Anja Wegner is a transdisciplinary researcher and marine science educator. She is currently a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center at LMU Munich and finishing her PhD in the Behavioural Evolution Lab at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, studying damselfish and their social behavior on physical structures. Her project at the nexus of ecology, art, and architecture aims at establishing a practice of co-designing with marine fish in collaboration with artists, architects and designers. Scuba diving, she collects data and makes observations for quantitative behavioral analysis. Combining those findings with the perspectives and approaches from different disciplines, Anja wants to learn more about the fish while creating a non-gestational kinship with the animals she observes. Her approach allows her to reflect on her research and the process itself and to contextualize it within a multispecies framework.

Alex Jordan leads an independent research group based at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, and works in oceans, lakes, and forests where animals live and have evolved. By working with animals in their own environments, he seeks insight into their subjective experiences, challenging our entrenched views on animal consciousness, experience, and perception of the world. Jordan is interested in exploring human limits of understanding other organisms, as well as the rules and criteria by which we judge non-human experience. By examining the social lives, aesthetic preferences, and subjective experiences of aquatic animals, the lab attempts to build a bridge of understanding between the human and non-human experience of our shared world. While maintaining a primary role in the scientific realm, Jordan and his team are also active at the interface of art and science, collaborating widely with artists, architects, and philosophers.

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is Lecturer at the master’s program of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW and runs the Art & Nature seminars. She is a writer and curator. Her research focuses on how art and culture address ecology, in particular the modes in which contemporary art fosters interspecies relationships across humans and other animals. Filipa Ramos is curator of Art Basel Film and a founding curator of Vdrome, a program of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers. She co-curated, with Lucia Pietroiusti, Persons Persones, the 8th Biennale Gherdëina (2022) and Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021). In the past, she was Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal and contributed for Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She authored Lost and Found (Silvana Editoriale, 2009) and edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2016). She is curator of Bestiari, the Catalan Presence at the 2024 Venice Biennale and is co-curating, also with Lucia Pietroiuisti, Songs for the Changing Seasons for the First Climate Biennale in Vienna in 2024.

David is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, and holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Trento. His research focuses on the interplay between hydro-morphological and ecological processes in rivers, with the aim to develop novel methods to support practical river management and restoration. To increase effectiveness and use of the developed approaches, and to better support policy making, his work is conducted in collaborations with local environmental agencies and other stakeholders. In 2019 David co-founded the River Collective, an environmental NGO based in Austria, which by fostering transdisciplinary collaborations between students, scientists, artists and activists, aims to support the conservation and the protection of river ecosystems. Within the River Collective, David has collaborated in various initiatives, such as the “Students for Rivers Camp”, a yearly summer school for university students, the “Actions for Rivers”, an incubator for environmental projects, and “Multispecies Resistance”, an interdisciplinary project to map and illustrate the biodiversity of the European continent.

Louise Firth is a marine ecologist and lecturer in environmental sustainability at University College Cork, Ireland. Her research focuses on understanding the ecology of the marine built environment and she is particularly interested in developing novel ways of making space for nature in human-dominated environments. She has published 85 peer-reviewed papers (48 on marine artificial structures), co-authored a Conservation Evidence Synopsis on biodiversity enhancement on marine artificial structures, written eight advisory reports (including one for IUCN – International Union for Conservation of Nature – on marine artificial structures), and contributed to the UN World Ocean Assessment II (on cities and sea level rise).

 

 

 

 

Aouefa Amoussouvi (she/her) is a French-Beninese multidisciplinary researcher, curator and facilitator based in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Theoretical Molecular Biophysics from Berlin Humboldt University (2019). Her work explores rituals, technologies, intersectional and decolonial feminist narratives in science. She addresses the power structures within Western academia and aims to create alternative practices for collective knowledge production on digital colonialism, ecology, menstruation, food production, or the body-mind relationship, among other topics. She also investigates technologies for healing and maintenance of transgenerational memories and is trained in process-oriented psychology. She is currently co-curator in the research, exhibition, 3-day discourse program and publication project “The Roots of Our Hands Deep as Revolt. Entangled Colonialities of the Green”(2023-2024). A project initiated by Nyabinghi Lab in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Chimurenga and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien.

aqui is a Thangmi woman of the Kiratimma first peoples of the Himalayas. She uses social exchanges and develops safe spaces to position art as a medium of healing in community. aqui's interdisciplinary practice ranges across ceremonial interventions, performances, drawings, zine-making, fly posting, and public intervention, brought together by participant involvement; most of her work is self-funded and realized in collaboration. sister library (@sister.library) founded by aqui is an evolving art work that engages in the in-depth reflection on the visual and reading culture of our times. It is also the first community-owned and community-run feminist traveling library of South Asia. aqui also collaboratively runs Bombay Underground, an artist collective that hosted South Asia's first zine fest, Bombay Zine Fest, and is central to the underground publishing scene, and Dharavi Art Room, a space for children and women in Dharavi to explore creatively.

James Matharu is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Learning Natures Project, led by anthropologist Dr. Francesca Mezzenzana at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU (Munich). The project aims to build a comparative account of children’s experiences of the ‘natural world’ cross-culturally, through collaborations between social-cultural anthropologists, experimental psychologists, and philosophers. This involves fieldwork in the Ecuadorian and Chilean Amazon, the US, Germany and Italy. After studying philosophy and anthropology at the London School of Economics, James completed the BPhil and DPhil in philosophy at Oxford University, focused on fleshing a nondual metaphysics of mind, language, and learning. This metaphysics informs his Project work, developing a nondual psychological anthropology with children’s agency at its center.