for Performance at York University. He has a research and performance design practice focused on ecology and accessible mixed reality technologies in performance. 

Maedy de Miranda-Tol

The Choreographic Force of Matter: Reframing Ecodramaturgy

In this Lecture-Performance, I explore ecodramaturgy and the role of matter as an active agent and co-creator in choreography. Through a blend of theoretical insights and choreographic demonstrations — through recorded footage — I examine how the integration of non-human elements such as wind and sand can shape movement, agency, and composition. I present ecodramaturgy as a lens to rethink dance performance as a dynamic interplay between human and more-than-human forces. Through this approach, I invite participants to consider how the performing arts can challenge anthropocentric narratives. 

Situated within the discourse of ecodramaturgy, this inquiry proposes an expanded understanding of ecology in the performing arts — where sustainability becomes not merely a thematic concern, but a material and embodied presence within the creative process. The presentation also reflects on the pedagogical potential of embedding ecological thought into performance-making, nurturing practices of co-creation, responsiveness, and ecological stewardship. 

Biography

Maedy is a dramaturg and scholar specializing in eco-dramaturgy and the agency of matter in performance-making. She explores how non-human elements act as co-creators in choreography, reframing performance as a dynamic interplay between human and more-than-human forces. With experience as a performer and arts educator, she connects theory to practice, rethinking art education and performance through ecological perspectives. Her research aligns with themes of environmental agency and climate justice. 

Laura Cull O`Maoilearca, Dorothy Blokland, Joy Brandsma, Patricia de Vries, Sabine Niederer and Carlo De Gaetano

Climate Imaginaries at Sea: Interdisciplinary Artistic Research as Ecological Storytelling

Climate Imaginaries at Sea (CIaS) is an interdisciplinary artistic research program that addresses the ecological challenges of sea-level rise through artistic, theoretical, and participatory practices. Established in Amsterdam in 2022, CIaS operates through three studios, each fostering critical perspectives on artistic responses to the climate crisis: Material Research at the Rietveld Academie, Interspecies Inquiry at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and Global South and Indigenous Perspectives at the Academy of Theatre and Dance. 

Collaborating across disciplines such as performance, visual anthropology, speculative fiction, sound art, and data visualization, these studios craft ecological storytelling that centers marginalized knowledge and questions dominant narratives. Rejecting rigid definitions of artistic research, CIaS emphasizes process, engagement, and the expansion of our relationships with the more-than-human world. 

Projects like The Future Guide for the Salty Forager, a speculative foraging guide set in 2124, and a soundscape inspired by alchemical philosophy showcase storytelling’s capacity to reimagine human-environment interactions. These works explore themes like rising sea levels, colonial extractivism, and multispecies cohabitation. It Happened Tomorrow by Carlo De Gaetano examines over 400 videos from the Institute for Sound & Vision for (other-than-)human relationships with water in the Netherlands. Through workshops involving drawing and climate fiction exercises, participants envisioned future landscapes and multispecies cohabitation scenarios, which the artist transformed into short climate fiction videos.  

And another CIaS project, The Power of Water by theatre maker Dorothy Blokland, connects children in the Netherlands and Suriname to engage in ecological storytelling through spoken word and photography. This project reimagines water’s past, present, and future beyond linear narratives, linking oceanic climate change with the transatlantic slave trade. 

This Workshare session highlights how CIaS’s interdisciplinary, collaborative approaches, involving cultural institutions, agricultural, and scientific organizations, dissolve boundaries between art and research. By linking artistic autonomy with actionable knowledge, CIaS demonstrates how ecological storytelling can be a transformative tool for imagining and shaping more just and equitable futures.

Biography

Laura Cull O Maoilearca (she/her) holds a joint appointment as Professor of Performance Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and as research professor at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Her research group focusses on practice research in performance guided by values of social justice, regeneration and care. She recently co-edited Interspecies Performance with Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp (Performance Research Books, 2024). With Patricia de Vries and Sabine Niederer she leads the Climate Imaginaries coalition conducting artistic research on climate justice. 

Dorothy Blokland (she/her) is a Netherlands-based Surinamese artist-researcher in the research group of the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam where she is the lead artist of The Power of Water project within Climate Imaginaries. Blokland has an established reputation in theatre, spoken word, diaspora storytelling and a Masters degree in Creative Producing.  

Joy Brandsma (she/her) is a Dutch-Rwandese queer visual anthropologist, curator, and filmmaker who works as a researcher in The Power of Water project. She has a Bachelors degree in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and a Masters degree in Cultural Anthropology – Visual Track (UvA).  

Patricia de Vries (she/her) is a research professor of Art and Spatial Praxis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Her research group focuses on artistic, activist, and academic practices that challenge the capitalist spatial enclosures found within cities, peripheries, infrastructures, and institutions. She examines how makers and thinkers can resist institutional and capitalist norms, fostering alternative forms of understanding, existence, and social relations through art and scholarship. 

Sabine Niederer (she/her), professor of Visual Methodologies at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and programme manager of ARIAS, and leads the Visual Methodologies Collective. This transdisciplinary research group specializes in visual and participatory methods for social and cultural research, with a focus on sustainability and arts-based approaches. She recently co-authored Visual Methods for Digital Research with Gabriele Colombo (Polity, 2024). 

Carlo De Gaetano (he/his), a designer and researcher with the Visual Methodologies Collective, explores the interconnectedness of humans, nature, and other beings through fiction. With a background in visual and information design, he curates audiovisual collections from archives and online spaces to examine representations of Dutch water ecosystems. Carlo also facilitates workshops that activate these collections through climate fiction-making, imagining alternative futures of living with the more-than-human.

Elina Lifländer

Involvement of the spectator in scenographic content

In the presentation, I will discuss the implementation of my practice-based research as part of a teaching course. The process started with the following questions: What role could the public play in the sustainable development of the scenography? Could the audience be involved in choosing the scenographical content and in this way also increase interest and understanding towards the scenography in general?  

This time the Special course in scenography was about installation making in specific way and had a subtitle: The personal material of the participant as the starting point of the performance installation.  

The course took place in January 2025 in cooperation with the students of the Theater Academy’s Degree Program in Scenography and the Performing Arts Collective Reality Research Center in Suvilahti, Helsinki.  

The method of this experimental course was that the audience representatives brought personally important objects, gestures, or materials as a starting point for the performance installations, designed by the scenography students. These audience representatives also participated in the course alongside with the scenography students. Therefore, it was a course combining spatiality, performance, and audience activity development, which explores alternative materiality in a practical and participant-oriented way. 

The idea is to publish an article about the process and its findings later in this research; reflect them broader to the sustainable practices of scenography and performance. 

Biography 

Elina Lifländer is a scenographer, artistic researcher and Lecturer in Scenography at the Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Her Doctoral Thesis (2016) was investigating Spatial Rhythms as conceptual materials of the Scenography. 

Anne-Lise Brevers

Hyperwithin: a shy dramaturgy in shadowtimes

This presentation introduces the central concept of my PhD research which is shy dramaturgy. The concept of shy is framed as an active resistance to the dominance of human-centric visual culture and the pervasive hyper-visibility that sustains late capitalism. Building upon May’s (2010) conceptualization of ecodramaturgy, which integrates ecological concerns into performance art, this research project critically examines the role of visuality in dance performance amidst our current ecological transition. It acknowledges the limitations of human vision in understanding environmental degradation, moving beyond direct visual representation. Using practice as research, I use the framework of ecodramaturgy to analyse compositions that seek to challenge visuality and generate ambiguous perceptions to conceptualize the substantive role and possibilities of a post-visual approach in performance. Structured in three cycles of exploration which result in three performances presentations (haze, darkness, and hologram), the project aims to gradually reduce the prominence of the human body on stage. Central to this exploration is the interrogation of the conventional belief that the visible presence of the performer’s body is indispensable for dance, thereby challenging the anthropocentric nature of visuality in dance production and performance. Consequently, by testing the hegemony of the visual, this project aims to propose alternative methods of representing bodies on stage that transcend visual biases and conventions, fostering more diverse perceptions of dance performance. 

Biography 

I am a dancer, choreographer, and researcher from Belgium. Over the course of my career, I have worked primarily with Cindy Van Acker, Romeo Castellucci, and Damien Jalet, among others. Since 2017, I have served as rehearsal director and artistic assistant to choreographer Jan Martens. 

In addition to my artistic practice, I have been teaching Embodied Theory in the Master in Dance program at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp since 2021, where I also serve as academic and artistic advisor. I began my PhD in 2023 at the University of Antwerp and the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. 

Riikka Tauriainen

Plankton Ecosystems and Situated Learning in Fluid Networks

Transdisciplinary arts and climate science collaborations are increasingly addressing questions of global change and social, environmental, and ecological justice. Despite extensive research, achieving just relationality and resonance between collaborators in knowledge co-creation remains challenging. 

Inspired by the research practice of EcoArtLab at the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB / BFH), this presentation explores transdisciplinary mapping to reflect on mutual learning and resonant impulses. It consists of a three-step process: an excerpt from the forthcoming film Waterscape Imaginaries, a short talk, and an interactive exercise. 

The film offers a sensory experience through sound and artistic research, enhancing ocean literacy. It traces a river’s journey from its mountainous origins to the sea, focusing on the perspective of plankton, the microscopic organisms forming the basis of marine life and the Earth’s carbon cycle. This is followed by a short lecture on practical approaches to relational ecology and collaboration in artistic and scientific practices, discussing the making of the film and the collaboration between plankton researcher Marta Musso, journalist Franco Borgogno, and EcoArtLab members. Finally, an interactive exercise visualizes impulses, reactions, and resonances for collaborative sharing and discussion. 

The presentation examines water’s transformative journey through diverse ecosystems, challenging fixed notions of agency, identity, and nature. As a vibrant material, water embodies queerness through its fluidity and interconnectedness, revealing its performative role as a carrier of meaning and matter. Drawing on underwater cinematography and hydrophone recordings, the talk focuses on plankton – the ‘drifters’ of the sea – whose adaptability and relational existence embody queerness. 

Riikka Tauriainen’s doctoral thesis, Plankton Ecosystems and Situated Learning in Fluid Networks, is part of the SNSF-research project EcoArtLab: Relational Encounters Between the Arts and Climate Research by the Institute for Practices and Theories in the Arts at the Bern Academy of the Arts and the University of Bern. It investigates how art-science collaborations can contribute to the care of bodies of water, analyzing EcoArtLab’s intervention Plankton Ecosystems – Shaping the Narrative of Climate Change through artistic research. 

Biography 

Riikka Tauriainen (she/they) is a visual artist whose installations, films and sculptures address ecology, ocean literacy and gender politics. She is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Art History at the University of Bern and works as a researcher at EcoArtLab on practice-based collaborations. Navigating the boundaries between art and science, her work explores water phenomena and our kinship with other bodies in a post-humanist context. Born in Finland and based in Zurich, she holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts. 

Kathryn Downton

Putting the Theatre Green Book into Practice; Sustainability, Pedagogy and the Conservatoire

Like all industries theatre must face the challenge of transitioning to a sustainable future, and in 2021 the Theatre Green Book was created to support that transition. It is now being used widely in the UK including by the National Theatre who are committed to working to the standards of the Theatre Green Book and have included engagement with this process as a contractual commitment for all staff and freelancers. Theatre educators are responsible for not only ensuring that their shows are made sustainably, but also for embedded this way of working into curriculums. Case studies that look at the use of the Theatre Green Book in theatres are now materialising, but there is no wider research currently available about its application within U.K drama schools.

This presentation explores the barriers and motivators that impact the implementation of the Theatre Green Book method into UK drama schools.   

Biography

Katy Downton is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Production at the Guilford School of Acting specialising in sustainable working practices. She convenes the Theatre Green Book Education Panel and sits on the steering committee for the Theatre Green Book Sustainable Productions. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Sustainability at the University of Surrey, and co-leads their Sustainability, Creativity & Communication Programme. 

Lauren O`Neal

The Eco-Curatorial: Reimagining Cultural Institutions                       

It is the year 2025. Cultural institutions are in crisis. Concerns about inclusivity, sustainability, shifting governmental and funding support, and the decline of audiences has produced a mentality of scarcity and apprehension. What conceptual, material, sensorial, and affective shifts in arts and cultural institutions are necessary to address urgent environmental concerns? Can speculative, experimental and interventionist art practices, generative AI tools, materials science, and radical joy help us reignite curating through ecological thinking? An eco-curatorial-scenographic approach can help us re-envision how programs, processes, and cultural spaces are re-conceived, allowing us to move from extractive, stingy, and institution-centric mentalities to those that are restorative and other-centered. This presentation speculates how the exhibition, performance, and educational outreach programs at cultural institutions can be intentionally subsumed by the natural world as a curatorial gesture of repair. Reconceiving the curatorial along imaginative and fantastical lines helps us glimpse new futures for arts and cultural institutions that put the environment at the center. A brief introductory presentation will be followed by collective, hands-on experimentation with materials and maquettes to re-envision cultural and performance spaces. 

Biography

Lauren O’Neal is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, arts administrator, and educator. Her doctoral research at the University of the Arts Helsinki examined the intersection of choreographic thinking and curatorial practice. O’Neal has exhibited, performed, and presented at Portland Museum of Art, the Theater Academy of Finland, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Nordic Forum for Dance Research. O’Neal teaches at Boston University and serves as an editorial board member of the Journal for Artistic Research. 

Tuomas Laitinen

Compostable thinking

For CARPA9 I propose a lecture performance with a durational extension (= possibly a multimodal presentation?). It contemplates and performs two related concepts: “Place-Thought” by the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe scholar Vanessa Watts and “local thinking” by the Finnish philosopher Tere Vadén. Watts, culling from her ancestral traditions, writes that Place-Thought is “based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts”. Vadén proposes that language cannot be separated from ways of life. Unique, untranslatable language, as well as unique language-related thought, can exist when unique ways of life exist. 

In 2022 I wrote a love letter, which has been since read by several audiences of my performances. The letter, written in Finnish and in English and containing articulations of my love ranging from family members to theoretical concepts, makes a request to its readers: to destroy the letter after reading it and to leave the remains for me to find. It also invites the audience to add something to the letter with a pencil. After the performances I have gathered hundreds of pieces of ripped and smothered paper placed with care in intricate formations. I have taken these emergent art works with me, to burn them on winter solstice in the garden at my residence. In early spring I have added the ashes to my compost and spread them by the apple trees. In the autumn I have harvested the fruits and preserved them as juice. These comestibles are again offered to new audiences. 

In the performance lecture proposed for CARPA9 I will address and bring to the studio fragments from different phases of the life cycle of the work: the language, the letters, the paper compositions, the ashes, the soil, the trees and the harvest. The lecture will consider whether and how local thinking is practiced in and through these materials and how this localized artistic practice has informed my teaching. 

As an extension of the lecture performance, a box of letters will be place in Tori for the duration of the conference. The letters are available for the participants of CARPA9 to read, to destroy and leave as traces to the conference site for me to find. Through this participation they can take part in the circulation of artistic energy, processed in a local ecosystem through composting, fertilizing, harvesting, preservation and digestion of the meanings and the living materials of the work. 

Biography 

Tuomas Laitinen works as an artist, writer and pedagogue between the fields of live and performance art, contemporary theatre and contemporary dance. Laitinen’s artistic practice is particularly focused on questioning the role of the audience, experimenting with it, and consequently developing new forms of performance. He works as a visiting lecturer and mentor in several institutions, including Uniarts Helsinki and Kankaanpää Art School. Currently, he is finalizing a doctoral research project How Audience Bodies Form at Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy. 

John Taukave and John Kautoke

Hanua ‘e ‘os gasava: Delivering a Just and Equitable Transition within acti(vā)ted spaces and values, at the IMO. An Oceanic Perspective

We as Oceania hold a vast interconnected yet unique network of cultures, intricate frameworks and their values across our ocean, ongoing for millennia. These frameworks empower our people to connect with the world from their eyes and apply these values within the different spaces they participate in. The pandanus mat is both a physical object at the heart of our social life and a metaphor for our interconnections. Reweaving and activating an oceanic mat framework within international negotiations and institutions is core to our commitment to think and speak from our Pacific social and cultural fabric. Negotiations at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) exemplify how we have built on these principles to shift in narratives and perspectives of the ocean and maritime ships. The power of SIDs and LDCs here continue to be recognized and rightly so. We have pushed for much change in a short period of time and our rootedness in our identity has played a critical role, especially in defining a Just and Equitable Transition that leaves no one, and no country behind. This article explores the vā (spaces) our negotiators activate at the IMO with approaches to traditional mat weaving, a holistic Rotuman worldview of storyliving and nurturing relationships. We advocate for respectful and nuanced engagement with ‘our’ way of viewing the ocean, rather than having to frame our concerns in western notions of financial and military power, ‘enlightened’ individuality, colonial-era borders, extractive business practices and exploitative trade relations that make little sense in our understanding of our place as humans in the sea of islands we inhabit. We then reflect on how our Oceanic negotiators have underscored the importance of their presence at the IMO and demonstrated their capacity to weave these values and concepts into the essence of their negotiations and discussions. Exploring indigenous concepts invites a deeper understanding of how physical and metaphysical spaces influence identity, community and sustainability at the IMO. We conclude by considering how these perspectives exist in friction with international diplomacy and international law. Like our ancestors and their ancestors did, ultimately we do this to see the world from our eyes. 

Biography

John Taukave is a a current PhD student in the Oceanic Imaginaries, Oceanic Solidarities program with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. He has provided technical and research support on climate policies and negotiations for the Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport (MCST) and Pacific (6PAC-Plus) delegations at the International Maritime Organization (IMO). John has also been a Rotuman for over 15 years and has extensive experience in Oceanic and Rotuman Performance. 

Mr. John Kautoke is an advisor on Maritime GHG matters working out of the Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport (MCST). He began working on IMO GHG matters whilst at the High Commission of the Kingdom of Tonga in London, and has assisted the Kingdom of Tonga in it’s negotiations since MEPC79. He has also served as a Member of the Steering Committee on the Comprehensive Impact Assessment of the Mid-term measures. He holds an LLM in International Law, and an LLB in law. John wants to see a future where prosperity and progress advance alongside consideration for those that live on the forefront of the Climate Crisis, and their survival. 

Damien Ricketson and Diana Chester

Intertidal Conversations

“Intertidal Conversations” explores connecting to our environment through sound via the research and creative installation project Listening to Earth. Through a three-way collaboration with Earth, sound artist Diana Chester and composer Damien Ricketson explore geophonic soundscapes for their ability to serve as a vessel of knowledge for the storage of more-than-human memories.  

The presentation outlines the process of deploying listening instruments, including hydrophones, geophones and custom designed aeolian harps, in dynamic intertidal zones in southeastern Australia, and the creation of a sensory installation that expands the thresholds of hearing beyond what is perceived by the ear, which we hope to exhibit as part of the CARPA 9 conference. 

Drawing on writings in sound ecologies, listening practices and decolonial discourse, we explore avenues for actively working against more traditional extractivist approaches to sound-based methodologies by engaging with Earth as a collaborator in an ongoing process of dialogic exchange. 

The sensory installation is a 40-minute audio-visual loop inviting audiences to engage in a deep-listening experience. Audiences enter a darkened space and are immersed in the sounds of an intertidal environment with an enveloping spatial experience. Traversing strata of air, water and land, participants sit or lie on benches through which low frequency seismic vibrations gently pummel and enable listening with the full body. The deep and intricate sound environment is augmented visually by reactive video projections as well as optional drums covered in sand that pulse to the low rumble of the ocean. We envision the installation may sit adjacent or concurrent to other conference activities or be faded in or out to accommodate other presentations or performances in the same space. 

Biography

Diana Chester is a scholar and artist whose work produces critically influential studies, methods, and outputs that use sound to traverse disciplinary boundaries using feminist, de-colonial, and post-anthropocentric approaches to thinking and making. Chester draws from sound studies, archival studies, and ethnography using field recording to explore sound in diverse contexts putting research and practice in direct conversation. Chester is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, and vice president of the World Listening Project. 

Damien Ricketson is a composer at the Sydney Conservatorium whose visceral and multisensory works explore the relationship between vibration and the body. Ricketson was the Co-Artistic Director of Ensemble Offspring and Program Leader of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium. Ricketson has received numerous awards including the international Music Theatre Now Prize; ‘Work of the Year’ in vocal and instrumental categories in the Australian Art Music Awards; and represented ‘Oceania’ in the Tokyo World Festival. 

Daniel Kofi Brako

Perspectives of Selected Designers on Ecoscenography and a Sustainable Ghanaian Theatre Stage

Recent issues on global warming and sustainability have prompted the conscious effort by industries globally to explore the use of waste or recycled objects in the manufacturing of products. A few years ago, a key decision taken by major stakeholders on ecosystems and sustainability advocated for the use of products that may not harm the environment and affect human health as well (UN SDGs 13, 14 and 15). Most affected by this are the theatre and performance space design industries. Although the idea of using waste or recycled materials is not novel to set designers in these industries, it is gaining prominence and designers are becoming ecologically and sustainably oriented in creating environmentally friendly spaces for performances. This paper explores the concept and approach of Ecoscenography and Sustainability by designers in Ghanaian theatre based on a qualitative framework; it uses purposive sampling technique in selecting three (3) participants for semi-structured interviews. Furthermore, it analyses the data using the thematic approach. The findings indicate that designers are conscious of the use of waste materials available to create performance spaces. In addition, it reveals that some designers consider materials and their health implications, while another designer does not bother much about the choice of materials and their health implications but for aesthetics and decorative purposes to create performance spaces. Finally, the paper recommends that designers must endeavour to experiment and design with a range of waste materials to present more aesthetic spaces and save our environment as well. It contributes to the subject matter which seems to be relevant across the globe, however, there is a paucity of literature on it locally. 

Biography

Daniel Kofi Brako (PhD), is a lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Arts and Culture, from University of Education, Winneba, Ghana. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Theatre Arts (Scenic Design) from University of Ghana, Legon and Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Art Direction (Film/Television) from University of Media, Arts and Communication (UniMAC), of the Institute of Film & Television (NAFTI CAMPUS), Accra, Ghana. His research interests are in the area of theatre and film set design, performance studies, scenography, digital art and design, art direction/production design, aesthetics, semiotics and film analysis. 

Aldith Gauci

Aesthetic Responses to the Ecological Crisis in the Indigenous Jola Masquerades of Senegambia

Jola masquerades are described by their performers as “spirit animals from the sacred forest.” Traditional masquerade performances exemplify a sustainable practice that works within planetary boundaries using natural resources and locally produced or reusable materials, often leaving no traces of performance when it has ended. However, the practice continues to change rapidly in response to a changing climate and, I argue, a changing economic system and ecosophy. In this paper, I explore the practice’s responses to the ecological crisis I observed during immersed performance ethnographic fieldwork in Senegambia. The kumpo masquerade, otherwise known as fusanyellaf (porcupine), is among the most powerful of the masquerades and is made from the leaves of the West African palm species. The performance dramaturgy is deeply rooted in the natural environment of the sacred forest, which is comprised of many palm trees. The goreng, as the sacred forest is known, is performed through the materiality of the masquerade, the songs, and objects held by specific individuals. The sacred forest is also the site where various traditional performance processes take place, including the secretive preparations of the kumpo. In this paper, I trace several aesthetic responses that can be seen in performance, including the plasticisation of the masquerade, shorter performance durations, popular performances and the disruption of the connections of the masquerade with the indigenous ecospiritual ecosophy. The climate crisis and other symptoms of the polycrisis are pushing Jola communities further away from their traditional sources of palm and sacred forests. I discuss this and other aesthetic and intangible changes in relation to deforestation, Capitalism, Islamisation, climate and economic migration. I emphasise an integrated post-humanist approach and attempt to expose the intangible connections in the ecology of the performance that lurks like “slow violence” (Rob Nixon, 2011) on the performance ecosophy. Through this methodology, I conclude that responses to the ecological crisis shift performance towards an act of consumption rather than the cultivation and integration of ecospiritual and ecosocial epistemologies and ontologies held in the traditional practices of Jola masquerades. This research stems from my doctoral thesis, Jola masquerades as Ecoperformance, and the data gathered from interviews and performance observations from 2019 to 2023. 

Biography

Gauci is a performance researcher interested in performance ethnography, decolonising methodologies and ecoperformance. Her research interests are framed by her pursuit of alternative knowledges in response to the Capitalocene and the global Polycrisis. She looks towards somatic practices, gardening and alternative economic models to inspire ecological responses in performance and performance studies. She is currently finishing her PhD at the University of Exeter looking at Jola Masquerades as Ecoperformance. She holds an MA in World Theatre from Aberystwyth University. 

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen and Susi Mikael Nousiainen

Writing-with-water: A feminist environmental artist pedagogy

Recent ecological crises make it necessary to re-imagine human beings’ (and the ones living in the rich, Western parts of the globe, specifically) place in the world, also in artistic practice and artist pedagogy. In our workshop, we present our experiments with ‘writing-with water’, a feminist, more-than-human poetic inquiry where we examine the process of writing with a natural element – an element threatened by pollution and the privatization of water – as an artistic and pedagogical practice. Our workshop consists of a short presentation on our multimedial artistic practices of writing-with-water and a participatory exercise in which we invite everyone to try out some of these practices by writing with us.  

In writing-with-water, we set out to examine our relationship with and to water by writing both individually and together. Influenced by (hydro)feminist and posthumanist discussions, we also explored the waters within us and how they connect us to the waters of the world. It is our belief that artistic and poetic practices of writing-with-water may lead to affective and aesthetic experiences, understandings and storytelling practices that help us make sense of our relations not only to the world but in the world, as part of it. We understand writing as a performative practice that produces knowledges, meanings and discourses in the world – and also, as we claim, inspires ecologically sensitive practices of living in the world. 

As we introduce our methodological experiments of writing-with-water, we present different, intertwined orientations of environmental and artistic practices and knowledges that can arise during becoming ‘sensitized’ towards and with more-than-human others by writing. Through conceptualizing these intertwined orientations, we aim to showcase how more-than-human writing can, first, lead to becoming sensitized to more-than-human others through artistic processes, and second, how this process of becoming sensitized also influences artistic practices, where the presence and agency of the more-than-human others lead to surprises in one’s artistic work. Thirdly, from the viewpoint of pedagogy, understanding these interconnected processes of becoming sensitized to the more-than-human and becoming open to more-than-human artistic practices can lead towards novel understandings on how to teach art in the times of ecological crises and therefore also strengthen artists’ environmental agency. 

Biography

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, PhD, is a poet, scholar, and teacher of creative writing, who currently works as University researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki Research Institute. Koistinen holds an MA in Literature, PhD in Contemporary Culture Studies, and Title of Docent in Media Culture. Their current artistic research project is entitled “Writing-with Others as Artist Pedagogy – Feminist Practices of Creative, Collective Writing in Times of Polycrisis”. 

Susi Mikael Nousiainen (BA in Fine Arts, MA in Literature) is working on his PhD Diversity-related conflicts in organizations in the field of Organization studies, using participatory drama as the method. He wants to practice artistic methods for creating spaces for knowing together, for example while teaching the course Social Sustainability at Work at University of Lapland. His artistic-academic work includes making collaborative comics with youth at vocational schools, designing digital LARP on social media, and interviewing Finnish BodyPositivity activists on their counterspeech strategies. 

Oshima Hiroko

Paper, Plants, and Performance: Reapproaching Scenography by Listening to Ancestral Knowledge

This presentation explores the transformative potential of sustainable materials and reusable structures in scenography, emphasizing their critical role in advancing a more sustainable performing arts sector. The research specifically focuses on paper as the primary material, along with plant fibres, which guide my scenographic design within a practice-as-research framework.  

The emerging global climate crisis has sparked extensive research into sustainable materials across various sectors. While much of this research focuses on high-volume consumer industries such as construction, packaging, fashion, and textiles. The performing arts sector holds a unique potential to influence creative expression and showcase sustainable practices to wider audiences. This presents an exciting opportunity for further exploration and innovation in the field. 

This study is built on two complementary theoretical frameworks. First, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), provides insights into sustainable resource management and material practices developed by indigenous communities over generations. This approach emphasises local resource use and community self-sufficiency and presents an alternative to centralised production models. The research examines traditional paper-making techniques across cultures, highlighting the renewable and biodegradable qualities of plant-based materials.  

The second framework applies the Personal Fabrication (PF) methodology, which promotes community-based production systems inspired by pre-industrial practices (Gershenfeld 1998). Though this phase won’t include DIY material samples, I will outline production methods for future exploration—a personal Bio-lab, enabling further research into environmentally responsible materials for theatrical applications.  

As part of my practice-based PhD at Lancaster University, this research aims to contribute to both academic discourse and practical applications in sustainable scenography. Future work will test these materials in live theatre productions to assess their effectiveness, aesthetic potential, and long-term viability. 

Biography

A scenographer and researcher based in Tokyo, she began her career as a set and costume designer after completing her Bachelor’s degree in London. She has worked on over 130 productions in various theatre genres. After completing her Master’s study on sustainability and theatre at Lancaster University in 2023, she established the non-profit company Image Nation Green to advocate for green transformation in the Japanese theatre sector. Now, she continues her research about sustainability in scenography at Lancaster University, funded by the UK Research Council. 

Tormod Carlsen

Recycling traditions of garden theatre in search of relevance for a sustainable theatre.

I seek to give a presentation on gardening as theatrical practise – were one both grow a place for performance, but also uses gardens as slow performances in themselves. By presenting my own experiments with this, together with similar contemporary practices from among others the Creative Europe project PLACE (that I am currently supervising) as well as pioneers in contemporary garden theatre making, I will discuss the artistic qualities of integrating land relationships concretely into the theatre process. By using examples from past theatre gardens and how we can see various historical traditions of connections between horticulture and theatre I advocate for why recycling traditions of garden theatre both can be seen as an answer to climate change, but also as a continuation of a theatre history that has been given way too little scholarly attention. 

Biography

Tormod Carlsen is a theatre director, independent theatre scholar and the artistic leader of Norwegian Landscape Theatre. His practice involves directing commissions for institutional theatres, dramaturgical work in the independent scene, as well as producing his 

own productions. He has also worked as a critique and writer as well as teacher in theatre. Together with Knut Ove Arntzen he is the editor of Landscape Theatre and the North (Orkana, 2021). He holds an MA in Theatre directing from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and an MA in Contemporary Aesthetic Theory. 

Anna Chrtková 

How Slow Can We Go? Staging the Sustainable Spaces in an Age of Burnout

What is the speed of art? How can we break the spell of artistic excellence, aesthetic innovation and cultural production? How can we value acts of spectating as a labour similar to artistic work? How slow can we go? 

We, artists and art-researches are always pressured to produce innovative, critical (and carbon-neutral) work. In an influential essay “The Three Ecologies”, Felix Guattari asks for the future of humankind in the rapidly changing world; where mechanisation, informational revolution and other contemporary issues stir up neoliberal societies valuing (economic) growth over sustainability and adaptation. The underpaid and extractive labour, platform economy and migration create new opportunities for some. The others are facing a more and more precarious future. What has once been called work-life balance, altered into vicious circle: work-rest-more work.  

Accordingly, in this workshare, I question existing patterns in art production, artists’ labour, precarity, exhaustion, success, and art visibility, by building upon the two case studies: curated event “Y: Slow TV Cinema” and the collective project “Monika”. Y: Slow TV Cinema challenged the means of art production and spectatorial expectations by commissioning “slow” films from artists with minimal film/video background. All films were then screened in 24-hours-long sleepover cinema built within the theatre space. Whereas the first project focused on the processes beyond an actual artwork, the second one produces an artworks and processes to be shown and displayed. “Monika”, a visual art collective I am part of, represents a practical approach of bending the exhausted presence towards the experimental crisis intervention on-site of the art institution.  

In this proposal, I attempt to share “slow” films and stories written by “Monika” to revise the tools of challenging and changing the speed of art; whether standing in the position of producers or the makers. In the temporary time-space of a CARPA conference, I propose a format between the slow TV watch and a reading session, where we can revise the process of slowing down the curatorial, authorial and spectatorial acts together. 

Biography

Anna Chrtková is an artist, curator and scenographer based in Prague. Her practice focuses on creating shared spaces with focus on different speeds of the presentation act. She runs the curatorial platform Y Events in X10 Theatre and is a one third of the collective entity called Monika. Together with the collective Intelekturálně, she holds a Prize For Imagination at the Prague Quadrennial 2019 for the project Prague is not Czech. She is a doctoral student and external pedagogue at the Academy of Performing Arts, with artistic research on The Scenographics of Art Curatorship. 

Riina Hannula and Kaajal Modi

Thermofilia: withnessing the microbial through hot yoga fermentation

Thermophilia is a speculative commitment to create warm conditions with companion microbes in and around us through fermentation. We play with the idea that the microbial companions resonate with its holobiont through the gut-brain axis in the visceral warmth, and artificial warmth of hot yoga rooms that is identical with the temperatures needed to ferment yogurt. Thermophilia, a joint project by artist-researchers Kaajal Modi and Riina Hannula outlines the development of a thermophilic, or warm, practice for microbes and microbial symbionts. Tapping into narratives of wellness that are by definition humanist and individualising we stay with the trouble of colonial violence, cultural appropriation of heat and instrumentalising of microbial and mammalian companions. Thermophilia opens space for a new meaning of warmth of the fermentations from microbial perspectives.  

The first iteration of the work was a public installation at SOLU/Bioart Society in August 2024. A thermophilic space called ‘hatha yoghurt’ invited visitors in a practice of somatic communion with microbes via a multispecies soundscape. We posit somatic practices as performative interactions (Williamson & Hansen, 2012) that speculatively commit to the sensory and speculative as key aspects of material intra- and inter- species practices of oral and embodied feminist care. Care for/by/with nonhuman others that exist as part of our bodies, particularly when they are not visible, can be tricky without falling into moralising and binaristic thinking (Fraser, 2023; Giraud, 2019; Hey, 2019; Hird, 2009; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).  

Thermophilia attempts to tune into thermophilic bacteria through embodied resonance to microbial desires, and in so doing, find warmer ways to conduct more-than-human care. It is a practice that seeks to disrupt anthropocentric and binaristic kinships into more complex modes of continuous and symbiotic becoming with, or witnessing. 

In our workshop at Carpa9, we aim to create heat with participants’ bodies and industrial heaters to ferment yogurts. After the presentation and adding microbial starters to milk products, we will guide people to experience 15-minute ‘hatha yogurt’ audio exercises interpreted by invited dancers. The speculative suggestion to move as a holobiont body is a performative experiment, that supports its companion species inoculation in the milk mediums before they are digested and transformed into the multispecies body. 

Biography

Riina Hannula is an artist working with situated art, video essays, somatic experiments, and installation. They conduct doctoral research in sociology within an international hub called CSSM, a social study of microbes based in Helsinki, Finland. Their artistic and academic practice stems from multi-species care and produces stand point assembling with a more-than-human world. Riina’s work is done in radically relational settings, collaborating previously for instance with goats, micro-organisms, permaculture gardens, and a river ecosystem. 

Dr Kaajal Modi (she/they) is an artist-researcher using a critical creative practice of multispecies co-creation to explore how diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise) negotiate multispecies imaginaries through food, medicine, spiritual and sensory modes to speculate on the future. 

Marianne Lavoie

Serendipity and Storytelling: A Regenerative Framework for the Cultural Sector

It would be an honor to present to CARPA a glimpse of our newest training on the regenerative approach applied to the cultural sector. This training is expected to be fully developed by winter 2025. With over five years at Écoscéno as a mentor and trainer, my team and I have faced the challenge of being constrained by a mechanistic and anthropocentric worldview when integrating eco-design principles into theater productions. Building on this experience, and drawing from my master’s research and the Regenesis Institute’s approach, I have started implementing regenerative principles and developing the role of “regenerative dramaturge” within the Canadian context. I will share two experiences as a regenerative dramaturge with the group. 

Through this outdoor session, the goal is to provide artists and performance makers with a unique opportunity to imagine and think beyond the current Western paradigm. We will explore how this paradigm influences our thinking and actions as creators and citizens. The narrative of coevolution, which reconsiders humanity’s relationship with the more-than-human world, is central to this approach. 

Regenerative practice requires serendipity, co-creation, a developmental process, and site specificity. Conducting the session outdoors will help foster a site-specific mindset, with discussions focused on the participants and the questions they raise. The aim is to create a space of learning and curiosity for both participants and myself. 

This session is meant to be a space of co-learning and joy. We will conduct several exercises, including one on serendipity and observation, another to encourage expanding imagination from creating “to nature” to creating “as nature,” and a third exercise to develop the capacity to embrace multiple perspectives and foster co-creation. 

Storytelling will be at the heart of this presentation as a way to practice and embody a regenerative perspective. This reflects the belief shared by Écoscéno’s members that theater holds profound power as an agent of change, given its deep connection to stories and culture. 

Biography

Marianne Lavoie studied theater design in Montreal and in Buenos Aires. She is pursuing a master’s in Environmental Design at UQAM, focusing on regenerative design. Since 2020, she has supported over 40 theater and museum productions in eco-design and has developed and led professional training since 2022. As Director of the Eco-design Division since September 2024, she aims to promote regenerative approaches in the cultural sector. She co-hosts an international book club on Ecoscenography with Tanja Beer and participates in public events on eco-design. 

Oona Leino-Virtanen

Touching as a way for multi-species knowledge

Tap Dancing With Moles is a video performance through which I try to understand the bodies that live and eat in a permacultural garden. I follow material non-human bodies by touch. The project began as trying to track microbes in the garden. Attempts to find invisible microbes led to something else: microbes became a method to understand the tangible relationships of the garden and the body’s ability to communicate. Organisms connect to the common material world through their bodies, and thus responsibility for the environment is included in the relationships between organisms (Haraway 2008). By touching, the shape, compactness, size, temperature, texture, moisture, can be experienced; rhizomes elsewhere, e.g. the attachment of roots to the soil, can be felt by pulling the plant. 

Touching is listening and understanding, communicating with the material world: knowing and nurturing, responsibility. After picking, I bathe the root vegetables thoroughly, chop, cook, and eat: I touch non-human bodies before they are microbially decomposed into my body, i.e. become me. Eating is intimate touching, touching is intimate knowing (Bellacasa 2017). Every touch changes the microbiome (Fragiadakis 2018). Is “my” microbiome a mix of all the agents in the garden that I touch? Are we a collective body, holobiont? Where is the responsibility for the ecosystem located? 

Tap Dancing With Moles deals with the garden as eating situations, the observation of which started when the moles moved into the garden. What happens when moles and humans eat the same roots? 

For some reason I want to tap dance in the garden. Later I heard that moles are afraid of vibration. I see the minimal bumps on the paws of a dead mole. Since then I have admired them; with those tiny paws and microbe-sized nodules and claws, do they dig long cavities in the clay? Sharing food with moles has revealed their abilities. Later I’m worrying when the moles haven’t been met anymore. The gestures of expulsion turned into gestures of invitation. The material for the performance forms from what happens and I do in the garden anyway. The 

process felt more like receiving than doing. The garden designed this show. I was kind of a fellow student, humble, intuitive. While showing the video performance I want to encourage the participants to touch the ground, floor, to choose the positions, to move, forming a connection with the surroundings by touching. Lying down, crawling. 

Biography

Leino-Virtanens’ PhD deals with the relationships between soil, microbes, and humans in permaculture gardening. She is part of the Center for Social Study of Microbes (CSSM, University of Helsinki), where she worked as an artist in 2023, creating a video performance about the microbial agency of the body, improvisation, and gut feelings. Art and science sometimes intertwine, sometimes compete. The garden works as a studio and colleague for her. Her dream is to move less in an upright position. 

Kilpeläinen Raisa and Milla Martikainen

On More Sustainable Performance Design, Education and the Future Skills in a World of Polycrisis.

This joint multimodal presentation focuses on performance design and its education regarding sustainability, a more ecologically sustainable stage and the era of polycrisis. It is inspired by two versions of an MA level course A More Ecologically Sustainable Stage (2024) at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki: the experiences and materials, the collected data and the feedback from the courses. The presentation discusses ways to approach sustainability and ecocreativity in (more) ecological performance-making and its pedagogy. The aim is also to reflect on transformative learning and socio-cultural transformation in relation to more ecological theatre-making. 

The presentation will be extended with a facilitated discussion with the participants, aiming to approach the speculative future of performance design and asking what are the future skills of a performance designer, what could and should be taught and known, and how to cope with the sustainability transition in education, on the field, and outside the academy. The discussion aims to collect material for mapping the future understanding and the changes in the field and developing education. The presentation is linked to Kilpeläinen’s research, where she explores current movements, changes and sustainability in performance design and its education, and to Martikainen’s work among the sustainability networking in the Finnish performing arts field. In the presentation there will be also introduced ongoing concrete Finnish eco-actions of the field. 

Biography

Raisa Kilpeläinen is an artist-researcher in performance design, specialising in scenographics, stage and lighting design, theatre and drama research and university pedagogy. Kilpeläinen works as a Lecturer in Performance Design at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. As a researcher, she explores changes in performance designers’ work and art and possible futures and sustainability in performance design. As an artist, she specialises in dramaturgy, light, space, site, perceptions, experiencing, audiences, performative installations, performance concepts, collective creation and sustainability. Kilpeläinen is a founding member of Art Collective KOKIMO, founded in 2010. 

Milla Martikainen is a freelance performance artist and performance-maker specialising in stage and lighting design. Martikainen works widely in the performing arts, focusing on sustainable practices and promoting ecosocial transformation. She has collaborated with wide range and scale of platforms from ANTI Live Art Festival to Finnish National Theatre. Martikainen is a visiting teacher at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki and has written about sustainability in performance. She is currently a project coordinator for LuoTo project that facilitates sustainability transition in the creative fields and is working in Metsäesitys and Mustarinda associations. 

Germain Ducroise

Dancing an embodied landscape: an ecosomatic movement workshop

“Danser le corps-paysage” (Dancing an embodied landscape) is a movement workshop for all audiences focused on situated improvisation. It’s an invitation to allow movement to happen in response to our relationship with the place where we are and with the beings we encounter, a dance with our sensory landscape. 

The current ecological crisis is often described as a crisis of attention, a crisis of the readability of the world (Zhong-Mengual and Morizot, 2018). Learning how to read, understand and appreciate our environement and the beings around us, learning how to amplify and deepen our relationship with the world, are vital and political issues at the core of my approach. 

I’m inspired by the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), who braids together western scientific knowledge, Indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants. Kimmerer offers an empowering example of ecological storytelling based on relationality, reciprocity, and kinship. I’m also inspired by the work of Baptiste Morizot (2018) who describes an approach he calls ecosensitive tracking that enables him to reach a deep connection with his sensory landscape and create new ways of being and knowing. 

The workshop is an adaptation, an embodiment of these principles, in what I describe as a state of « embodied landscape », a specific way of being that emerges during periods of situated dance improvisation in connection with the land. This state, and the movements that stem from it, are the foundation of the workshop, and resonate with ecosomatic approaches (Bardet, Clavel & Ginot, 2018), that place the relationships between the body and its environment at the heart of the experience. That’s why I would like to share “Danser le corps-paysage” as an example of creative pedagogy that activates embodied forms of ecological storytelling. 

The workshop offers a caring and playful approach. No dance experience is necessary : participants are encouraged to move with curiosity. Periods of practice, with different levels of guidance, alternate with periods of presentation and feedback, and a final conversation concludes the workshop. Participants should wear comfortable clothing and appropriate footwear for outdoors practice and bring a bottle of water and something to write on. 

Biography

Germain Ducros is a dance artist, researcher and PhD candidate based in Montreal, Quebec. He is interested in the possible relationships between sensory landscape, sensitive body and the territory it inhabits. After ten years teaching languages in France, he moved to Quebec to begin a PhD in Art Studies and Practices. Initiated in 2021, his doctoral research-creation at Université du Québec à Montréal revolves around the concept of corps-territoire. Germain Ducros is also a facilitator of movement workshops, multifaceted performer, and occasional lecturer.

Friday 29 August

Raisa Foster

Keynote: Embracing Hope and Utopia Amidst Complex Eco-Social Crises

Art has long exposed injustice, challenged power, and warned of future threats. But what happens when dystopia is no longer a warning but reality? Climate change and nature loss shape the present, and democratic structures are eroding. After decades of relative stability, much of what once felt secure is rapidly unraveling. What can art do in an era of crisis?  

This presentation explores how artistic research can cultivate active hope and utopias—not as escapist fantasies but as vital orientations for navigating eco-social complexity. While scientific inquiry is essential for analyzing systemic crises, sustainable transformation also demands a broader sensuous and ethical imagination. We must ask not only what is happening in the world and why things are as they are but also how we might relate differently—to each other, to the more-than-human world, and to the futures we co-create.  

In this context, hope is not a passive feeling but an embodied and creative force—an everyday practice of resistance and renewal. Utopia is understood not as a fixed destination but as a method: a speculative and ethical gesture that resists closure. Facts, critical reflection, and fiction must work together to envision other ways of being, knowing, and becoming.  

Through the lens of ecosocial thinking, this talk draws from multispecies entanglements, embodied knowledge, and site-sensitive performance practices. It explores how ecologically oriented artistic and pedagogical practices can awaken affective, collective, and more-than-human forms of agency. Artistic practices—interdisciplinary, sensuous, and situated—offer alternative gestures where transformation feels both imaginable and actionable. 

Micaela Kühn

Eco-Thinking in Decision Making in the Dance Studio: a try-out of a Decision-Making Framework in Choreographic Production

Since 2020, I have been working with dance dramaturge Maxwell McCarthy and choreographer Alfredo Zinola on the artistic-ecological initiative Punctures. The goal of Punctures is to create novel ecosystems in the agricultural area around Cavallermaggiore/IT, fostering biodiversity. On parcels of 3,000–7,000 sqm, we plant as an invitation for biodiversity to stay, return, or show up.  

This practical action — planting — and its ongoing maintenance — care sessions — are carried out as community activities, involving local residents and artistic collaborators. Punctures also seeks resonance in the performing arts field through residencies, work sharings, and labs in festivals and theatres (e.g. Stamsund Festival NO, Tanzhaus NRW DE, Taarnby Festival DK). 

In Punctures, we constantly face questions: What do we give space to, and what not? How much do we let voluntary plants grow? How much do we intervene, and how much do we let happen? Is it worth flying in collaborators from abroad? The process of navigating these questions — as amateur environmentalists but professional dance artists — has become one of the most exciting aspects of the project. It is often not about the most efficient solution in quantifiable terms (e.g. CO₂ emissions), but about realistic compromises or daring experiments. It has been a practical way of staying with the complexity of what the most sustainable response might be, always grounded in the specific context. 

In my other role as an educator in the dance department at the Danish School of Performing Arts, I notice an gap between students’ engagement with sustainability discourse and the practical realities of production — especially when eco-themes are not at the center of the work itself. Often, the budgets simply do not allow for expensive train travel, people are already underpaid or overworked, LED lighting is not an option, and most materials used on stage are already recycled. This gap or dissonance often leads to a sense of helplessness or stagnation among student artists and emerging makers. 

Drawing on our decision-making experiences in Punctures, and inspired by visual frameworks like Doughnut Economics and applied models like Permaculture, I am beginning to sketch a small-scale tool — something like a compass — that could help dancers and choreographers navigate ecological considerations in their own practice, bringing planetary matters to a dance studio level. This presentation is an invitation to join that development process. 

Biography

Micaela Kühn Jara works in the field of dance and education. As a Teaching Associate Professor in the Danish School of Performing Arts, she teaches, coordinates and supervises in subjects such as choreographic production and artistic-pedagogical practice. She is the artistic producer of Alfredo Zinola Productions (Germany), company that develops contemporary performances for young audiences. Together with A. Zinola and M. McCarthy, they initiated the long-term project Punctures, an ecological-artistic project to nurture biodiversity in monoculture areas in northern Italy. 

Joonas Lahtinen

Mundane matters – “use what you have” and “politics of the mundane” as tools for facilitating ecological and resource-conscious HEI performance art pedagogy

This paper discusses and outlines productive possibilities that the approach “use what you have” and the concept “politics of the mundane” can offer for a student-centred and malleable, ecological and resource-conscious HEI artist pedagogy in the context of teaching performance and live art practice. 

Drawing on projects and workshops that I have realized with Bachelor-level students from diverse artistic backgrounds at the MUK – Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (2023–) and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2017–23), and supported by documentary AV materials, I aim to show ways in which the mundane dimension of daily life can serve as an accessible starting point for investigative artistic endeavours, both for students with, and without, previous experience in performance-making and knowledge of discourses related to eco-pedagogy and care. 

I operate with the premise that at the HEI, it is not solely the statements and strategy papers regarding ecological and social sustainability and the use of resources that matter, but, above all, the resource-related decisions and nuanced (self-)critical reflection at the level of practice. Briefly put, in teaching situations, “use what you have” refers to the task of identifying and working with materials, objects, institutional and domestic spaces, and devices that are available to each student in their daily lives, in ways that critically investigate the “mundane”. Here, the “mundane” refers to unremarkable, unspectacular habits, routines and patterns of daily activities that often go unnoticed (Bargetz; Brekhus; Goudouna; Read), but that have nevertheless (eco-)political currency both in terms of consumption and the use of resources, and in that they structure our very experience(s) and understanding(s) of reality and its parts in the Rancièrean sense. I suggest that “use what you have” and “politics of the mundane” offer novel perspectives on how the ideas of “care as embodied performance” (Hamington) and of “infrastructural avowal” (Jackson) can be understood in eco-pedagogical contexts in artist education. 

Biography

Joonas Lahtinen is Professor of Artistic Research and Performance Art at the MUK – Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. He studied Performance at Queen Mary University of London and Theatre research at the University of Helsinki, where he completed his dissertation “Making Sense of Perception and Power in Participatory Performance” in 2021. Lahtinen’s artistic and research projects have been presented internationally in renowned institutions and festivals. He convenes the subgroup Spaces of Artist Education within the Artist Pedagogy Research Group of the SAR. 

Alba Balmaseda Dominiguez

Unveiling Water: Embodied Explorations of Urban Waterscapes

Water is essential to life, yet in urban environments, it often goes unnoticed—concealed within infrastructure or reduced to a purely functional role. Unveiling Water offers an experimental and embodied approach to reconnecting with water, challenging participants to rethink its past, present, and future significance. Helsinki, with its deep connection to water, provides an ideal setting for this exploration. 

Rooted in two investigations—one focused on urban bathing, exploring the interplay of cities, bodies, and water, and the other on spatial performativity, examining the relationship between performance and space—this workshop draws inspiration from Anna Halprin’s Experiments in the Environment and Huan’s To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond. It treats the body as a live instrument to engage with the larger collective body of urban waters, fostering creativity, ecological awareness, and a renewed water culture. 

The workshop begins with an embodied exploration, guiding participants through movement exercises informed by water’s qualities, such as flow, rhythm, and adaptability. These somatic practices deepen participants’ understanding of water’s dynamics and its resonance with the human body, emphasizing themes of interconnectedness and heightened awareness. 

Building on these insights, the workshop culminates in small-scale, performative interventions in connection with water. These collective actions aim to unveil water’s presence by highlighting forgotten natural waterways, neglected infrastructure, or overlooked water features, such as pollution, scarcity, or symbolism. Through these site-specific engagements, participants will reimagine water’s role in shaping urban life and explore new ways to connect with this vital element. 

By blending embodied practice with creative action, Unveiling Water inspires participants to rethink their relationship with water and its place in the urban landscape. The process fosters individual insights and sparks collective reflection, bridging art, ecology, and urban studies to cultivate a deeper awareness of water’s centrality to our shared environments. 

Biography 

Alba Balmaseda Domínguez (Spain) graduated as an architect from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 2010. She combines architectural practice with academic research and teaching. Her work focuses on public realms, the relationship between body and space, approached through design, performance and full-scale construction. In 2014 she started her own architectural practice. She is a PhD student at the University of Roma Tre with a study on collective bathing in urban public spaces. Member of the non-profit association ‘Performing Space’ and the research group ‘OFFSEASON’. 

Marija Griniuk

Indigenous art: Whakapapa and Maadtoe

The presentation investigated two major concepts within Sámi and Māori artistic expressions in Sapmi and New Zealand Aotearoa: Whakapapa (which is Māori) and Maadtoe (which is Southern Sámi concept). Both concepts are connected with heritage and the inherited knowledge within Indigenous communities, which are connected to ecopoetics, eco-friendly behaviour and interconnection between humans and more than humans – nature. The Southern Sámi concept is chosen to use due to the fact that the author works currently in Southern Sámi contexts in Bodø while also working on her postdoctoral research at Vilnius Academy of Arts. The cases provided are bringing together Sámi and Māori artists, such as workshops and educational content development for youth and children. The author provides the cases where she had been involved as a manager or educator.  The method of this study is arts-based research, the study analyses visual and text-based data through reflexive analysis, exploring concepts of Whakapapa and Maadtoe. The findings offer recommendations for facilitators in Indigenous art contexts. 

Biography 

Marija Griniuk holds a DA (Doctor of Arts) from The University of Lapland in Finland. She is Director of the Sami Center for Contemporary Art in Karasjok, Norway. She is a Lithuanian artist and has a background in visual arts, performance art, and performance pedagogy. 

Jo Pollitt

The Dramaturgy of Weather: Ecopoetic Practices for Unstable Times

This paper grapples with the daily instability of weather as a feminist dramaturgy for unstable times. Borderless and unfixed, such feminist weather is an improviser offering a model of ecopoetic performance in practice. Drawing on ‘Staging Weather’ a three-year project based in Western Australia on Whadjuk Noongar Country, the presentation shares approaches to dramaturgy and the phenomena of metrological art practice through three current case studies; ‘Seroja’ a virtual reality project featuring the sonification of cyclonic rainfall and windspeed; ‘Forecast’ a participatory exhibition of tactile poetic pedagogies; and ‘w e a t h e r v e i n’ a live dance and writing performance practice. These studies all approach the dramaturgy of weather as ecopoetic improvisations variously translated across the gallery-page-screen-stage. The research integrates weather science with artistic processes, fostering an ecopoetic approach to reengaging humans with place-based weather literacies. These literacies aim to recalibrate sensory and affective relationships with local meteorological conditions, promoting a sentient connection with everyday weather. It investigates how artist-led methods of attuning and improvisation in responsive and relational studio practices can catalyse public imagination and deepen feeling with atmospheric instability and change. 

Biography

Jo Pollitt is an artist-scholar living and working on Whadjuk Noongar Country as a Research Fellow with the Centre for People, Place & Planet and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University. Her work is grounded in a long-term practice of improvisation across multiple performing, choreographic, and publishing platforms. She is creative director of #FEAS (Feminist Educators Against Sexism), author of The dancer in your hands, and lead on the transdisciplinary research project Staging Weather. 

Kitija Balcare

Building Ecological Awareness Through Ecotheatre: Case of Latvia

The ecological crisis, which encompasses a range of environmental and social problems, is diffuse in time and space and externally gradual, thus preventing an immediate human response and a change in attitudes and behaviour. Ecological awareness, understood as an awareness of the inevitably close interconnectedness between humans and the environment, undermines the anthropocentric belief that there is no reference point other than the human [Morton 2018: 32], so theatre that strengthens human ecological awareness meanwhile weakens the anthropocentric point of view. Ecological consciousness means thinking and doing ethically and politically from multiple points of reference, not just one: the human [Morton 2018a].  

As art can contain contradictions, it can create a safe space in which to address the highly emotional or affective traumas of climate change and other environmental issues [Davis 2020], while theatre in particular can become a place for the human species and other species with which humans share space on the planet [May 2021], and for imagining a sustainable future [Hubell & Ryan 2022]. Thus, ecotheatre has the possibility to become a form of ecological imagination. Such imaginaries have a significant impact on how society responds to the growing climate crisis and environmental challenges [Neimanis et al. 2015], with the character of a hyperobject. 

Ecotheatre is an approach for creation of an environmental imaginary through collaborative exploration and embodied storytelling while taking into account sustainability aspects of performance making. Ecotheatre is not only an art form, but also a participatory tool for community work, looking at scientific facts with an emotional engagement and helping to alleviate ecological anxiety by channelling this energy into co-creative work. Through collaborative exploration of environmental issues, a group becomes open to change – at individual, community, and wider levels. Strategy of ecotheatre is to encourage an active re-evaluation of the existing practices and systems, rather than to impose ready-made solutions, to develop a “what if” perspective as precondition for environmentally conscious action.  

Aim of the presentation is to reveal theoretical ideas in practical cases in the landscape of performing arts in Latvia, highlighting how ecotheatre as a collective practice can help to reduce individual ecoanxiety, deepening personal ecological awareness and fostering engagement into environmental activism. 

Biography

Kitija Balcare, Ph. D. (cand.)., a Latvian theatre critic and junior research fellow at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of Latvia researching how ecotheatre becomes a form of environmental activism. Research interests include posthumanism, ecocriticism, with particular interest in ecology and sustainability in the performing arts. Lecturer at the Latvian Culture Academy. Member of scientific committee for the project Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift (STAGES). 

Gretchen Jude

(In Search of) the Radical Recuperative Potential of Listening and Sounding Practice

In this paper presentation, I tease out the nearly fused strands of technology, economics, aesthetics, sociality, and sonic practice, to interrogate Timothy Morton’s bold claim that all art is ecological (2018). At this very time when audio recording, playback, and streaming technologies have reached near-ubiquity, sound designers and audio practitioners must consider what comes next. How will we transform our use of these creative tools to prepare for (and perhaps even mitigate) coming crises? In short, how can we engage in “green” audio practice? 

I first explore ways of cultivating sustainable listening practice in our work as performing artists. Electronic and digital media have become naturalized in our aesthetic practice and our daily lives. Kyle Devine (2019), in critiquing the political ecology of the music industry, observes that listening to audio means engaging with the conditions of extractive capitalism and suggests that “if we develop ears to hear these conditions, then we may also be motivated to change them” (189). Mark Wright (2022) offers pedagogical exercises towards a critical field recording practice that examines the “responsibility of listening” and expands posthuman agency to include “elemental agents such as oil, sun, ice, and data” (114). I adapt these approaches for sustainable sound design in performing arts. 

Next, I suggest how ways to foreground the embodied and social potential of sounding practices. Idealizing a return to “purely” acoustic sound represents a dead end if our aesthetics merely look backwards. Performance requiring fragile musical instruments and virtuosic players can be highly resource-intensive, and current systems of live performance, reliant on touring, audio equipment, and electrical sound reinforcement, are far from environmentally friendly. What are alternatives? 

Finally, sound-making rooted in embodied human effort that engages creatively with materials from the immediate environment will be examined. As a case study, the work of Kinshasa-based performance collective Kokoko! (Democratic Republic of Congo), who utilize recycled materials and DIY electronics in their community-based interventions, will be examined as one example of a sustainable “green” audio performance practice for the future, as we imagine ways to cultivate practice beyond Capitalocene logics of obsolescence. 

Biography

Gretchen Jude is an award-winning experimental performer and composer for film, dance, and theater, whose sounds have been heard around the globe. Born and raised in the wild state of Idaho (USA), Jude is fascinated by the complex interactions between nature and technology. She holds degrees in Performance Studies (Practice as Research) from the University of California, Davis (Ph.D. 2018) and Electronic Music & Recording Media from Mills College (M.F.A. in 2011) and is currently Assistant Professor of Film Sound at the University of Utah.

Ida Ślęzak

Researching Artistic Processes: Tools, and Strategies for Performing Arts Ecosystems

The presentation will share findings from my ongoing research project exploring the practices and strategies of young artists working within the field of expanded choreography in Warsaw, Poland. My primary aim is to understand how their creative practices generate situated and embodied knowledge, which I analyze through four interconnected categories: the art field, institutions, relationships, and tools. 

The research examines the dynamics of young choreography’s development within Warsaw’s institutional landscape and the artistic formats and works emerging from these frameworks. I place particular importance on shifting the focus from final artistic products to the processes of creation, as this perspective fosters sustainable institutional practices and production methods. Through this research, I aim to identify and analyze strategies that prioritize sustainability, process-oriented approaches, and practices that resists overproduction, while centering pleasure, rest, and community building. 

My methodology is grounded in embodied co-participation, combining ethnographic perspectives, institutional and artistic critique, and performance research. I employ autoethnography and embodied approaches to knowledge, emphasizing emotions, affect, and bodily experience as key sources of insight. The study involves 10 young choreographers whose practices encompass both individual endeavors and collaborative work in groups or collectives. By the time of the conference, the project will be in its final stages, with conclusions and key insights being refined. 

During the presentation, I will also reflect on my experiences of accompanying, observing, and researching artistic processes in the performing arts. I will detail my methods, including interviews, participant observation, experimental research-artistic activities (e.g., mind mapping), and field notes.  

My goal is to illuminate how a focus on processual and sustainable artistic strategies can inspire a rethinking of institutional practices and art production methods. The project’s methodological reflections may serve as a foundation for broader discussions on the potential of choreography as both a research field and a critical practice. 

Biography

A cultural studies scholar and co-creator of artistic and research processes. Her work focuses on performing arts and the study of artistic processes. In her PhD research, she examines contemporary performing arts in Poland, exploring their responses to the climate crisis and the adoption of non-anthropocentric ways of being, knowing and experiencing the world. 

Asmita Sarkar

Insight into ecological story telling through case-studies from contemporary visual-material art from India.

In this paper, I will investigate how contemporary Indian artists are expanding and questioning the definition of humans through their critical practice. Such practices can reveal new insight into performativity, body, and ecology. In this paper, the practice of three Indian contemporary artists will be investigated – Tejal Shah, Amol K Patil,and Pravakar Pachpute. Tejal Shah (born 1979), had taken direct inspiration from critical theories, especially from Haraway’s work. Ecological and futuristic concepts are recurring in their video and performance pieces. Shah explores plural gender identities that often include interspecies relations. On the other hand, artists such as Pravakar Pachpute and Amol k Patil portray the body-materiality of miners, and migrant workers where their bodies fused with their tools and materialities of the environment they inhabit. At first glance these artist’s works may not appear to explicitly delve into human-technology relations that can fall under the category of a cyborg as proposed by Haraway, but her works are resonant with the imaginative restructuring of the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.  

In this paper the nuances of the theories of post-human will be explored with as it is reflected in the artworks and artists discussed. The three artists mentioned represent the human body as a state of flux extending and diffusing with the environment and with the more than human other, animate or inanimate. In contrast/addition to Haraway’s theory of more than human, the artworks discussed can be explored through the lenses of personhood and vitality. Transgender persons, laborers, and miners possess different shades of personhood. The artistic transformation of the surfaces’ material, forms, and texture pulsate with vitality that can determine this individual and define the future “human”. Such artistic practices can bring the element of the human body and the liminal space they occupy into the discourse of performativity and can inspire different performance practices to consider the continuum between humans and more than humans. Case studies of such artistic practices can also be integrated into performance pedagogies. 

Biography

Asmita Sarkar is a theorist of contemporary art and a practicing artist. She has an interdisciplinary background encompassing psychology, art theory and history, and creative and critical writing. She has publications that are in respected international journals (Leonardo, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of Visual Art Practice) that focus on interdisciplinarity. In her doctoral research, she has chosen the phenomenology of embodiment as a methodological tool to explore the works of contemporary painters. Currently she teaching in Srishti Institute of Art. 

Carly Everaert and Laura Cull O` Maoilearca

Head seeks Hand: Regenerative Artistic Research in Costume Design                      

This multimodal workshare session focuses on a demonstration of how costume designer and educator Carly Everaert has integrated regenerative principles into their costume design processes in the context of professional practice and the delivery of the course “Head seeks Hand” as part of the Scenography curriculum at the Academy of Theatre and Dance (ATD), Amsterdam. In their own professional practice, Carly’s costumes are often a collage of existing clothing and materials that come to life on the actor’s body. In the costume design block, “Head seeks Hand” first year students on the Scenography program learn how to create a new design from an existing traditional (trouser) suit. Students are sent out to a nearby second-hand market to buy themselves their own grey man’s suit. Then they completely dismantle the suit. In the process you see just how many pieces are used to make up the suit, and how much work, time and material goes into it. Then they are given the the assignment of using all the parts to design a costume that is as far removed from the body as possible. They are ask to discard any preconceived plans and just to look at what comes into being by doing. Working in this way, they discover that their bodies harbour knowledge that comes to the surface when you work with your hands. The results are textile sculptures, abstract forms and costumes with strange protuberances or sharp angles. Ultimately, they themselves crawl into their costumes to experience what they ask of them. Regeneration is a key learning objective here: students learn to dare to let the design emerge – while researching, experimenting, recycling with materials – instead of being result-oriented. Students come to experience how an environmentally conscious approach to costume design is not a ‘limitation’ but produces new aesthetics. In this workshare session, Everaert will share the insights and student creations that have emerged from this course over the years and – in dialogue with Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca – will situate Everaert’s work in the context of the wider efforts to advance Regenerative Art Education at the ATD in policy, curriculum, and facilities. Drawing insights from a recent meeting where educators from across the Academy came together to share experiences of implementing regenerative principles in their educations, we will consider the challenges and opportunities of moving from a paradigm of extraction and exhaustion to one of regeneration and care. 

Biography

Carly Everaert is an award winning costume designer. Recent projects include costume design for Trojan Wars, Queer Planet and Romeo & Juliet at HNT-jong. In 2022, Carly received the Proscenium Prize for their entire oeuvre. Carly teaches in the Scenography department of the Academy of Theater and Dance, Amsterdam and is a member of the research group where they conducts research on costume, space, and embodiment from an intersectional, practice-based perspective. 

Laura Cull O Maoilearca (she/her) holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Performance Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and as a research professor at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Her research group focusses on practice research in performance guided by values of social justice, regeneration and care. She recently co-authored a text on Regenerative Art Education with Anthony Heidweiller, Bas van den Berg and Minou Schillings. 

Jari Koho

How to Do Almost Nothing: An outline of the (Im)possibility of Making Art Today. (Ecological Sound Artistic Perspective)

The title of the lecture is a combination from bestselling book How to Do Nothing (2019) by an American artist, writer and teacher Jenny Odell, and a composition PRESQUE RIEN N°1 (1967–70) by French composer Luc Ferrari. What these three have in common is to observe what opens up to experience and perception when you become present in the moment and to what already exists. From these starting points, the lecture asks, sketches, explores and experiments with what it could be like to make ecologically sustainable sound art, instead of not doing it at all or quitting. 

The lecture is based on an ecological perspective, which aims to find and experiment with ways of making art that take into account the limits of the world and growth and strive to adapt to the so-called 1.5-degree lifestyles. 

How does this adaptation affect art? 

Please note that the lecture takes place outdoors in the vicinity of the Sörnäinen campus. During it, we move in a group by walking from one place to another, stopping and doing various guided exercises. 

• Bring weather-appropriate clothing and good walking shoes. 
• The length of the route is about two kilometers. 
• Unfortunately, the route is not accessible. 

Biography

Jari Koho is a Helsinki-based artist who works extensively with sound. Koho’s art is characterized by site-specificity and consideration of ecological perspectives. Koho graduated with a master’s degree from the Theater Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki from the degree program in sound design in 2021. Currently Koho is a doctoral candidate at the Performing Arts Research Centre (Tutke) of the University of the Arts Helsinki and conducts artistic research on listening-driven, ecologically sustainable sound art. 

Andrea Franco

Plants, Stones, and Bats: The Non-Anthropocentric Dramaturgy of Chilean Director and Playwright Manuela Infante

Starting with the question of how to create – both scenically and materially – a non-anthropocentric theatre, Chilean director and playwright Manuela Infante has developed since 2017 a trilogy of works (Estado Vegetal (2017), Cómo convertirse en piedra (2021), and Vampyr (2024) that stem from the study of authors linked to the non-human turn. In these works, Infante deconstructs traditional theatrical forms, where the human is both the philosophical and formal center, positioning herself from alternative categories: the vegetal, the mineral, and the non-human. This decentering of the human leads to new scenic configurations. For instance, in Estado Vegetal, the conceptual structure of the piece reflects a vegetal configuration: branching, phototropism, and photoperiodism. In Cómo convertirse en piedra, sedimentation, inherent to the mineral, organizes and determines the scenic elements. Finally, in Vampyr, the proposal centers around the figure of the vampire as a non-human creature and its relation to a Chilean hematophagous bat. This creature’s characteristics help Infante explore ideas like ecological devastation hidden behind “green energies.” 

Infante aligns with feminist new materialisms (Barad), recognizing the agency of what is not considered human. These ideas connect with epistemes from the Global South, particularly Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s “Indian epistemology”. Thus, Infante’s work also engages with decolonial proposals. 

Considering the non-human in Infante’s work challenges the spectator: it requires stepping aside to view the world from another perspective, contemplating the possibility of other ways of being, and generating questions regarding the human and what has been excluded from hegemonic narratives. A crucial element is that it does not rely on representation but rather on speculation, understood as a poetic and ethical act (Bogost, 2012). This avoids imposing human categories on the non-human, instead seeking forms that allow engagement with the non-human on its own terms. 

Based on these premises, Infante’s works challenge core notions of narrative, such as character and temporality, reworking them in the scenic play through interaction between performers and technological devices. These staging strategies create new narrative forms that, from a critical and ethical perspective, problematize the relationship between the human and the non-human in the context of the global ecological crisis. 

Biography

Andrea Franco (Chile, 1981) is a playwright, director, screenwriter, and educator. A PhD candidate in Arts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC) and ANID fellow, she holds a Master’s in Arts from UC and in Audiovisual Creation from the International School of Cinema and TV, Cuba. She teaches Screenwriting and Creative Writing at the University of Chile. Selected for the Royal Court Theatre’s Latin American Workshop, her works include Mutilados (2015), Boca abajo (2021), and Velocirraptors (2022). 

Oliver Gough

Tied in a Global Knot: ecological storytelling looking beyond formal and national borders

Through close textual analysis and eco-critical inquiry into the productive possibilities of recent play-texts, this paper suggests that non-traditional structure and internationalist instincts are central to a nascent but significant development in new ecological play-writing. In Towards An Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene (2022) Mohebat Ahmadi describes an ‘ecocritical turn’ in performance in and on the Anthropocene. The study traces a diverse, challenging, and rapidly growing set of new (and reclaimed) play texts exploding from an urgent need to reconfigure the human relationship to beings, systems, and possibilities of art previously dismissed. Such works can be understood as part of a broader development in writing about climate change in which formal approaches have expanded, political tactics diversified, and the impacts and stories of global warming are felt and told in new contexts. From Australia, plays like Scenes from the Climate Era (2023) by David Finnegan and Anchuli Felicia King’s White Pearl (2019) recognise and interrogate the disorienting, complex, and global reality of ‘wicked’ problems like climate change and late capitalism. This kind of subliminal and overt ecological storytelling bakes the massive scale of environmental events and the viral exchanges of capitalism into twisting form as well as content, appropriately dismissing borders to consider a multi-species spanning problem. While Scenes from the Climate Era’s adjustable set of genre/location spanning short scenes burrows deep into the productive playfulness of ecological awareness, in White Pearl, a capitalist crisis spins out of control across languages, cultures, and global cities, ultimately staging the bewildering ironies of the Anthropocene alongside its probing of racism and class. Plays that speak across borders and forms and move beyond the orthodoxy of given Anglo national play-writing traditions might be a particularly useful dimension of Ahmadi’s eco-critical turn. Ecological play-writing in this vein, alongside pedagogy and performance making, can destabilise Anthropocentrism, critique the ascendancy of realist responses to climate change, and build radical new connections between humans and the environment through their bold storytelling. 

Biography

Oliver Gough is a PhD student and emerging playwright based in Magandjin/Brisbane. His practice-led MPhil and honours projects applied research on interrogating climate change-ravaged futures through absurdism, with resulting conference papers presented locally and at the Australasian Drama Studies 2022 conference. His plays have been independently produced, and writing has appeared in the online magazine ‘Science Write Now’, the Australasian Drama Studies journal, reviews website TheatreHaus.com, and literary journal Jacaranda. 

Rachel Young

Threads of Inquiry from Costuming the Collapse – An Exploration of Costume Fragments

This triptych draws on remnants of past costumes from my PhD research, Costuming the Collapse. Underpinned by post-qualitative inquiry and a posthuman approach, it explores the rich narratives within these materials, highlighting the intricate relationships between creativity, collaboration, and the more-than-human world. 

Snapshot Triptych – I will present three key pieces, each offering a unique perspective on the significance of costume fragments. 

(RE)root – Multidirectional Embroidery

This piece visually represents mycelial networks, serving as both a map and a diagram to illustrate the complex interconnections in my creative process. Like mycelium, it highlights the intertwining of practice and research, inviting viewers to reflect on how creative practices inform relationships with materials and inquiries. 

(RE)Material – Tactile Book of Fragments

A tactile book made from fragments of old garments, this work offers a narrative experience through texture and form. Each embroidered page emphasises the stories woven into the fabric, with the book’s linearity serving as a storytelling platform. Viewers are invited to reflect on the past and consider how these narratives inform future creative practices, embodying the idea that every fragment has a unique narrative. 

(RE)Discovering the Material – Washing Line Installation

This installation features a washing line adorned with fabric and costume fragments, embracing co-collaboration with more-than-human elements. As the wind moves the fabrics and local creatures engage with the installation, it creates a dialogue between materials and their environment. This piece highlights the interconnectedness of all living things and the role of the environment in shaping our creative expressions. 

These three pieces are snapshots of a broader, evolving project that explores how remnants of the past inform future creative practices and ecological thinking. Through this work, I aim to illuminate the significance of our relationships with materials, human and more-than-human, in the storytelling of our collective histories, present, and futures. 

Biography

Rachel is a costume maker and Head of Costume at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Their work explores (dis)connection to the natural world through practical, malleable, and tangible outcomes, emphasising sustainable and considerate costume practices. Under the supervision of Tanja Beer and Susannah Henry, Rachel delves into the narratives woven into materials, fostering a deeper understanding of our relationship with the environment. Their passion for connecting creativity with ecological awareness drives an innovative approach to costume, teaching, and research. 

Elena Peytchinska and Thomas Ballhausen

Performing Undisciplined Landscapes: A Posthuman Approach to Collective Storytelling

Merging our research frameworks on posthuman phenomenology of place (Elena Peytchinska) and synthetic fiction (Thomas Ballhausen), this workshop explores how ecological narratives emerge when we attune to non-human agencies through sonic perception. These perspectives reimagine both performance design and storytelling through ecological and posthuman lenses. Practice-based posthuman phenomenology of place investigates spatial relationships through embodied experience, decentering human agency and recognising landscapes as active participants rather than passive backgrounds. Synthetic fiction examines how new technologies and iterative exchanges between human and non-human actors generate alternative narratives and reconstruct cultural heritage. Together, these approaches provide a framework for exploring collaborative innovation in artistic creation. Our research challenges traditional notions of site and landscape as vistas by engaging with what feminist political geographer Doreen Massey describes as “provisionally intertwined simultaneities of ongoing, unfinished stories,” emphasising landscapes’ refusal “to be disciplined” (Massey, 2006). Sound and performance artist Salomé Voegelin further informs our practice through her elaboration on the “material reality” of a landscape as “a sonic possible world” (Voegelin, 2021). 

The workshop unfolds in three sections (each lasting 15 minutes). First,  participants will engage with their sonic surroundings, developing an embodied understanding of the environment through deep listening and notation (via text or drawing). Next, they will reflect on these experiences through writing exercises, which serve as the foundation for the final section: collective storytelling. The workshop fosters narratives that emerge from direct encounters with non-human agencies by combining listening, drawing, and writing into new forms of notation. This approach decentralises human narrative control, encouraging participants to explore storytelling as an act of environmental engagement shaped by attention and presence. 

Biography

Elena Peytchinska is a visual artist, performance designer, musician, researcher, and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the Department of Stage and Film Design. In 2022, she completed her PhD titled “Theoretical Animals: Textual Strategies for Spatial Production” at the Department of Language Arts / University of Applied Arts Vienna. Elena’s research interests include language-based artistic research, history of science, feminist epistemology, posthuman phenomenology of place, and digital drawing. 

Thomas Ballhausen is a poet, philosopher, curator, and lecturer in the Department of Scenography, as well as Head of the Interuniversity Organization Arts & Knowledges at the University Mozarteum Salzburg. He holds PhDs in philosophy (focusing on media history and archival theory) and language arts (exploring new forms of artistic epistemology and ontology through the format of literary and artistic cahiers). Thomas’s interest in media history, aesthetics, digitality, and literature as artistic research informs both his academic and literary works. 

Juliana España Keller and Aleksandre Pèpin

Entering Into a Sonic Intra-active Quantum Relation with Plant Life.

In the speculative research of plant bioacoustics, one enters into a sonic intra-active relation, by humans with non-human beings (plant life), activated through acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to create 

electronic patterns of sounds composed by humans and emitted by machines. Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of 50–120 Hz. Experimenting with patching and modulation by tracking these sonic lines of data can indeed tap into the universe’s musicology. We can interact with sounds on such a deep level to create acoustic energy and have always been attached to the universe in a relational processual way, interconnected with plant life vibrating at different internal frequencies. This lecture and sonic presentation focuses on a symbiotic relation between humans and plant life as an acoustic shimmering ecology – to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter as a morphological force that (re)shapes, (re)affirms our sonic intra-relations to the natural world. This proposition is molecular and metaphysical, as sound matter is of a qualitative multiplicity in the quantum field of listening. By acknowledging ontologically that cosmopolitics brings into relation different practices, practitioners, and the non-human (they assemble in a field of forces and intensities), I argue that there is no sovereign power under which all modes of existence can be organized, and there is no meta-language through which one can master the diversity of all discursive or material practices; but there are intra-relations in which one can get lost in a quantum field of sonic matter by moving into the cracks of the sensorium and the plant biosphere, which includes Indigenous voices. The alterity of plant life is daunting from an eco-feministmaterialist position in that relationships are the default state of existence 

and sonic experiences uncover alternative or additional explanations in a (post)phenomenological world. As a creative practitioner, how does one define the mutually beneficial engagement in plant communication with creative musical encounters? Entanglement is messy and a becoming with the universe as a philosophical sonic meditation and (re)worlding. This entails expanding on plants as cosmogonic beings, world builders, and we, perhaps, are the byproducts of the lives of our vegetal others. 

Biography

Juliana España Keller, PhD is a Canadian, Swiss and British Sound Performance artist engaged in radical entanglements in sonic practices through speculative research, drawing attention to quantum listening as a relational capacity and as a philosophical and temporal process. Her research focuses on collective resonant acoustic ecologies that are entangled with human-non-human contact and engage in fluctuating sites with sensing subjects and tactile experimentation. She teaches at Concordia University, Studio Arts, Montreal, Canada. 

Alexandre has been playing classical music instruments since he was (15) years old where he went on to form his first band and performed his first public event. At (18) years old, he recorded his first album. He has recorded albums and toured with different musicians such as Canadian folk artist, Joseph Edgar, traveling all over the world for (9) years. He still works with the Queer rock band, “Samuele” and has accompanied them on tour since (2010) through Canada, France and Switzerland. The most recent recording was released in September (2023). 

“Cereus” is a collaborative project that he shares with Dr. Juliana España Keller that explores acoustic ecologies of the Anthropocene. 

Monika Klimaitė-Daunienė

Heterarchical creation – a way to approach a process of performance making as an ecosystem

This presentation explores heterarchical creation as a performative and ecological strategy within the context of contemporary directorship. As part of my ongoing artistic research, I investigate creative models that aim to decentralize the director’s authority, redistributing creative agency among all participants. This inquiry led me to the notion of heterarchy, defined as “the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways” (Crumley 1995, 3). 

Building on D. Radosavljević’s concept of the ‘heterarchical director’—aligned with eco-leadership models that privilege systems thinking over individual command—I consider how performance-making can function as an adaptive, self-sustaining ecosystem (Radosavljević 2019, 261). Through a case study of my own practice, I propose a directorial strategy rooted in heterarchical structure and discuss its impact on collective creation, authorship, creativity, and ecological awareness. 

The heterarchical approach produced a threefold ecological effect: 

1. Microclimate of Collaboration: By dispersing hierarchical authority, the process mirrored the dynamic interrelations of an ecosystem. Leadership emerged situationally, fostering a collaborative microclimate that supports responsiveness, adaptability, and co-authorship—principles resonant with ecological thinking. 

2. The ‘Deer Method’: Developed within this structure, the Deer Method invites performers into a creative dialogue with urban ecologies. By physically engaging in the search for deer in city spaces, actors gather material and inspiration through direct environmental interaction. This method dissolves boundaries between performer, environment, and material, positioning ecological awareness as an embodied, performative practice. 

3. Aesthetic Shift Toward the Anthropocene: Colaitional thinking also shaped the aesthetic outcome of the performance. The thematic framing of The Casting of the Anthropocene emerged as a result of the process, reflecting on human-nature entanglements and ecological crisis. Here, ecology is not only a metaphor or theme but a structuring principle of creative practice. 

By employing ecological thinking as both a methodology and a conceptual framework, this work suggests that sustainable performance practices begin not only with themes of ecology, but with ecological modes of collaboration, perception, and creative development. From structuring rehearsal environments to shaping dramaturgy, heterarchical creation opens a pathway for reimagining theatre-making as an ecosystem—adaptive, interdependent, and responsive to a climate-changed world. 

Biography

I am Lithuanian theatre director and researcher. I received BA degree in Theatre Directing at Klaipeda University and MA degree in Performance Practices and Research at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London in UK. At the moment I am a PhD student in artistic research at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. My artistic research focuses on the decentralization of power structures in the process of performance making and investigates the changing role of director and the requirements of directorship in the environment of collective creation. 

Saturday 30 August

Dylan Van Den Berg

Keynote: Listen Here: Country as character and ecological whispers in First Nations playwriting and performance

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been caring for the lands across what we know as ‘Australia’ for millennia. Caring for Country* lays at the foundation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Knowledge about the land, sky and waterways is passed down as story, song, dance, and ceremony. These stories are not extracted – by painful excision – from Country, but heard. Country is a reason for storytelling, and storytelling channels Country.  

For many First Nations playwrights and theatre-makers, Country is a necessary practical and ideological consideration in the creation of new work: what are the cultural considerations of setting, including the permissions required for setting stories on non-ancestral land? But, beyond this, there are always larger dramaturgical considerations about the role of Country in Blak storytelling. What does it have to say about this place at this time? How will the specific character of Country manifest, keeping in mind, of course, that Country has a uniquely powerful ability to speak back to the colony. It murmurs between lines, buttressing bodies on stage.   

This keynote will explore the intersection of more traditional First Nations arts practices, which have always emerged from Country, and contemporary playwriting and climate dramaturgy. Drawing on First Nations methodologies and cultural frameworks, I will argue for the creative potential of ‘Country as character’, offering approaches for embedding Country into new works for the stage. I will also explore how, as we translate work from the page to the stage, we can reflect the rich potential of Country. I am advocating for a pedagogical shift in Performance and Theatre Studies that incorporates diverse perspectives in introducing ecological themes.  

To illustrate these ideas, several of my own works will be referenced as case studies: Ngadjung (BelcoArts, 2022), a cli-fi drama written in collaboration with the Ngunnawal community of Kamberi/Canberra, Whitefella Yella Tree (Griffin Theatre Company, 2022), which features a monstrous tree as stand-in for a colonised landscape, and The Chosen Vessel (The Street Theatre, 2025), which positions a blood-tainted river as the site of colonial Gothic horror. In each of these plays, Country has as much to say about ecological distress as it does about past and ongoing political, social and physical violence enacted against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This is not even a matter of conscious design, but rather a consequence of the simple fact that, for us, the two cannot be examined in isolation. We can no more be unbound from Country than we can exist without stories.   

* ‘Country’ refers to the lands, waterways and skies an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander person is connected to through kinship, ancestry and culture.  

Snežana Pešić

Designing The Trials: Sustainable Design Practices in an Educational Setting

My presentation is a visual case study of the design process for the University of Toronto’s production of The Trials by Dawn King, which successfully implemented sustainable design practices into an academic drama program with limited financial and human resources. In this production, I acted as set and costume designer, as well as design professor, thus my presentation will also examine the teaching methods applied to support this low-carbon-emission production.   

As an Assistant Professor of performance design at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS), I am exploring sustainable practices and making efforts to increase ecological concessions among Canadian students and younger theatre artists.   

Produced in the academic year 2023-24, The Trials is a dystopian story about ecological responsibility and eco-justice. The play called for an ecologically viable approach and allowed me to innovate sustainable methods in designing and teaching my third-year design course (DRM354: Design II). Students taking this course are directly involved in the design aspects of the production as assistants and researchers.   

Referencing publications on ecologically sustainable practices, such as The Theatre Green Book, conceived by a collective of British theatre practitioners, and Tanja Beer’s Ecoscenography: An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance, I created a clear structure, objectives, an action plan, and a methodology for both the process and the course.   

Our design team followed the essential principles of creating more with less, recycling and reusing, shopping with awareness, reducing travel and transportation, and eschewing harmful chemicals.    

The process involved:  

• Setting sustainability as the production objective   
• Developing a sustainable design concept   
• Collaborative team planning  
• Flexibility in design  
• Sourcing extant materials, scenery, and costumes to borrow or rent  
• Second-hand shopping and limited use of virgin materials  
• Securing the afterlife of all elements  
• Measuring outcomes  
• Sharing gained knowledge within our department  

Based on The Theatre Green Book’s guidelines. 

Biography

Snežana Pešić is an award-winning scenographer and educator. 

Her work has been seen across Canada and internationally. In Canada, she collaborated with theatre companies nationwide. Internationally, her designs were toured and performed in the US, Norway, and Serbia and presented at numerous international exhibitions. She exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial (2007, 2015) and World Stage Design (2009, Seoul; 2013, Cardiff). Pesic designed and curated the Canadian Professional Exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2019. 

Marika Hedemyr

Ashes to Ashes: Sensing our co-existence with planet earth in a mixed reality walk at a cemetery

This talk will cover how ecological thinking informs my creative processes and embodied composition techniques for performances that use Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies, a growing genre of works that use mobile phones to experience interactive digital media. The talk will culminate with a description of how to implement ecological themes into storytelling practices, sharing composition practices I have developed and articulated in my recently finished PhD. 

Mixed reality (MR) is an umbrella term for experiences/technologies that combine physical reality with a layer of digital information and media. It mixes sensory and conceptual elements externally in the world, as well as in the minds and imagination of the users. These technologies, also known as Extended Reality (XR) and Immersive Media, present not only technical but also staging and world-making possibilities and challenges.  

I will share the creation process of the MR performance Av jord är du kommen (Ashes to Ashes): The work is a personal experience and meditation on how we are all part of common cycles, a reflection on the legacy we leave behind when we once in the future are part of the Earth as soil again. It is a choreographic mixed reality work for cemeteries that creates reflection and sensory experiences of how we and our mobile devices are interconnected in the Earth’s material cycle. The format is site-specific public art that utilizes immersive media and mobile-based augmented reality (AR/MR/XR) technology as a performance format.  

The conceptual starting point is that the smallest ingredient that makes up our mobile digital devices – minerals and matter coming from the earth, are also the building blocks of our human body. From this perspective, the human body and the mobile phone are one. One of the few public places where the tangible relationship between bodies, earth and time is both seen and felt are cemeteries. They are a borderland between the dead and the living, between grief and hope, between stillness and activity. Another aspect is the dark side of mobile phones, whose manufacture involves the mining of rare metals. Instead of leaving the phone, I choose to ‘stay with the trouble’ (to paraphrase Haraway) and use the phone to artistically address these issues with both seriousness and humour. A recurring theme in my practice is the relationship between the physical body and the body of society. In this work, the body of the earth is also included. 

Biography

Marika Hedemyr, choreographer/artist who creates public art, choreography, and mixed reality (MR) experiences. She explores coexistence through the emotional and political relations between people and places. Develops a MR-series exploring our coexistence with planet earth through the elements earth, water, fire, and air. Recent works: Med Vind i håret (2024), Next To You at Korsvägen (2017) at Gothenburg Dance & Theatre Festival. Publications include chapter in Art and The City (2017, Routledge), and PhD Thesis Mixed Reality in Public Space (2023, Malmö University Press). 

Dezsi Fruzina and Màrton Gàbor Csaba

Hug the Future

Rooted in the cultural and creative sector’s inherent ability to communicate meanings, pose questions, translate knowledge, and craft narratives, it emerges as a realm uniquely equipped to shape the societal discourse on sustainable development. Performing arts professionals, adept in the art of storytelling and capable of delving into the depths of people’s thoughts, play a pivotal role in constructing ‘social imaginaries.’ These imaginaries serve as powerful vehicles for collectively envisioning a net-zero, regenerative future, bridging the gap between policy conceptualization and its implementation. But the burning question still remains: How can scientific results be conveyed through art in a locally meaningful and emotionally relatable way? How can we create a long-term impact that will fundamentally reshape the way that individuals and communities operate by fostering a new, self-motivated mindset? How can an art projects be used as a tool for fundamental social change?  
 
Our performative lecture based on the recognition that people care most deeply about – and take care of – the things they have a personal connection to. However, the 21st century’s excessive urbanisation provides little chance to connect with nature, and the apocalyptic future scenarios presented by the environmental sector can also lead to emotional detachment, fear, anxiety, and self-blame – that is why many people struggle to commit to sustainable living and make sacrifices for something they rarely enjoyed the benefits of. Therefore, in our pursuit of exploring the different human experiences, we have decided to use the tools of performing arts to experiment with both dystopian and utopian narratives, trying to reconnect the participants with nature. By delving into these two contrasting direction, we aim to investigate their different emotional effects on us as individuals and as a society.  
 
After this short interactive theatre experiment we would like to highlight our artistic organization, the Pro Progressione’s most effective eco-friendly and sustainable performing arts practices, presenting relevant socially and environmentally sensitive projects like The Big Green, PleaseAsk, Deconfining, EU Digital Deal and Aqua Motion. 

Biography

Dezsi Fruzina earned a Bachelor’s degree in literature, followed by two Master’s degrees in theatre studies and cultural anthropology. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at Eötvös Loránd University with a focus on the political aspects of community theatre. With six years’ experience as a playwright and a production manager in Hungary’s independent performing arts scene, now she is leading The Big Green, a large-scale Creative Europe project that brings together the efforts of the CCS in the context of sustainability under one umbrella. 

Gábor Márton Csaba is the head of Pro Progressione Arts pillar. With 15 years of experience as a creator in the performing arts and 10 years as a cultural manager, he has worked in a variety of genres such as youth theatre, contemporary dance, drama, Theatre in Education (TiE), and community circus. Gábor has also worked with disabled and neurodivergent children and adults, demonstrating his diverse skill set and inclusive approach. 

Catarina Fontoura and Thomas O’Shea Wheller

Mapping Emergence: Fieldwork, Art, and Interspecies Co-creation

In this multi-modal presentation including reflexive dialogue, review of practice and informed ecocritical thinking, we aim to make visible network of interspecies collaboration and co-creation in our Art-Science project ‘Mapping Emergence’.  

Mapping Emergence won the Creative Exchange Award, at Falmouth and Exeter Universities in the UK. Within it, a duo of artist-scientist evaluated ‘creative exchange’ from a post-anthropocentric and posthuman perspective, challenging the boundaries of human and more-than-human collaboration. 

Our work joins and progresses existing research, inviting speculative fabulation, as conceptualised by Donna Haraway, as a tool to defamiliarize, “queer” perception, and disrupt habitual ways of knowing. 

In our CARPA contribution, we aim to make visible our approach to practice-based research, weaving together epistemologies and methodologies of multiple disciplines, transcending their frontiers and generating novel insights. We conceptualise art-science fieldwork as a form of ecological performance and think about the action and relationships which emerge from it.  

We have designed artful experiments that draw on scientific understanding of social insects to ethically interact with them, uncovering their societal patterns. 

To this end, in the field we engage reciprocity as core methodology. We offer biologically appropriate forms of sugar as exchange for artful insect interactions, co-creating artworks in the process. 

In our presentation we will show our collaborative artworks, photography, film, drawing and installation and critically position our work, reflecting on our methodologies in the face of unravelling ecological crisis.  

Through public engagement and education we invite audiences to engage and perform our fieldwork experiments, co-creating art with ants in the process; or to interact with installed works in ways meant to increase ecosystemic awareness and deconstruct preconceptions about soil architects and pollinators, at part of entangled interdependent life systems.  

To Giovani Aloi, insects are “inhabitants of a remoteness that makes the space between us vast and difficult to bridge.” Yet, biologist E. O. Wilson observed that ‘work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans’. 

Our project seeks to address this paradox —of vast space contrasted with striking societal similarities — and help human audiences connect and learn from insect intelligence, in the face of shared ecological challenges. 

Biography

Catarina Fontoura is an artist, writer and educator She was awarded a PhD in Environmental Humanities from Birkbeck, University of London, specialising in visual environmental histories at the intersection of Science and Art.   

Catarina’s artistic practice explores the relation between art, science, spirituality, story-telling and ecology. She is particularly interested in reconfiguring the land into entangled systems and stories, embedding human beings into more-than-human narratives and entities. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, USA, Mexico, UK and Portugal. 

Dr. Thomas O’Shea Wheller, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter. I am interested in the complex interactions that govern collective behaviour, ecology, and self-organisation within social insects. My research centres upon the intersection between fundamental investigations of colony functioning, and applied work in ecology and epidemiology. I utilise ants, honey bees, bumble bees, and termites as models to assess network dynamics, with a focus on the role of interindividual heterogeneity. 

Currently, I am involved in projects pertaining to honey bee epidemiology and genetics, the dynamics of parasite-pathogen interactions within insect colonies, the effect of mosquito control compounds upon bumble bees, and the detection and behavioural classification of invasive hornets using artificial intelligence.  

The central aim of my research is to leverage an understanding of the rules underpinning complex systems; both to solve real-world challenges, and enhance mechanistic knowledge at a variety of scales. I value social insect models, as they provide tractable and fascinating tools with which to investigate applied and fundamental questions in biology. 

Julie Fournier

Mentoring Change: Ecosceno’s Practical Tools for Sustainable Transition in the Cultural Sector

Ecosceno, a pioneering organization with five years of experience, is a global leader in ecodesign for the cultural sector. Over these years, we’ve crafted an innovative approach that integrates ecodesign strategies across the entire creative process, collaborating with costume, set, and props designers, directors, and builders. We’ve developed practical tools that enable professionals to embrace ecological practices within the production workflow. 

With over five years of training professionals and students, consulting on productions, and developing practical tools, we’ve refined our expertise in mentorship and change management, enabling smoother transitions and fostering adaptability within teams. This knowledge is valuable and should be widely shared to accelerate the socio-ecological transition across cultural sectors. I believe this workshop offers a great opportunity to do just that. 

In this workshop, I’ll provide an overview of our ecodesign strategies, showing how we’ve made them accessible to foster a shared vocabulary within Canada’s cultural landscape. While my expertise is focused on costume design, I’ll discuss set and props design as well. I’ll also introduce the practical tools we’ve developed to assist production teams and discuss how this knowledge has been integrated into the teams we work with. 

Next, I’ll explore the rewards and challenges of collaborating with industry professionals, drawing on personal experiences. How do we support teams through this transition? How do we involve every member of the creative and production team in the process? How do we foster collaboration and inspire engagement in the ecodesign process? These are some of the questions we’ll explore during this interactive workshop. 

Through a mix of presentations and hands-on activities, participants will explore Ecosceno’s ecodesign approach and practical tools, including our ecodesign spreadsheet for calculating production impacts, our socio-ecological budgeting tool, and our eco-production checklist. These resources will equip participants to initiate meaningful change in their projects and organizations. The workshop is designed as an ongoing, collaborative reflection, alternating between brief presentations and interactive segments to foster open dialogue. We’ll engage in shared reflections, allowing participants to actively contribute, ask questions, and explore ideas together. 

Biography

Julie Fournier graduated from Concordia in 2020, specializing in sustainable costume design. Since 2021, she’s worked at Écoscéno as an eco-design consultant and trainer, developing resources and tools for the cultural sector. She worked with many costume designers and recently, expanded to set design. In 2022, she began a master’s in Business Administration and Corporate Responsibility at UQAM, focusing her thesis on change management within the socio-ecological transition. She also co-founded Entremaille, a cooperative offering sustainable fashion workshops. 

Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, Alejandro Olarte, and Pascale Weber

Taking electroacoustic musical performance out of the concert hall and into the open air: How solar panel instruments allow the emergence of a performance milieu grasped in its human and non-human complexity

Our trio of multidisciplinary artist-researchers presents an outdoor electroacoustic performance, artist talk and open discussion (each part approx. 30 min). The socio-ecological transition required to address the climate crisis has set part of the sound art and electroacoustic music community to question its societal role and the viability of its artistic practices. Within a collaboration for my doctoral project, my colleague Dr. Alejandro Olarte and I drew up an artistic approach grounded in an essential restriction: to perform and create electroacoustic music without requiring to grid-supplied electricity. This self-imposed constraint challenges prevailing norms in our field, which are often predicated on energy-intensive technologies for sound amplification in particular, implying power relations structured on loudness. 

How can electroacoustic musicians act meaningfully while substantially lowering their ecological footprint? How might such a gesture foster a critical awareness of the environmental costs embedded in our tools—including energy consumption, mineral extraction, and the reliance on rare-earth elements? How to rethink the presentation of electroacoustic music beyond the traditional, technologically saturated setting of the concert hall? And what might instrument design, performance design, and the act of performance itself reveal or transform in our relationship with the environment? 

The project involves the design and construction of alternative-energy electroacoustic instruments—such as the solar trumpet, piezo drum hat, or the solar harp—as well as the development of performance techniques and embodied gestural vocabularies for group improvisation in outdoor settings. Placing ecological awareness at the core of the performative act, our artistic dispositive aim to foster an immediate and situated engagement within the milieu of the performance and to allow scrutinising from an experiencial perspective the emerging relationality with both human and non-human agencies. 

The project adopts technological sobriety and de-escalation (Olarte) as intertwined artistic strategies and ecological stances. A micro-phenomenological inspired approach (Petitmengin, Kim) allows scrutinising the performer’s lived experience to describe the emergence of a performance milieu, where the concept of aesthetic empathy is extended toward an empathy with the non-human being (Decoster-Taivalkoski). Collaboration with Prof. Pascale Weber (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) further enriches this perspective through her research on Eros—a sensuous and affective attunement to natural elements. 

Biography

Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski, lecturer and doctoral researcher. Electronic musician, interactive media and sound artist born in France, based in Helsinki since 1993, my artistic research activities deal with movement-sound relationships through creation of interactive sound installations, performances involving spatial audio techniques, and field recordings in motion. Within this practice my doctoral research investigates migration and identity building in flux, relationality and positioning in sonic worlds with a phenomenological attention to the lived experience of listening and performing outdoors. 

Dr. Alejandro Olarte, lecturer and head of department, Uniarts Helsinki, Sibelius Academy, Centre for Music and Technology (MuTe). Alejandro Olarte is an electroacoustic musician, researcher, and educator, serving as the Head of the Department of Music Technology at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. He holds a doctorate in live electronics and pedagogy, with degrees from the National Conservatory of Paris and a Master’s in Computer Music from the University of Paris. His work explores sound and its artistic applications through technology, examining its opportunities and challenges in everyday life. Dedicated to education, Olarte advocates for knowledge exchange as a driver of societal progress, supports artistic research through sound and musical practice, and has a strong interest in modern instrument design. 

Professor Pascale Weber, Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, École des Arts de la Sorbonne (EAS)- Centre St Charles. PhD (2001), trained first in environmental design in Paris (École Supérieure de Design Industriel), then studied Art and Art Sciences at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Centre St-Charles), where she is professor responsible for the programme in Performance at ACTE research institute. Her general research theme is soma-aesthetics and geo- poetics: contemporary rituals. In addition to performance art, she practices Butoh dance, daydreaming and other guided journeys, vocal techniques derived from joik, throat singing or diphonic singing and, among somatic disciplines, the Feldenkrais method. She is the other member of the duo Hantu. 

Lee Miller and Joanne “Bob” Whalley

Dreaming Machines: Ecological Thinking and Ephemerality in Performance Pedagogy

This paper examines how performance-making in a climate-changed world can draw on ecological and philosophical insights from technologies like LiDAR-equipped autonomous vacuum cleaners. These devices, which generate “point-clouds” to visualise environments, offer a lens for understanding ephemerality and interconnectedness, vital qualities for sustainable performance pedagogy. By invoking feminist, posthumanist, and decolonial theorists—Barad, Bennett, Haraway, Escobar, and Sharpe—we consider the potential of mundane technologies to reshape perspectives on agency, collectivity, and resistance in the Anthropocene. 

Christina Sharpe’s concept of “losing your kin” informs this investigation by highlighting how inherited structures of belonging, shaped by colonial histories, might also constrain imaginative reorientations towards ecological and technological futures. Sharpe’s critique of kinship as a stabilising force challenges us to reconsider relationships with non-human entities and ephemeral acts of performance-making as sites for radical reimagination. These reflections frame technologies like LiDAR as not only agents of ecological surveillance but also participants in speculative, pluriversal practices that destabilise anthropocentric modes of being. 

We draw parallels between choreopolitical resistance (Lepecki) and the agency of non-human entities, framing performance as a site where speculative futures and plural ontologies are enacted. The abstract and incomplete renderings generated by machines mirror the transient gestures of performance-making, suggesting pedagogical opportunities to explore interconnectivity and ephemerality. These perspectives align with ecological imperatives, encouraging educators and practitioners to reimagine performance processes as acts of collective and speculative resistance. 

This paper outlines pathways for integrating ecological thinking into performing arts pedagogy, emphasising speculative, relational, and embodied practices. By connecting ephemeral acts of performance with broader ecological frameworks and Sharpe’s call to “lose your kin,” we explore how performance-making can respond creatively to the global climate crisis. 

Biography

Lee is Head of Postgraduate Research at Falmouth University, specialising in practice as research and the role of collaboration in knowledge generation. In 2004, he co-authored the first UK practice as research PhD in an arts discipline, which established his career-long focus on experimentation in teaching and learning. His research explores the affective gap between performer and audience, with recent work examining extended reality contexts. Lee has published widely on practice as research, audience interaction, and the theory-practice relationship in performance. 

Dr Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley is Director of Doctoral Training and Development at University of the Arts London, specialising in intersectional narratives, empathy, and affective exchange. She co-authored Between Us: Audiences, Affect and the In-Between (Palgrave, 2016) with Lee Miller, exploring spaces of affective connection. In 2004, Whalley and Miller completed the first joint UK practice as research PhD in an arts discipline. Her work spans performance, installation, and text, with research focused on grief narratives, with-ness, and witness. 

 
Jeanette Mueller and Paul Divjak

NATURE AFTER NATURE – A Multisensory Medley For Systems Awareness
 

Our arts-based research project SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS – Exploring the Potentials of Multisensory Scenography for Systems Awareness is based at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF / PEEK). In the course of the project, we have spent the last one and a half years creating multisensory, performative poetic narratives for diverse audiences and groups on different continents in order to promote awareness of complex systems and ecological interrelationship. By developing performative poetic narratives, we aim to convey systemic thinking through immersive experiences that integrate olfactory and acoustic elements as well as tactile sensations for SENSING LIVING SYSTEMS scenographies. 

On the occasion of the CARPA9 conference, we propose to present excerpts from these performances and scenographic studies – to present them as a kind of “medley” in the form of a multisensory lecture-performance that serves as both a research lecture and a sensory experience. Our aim is to stimulate dialogue and invite conference participants to discuss and reflect together on the possibilities of multisensory scenography to promote ecological awareness and systemic thinking. 

Our series of “Nature After Nature” performances and installations / scenographic studies includes “TOUCHING REALITIES – Sensing the Invisible” (Performance and Exhibition at Songkhla Art Center and Austrian Embassy Bangkok), “LITTLE SCHOOL OF R/EVOLUTION” (Exhibition and Performance Lecture at the University of Architecture and Art, Hanoi), “DRAWING TREES WITH SCENT. Preparations for the Future: Forest bathing without trees” (A performative funeral procession for collective olfactory memories) and “SOIL PERFORMANCE” (both at AIL Vienna). In these works we combined ecological narratives with a multisensory scenography approach to encourage thinking in relationships, cycles / loops and networks.  

These artistic explorations encourage participants to shift their perception from isolated entities to interconnected structures in order to foster environmental and systemic awareness that is crucial in light of today’s ecological challenges. 

Biography

MUELLER-DIVJAK, comprising Jeanette Müller and Paul Divjak, are artists and researchers specialising in multimedia / multisensory installations and scenographies and environmental interventions. They lead “Sensing Living Systems,” an arts-based research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund, exploring multisensory scenography for systems awareness at University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Their work integrates site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, and soundscapes, reflecting on nature and living systems through sustainable approaches. 

Dr. Jeanette Mueller studied Political Science, Jewish Studies and Arabic Studies (University of Vienna) and at the University of Applied Arts (Design Theory), as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (New Media) and wrote her thesis about “Trust and Creativity”. Recipient of Theodor Körner Prize for Science and Art. Numerous installations, performances and artistic science communication projects across Asia and Europe. Her practice demonstrates long-term engagement with environmental themes and public interaction.  

Dr. Paul Divjak, MAS studied at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK, Department Design & Technology: “Advanced Studies in Scenography”) and is holding a PhD from the University of Vienna (Theatre, Film and Media Studies). His dissertation on “Integrative Staging: Scenographies of Participative Spaces” was granted a FWF-publication support. Divjak ́s transdisciplinary work, which includes writing, electronic music, olfactory art, is exploring culture and the phenomenology of the senses. Recipient of Theodor Körner Prize for Science and Art.