(Imagining) Multispecies Belongings
Participatory arts and curation project, 2022 - ongoing
“Multispecies Belongings” is an ongoing creative research project exploring how we might dismantle human exceptionalism and reorient ourselves within a rich, unruly, and lively more-than-human world. Initiated in 2022 with funding from the Collective Imagination Practice Community (via the Joseph Rowntree Foundation), the project brings together interdisciplinary voices to co-create tangible, speculative and affective practices for multispecies worlding.
Initiating as a zine funded by the Collective Imagination Practice Community, this consists of an anthology of ‘recipes’ from activists, artists, conservationists, educators, researchers and facilitators working at the edge of the ecological and the imaginative. These recipes take many forms: step-by-step guides, reflections, rituals, drawings, meditations, short stories, and poetry. They function as invitations to sense, attune, disrupt and reimagine how belonging might unfold across species boundaries.
My role included conceptualising and leading the project; curating contributions from a diverse range of practitioners; editing and assembling the zine itself; and facilitating local participatory events and encounters. I hosted walks, one-to-one conversations and small-scale workshops to explore and generate materials through collective reflection, body-based practice and site-specific engagement.
The first edition of the zine was distributed globally to practitioners and schools. Rather than closing around fixed outcomes, the project continues to evolve as a growing, adaptive online archive - offering tools and provocations for those working across art, ecology, education, and care to enact alternative modes of kinship, reciprocity and community-ing beyond the human.
“Multispecies Belongings” does not seek to tidy or resolve our ecological crises - it asks how we might stay with their complications, together, and imagine otherwise where humans are decentred.
