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In this section I elaborate on what Artistic Ecosystems could be:

Artistic Ecosystems refer to artworks that sustain life and involve multispecies, sentient beings as active participants. Rather than functioning as abstract metaphors or computational models, these ecosystems are grounded in living, breathing entanglements between human and non-human actors within specific environments.

POTENTIAL PROPERTIES

OF ARTISTIC ECOSYSTEMS

                                                                       INTRODUCTION                                                                                             START →  

ARTISTIC ECOSYSTEMS

A Speculative Proposal to Understand Creative Processes

 

 

In recent decades, contemporary art and performance have undergone what might be described as an inter-species turn (Cull Ó Maoilearca and Fitzgerald-Allsopp 2024), where animals and other non-human beings increasingly appear not simply as symbols or backdrops, but as co-creators within artistic processes. This shift, particularly visible in experimental European theatre since the 2000s (Orozco 2013), aligns with the broader currents of posthuman thought emerging from feminist new materialisms (Haraway 2003, 2008; Barad 2007; Bennett 2009; Braidotti 2019).

Posthumanism dismantles the dominance of the anthropocentric subject and instead foregrounds a distributed, relational conception of subjectivity among human and non-human entities alike. For thinkers such as Braidotti, this signals the formation of a posthuman 'We', bound by an entangled convergence of zoe, bio, and technos. In the arts, this shift is increasingly visible in works that decenter the human, instead reimagining the body and performance itself in intimate entanglement with the more-than-human world. Artistic researchers like Tuija Kokkonen (2024,13) describe this turn not only as a thematic development but as a fundamental reconfiguration of what performance means: when it begins, who participates, and whether it can be said to 'begin' or 'end' at all. In this emerging landscape, performance resists stable categorization, becoming instead an open-ended, multispecies process marked by fragility, uncertainty, and ecological presence.

 FOUR ARTISTIC ECOSYSTEMS

This section contextualise the selected projects, offering an overview of their contexts and key characteristics.

Life (2021) by Olafur Eliasson, Forest of Lines (2008) by Pierre Huyghe, Calling Songs by Johannes Westendorp and Agnes Denes’s Tree Mountain (1996–ongoing).

 

In my personal artistic is situated between performance, composition, theatre, and ecology. I explore artistic projects that embody these posthuman orientations and argue that, due to their resistance to traditional classification, they may be fruitfully approached through the speculative lens of ecosystems. This marks the beginning of my doctorate research trajectory in which I aim to develop a personal ecosystemic, sympoietic approach to posthuman artistic practice. I have reviewed a wide range of artistic projects engaging with non-human agencies. For this essay, I curated a personal selection of immersive projects that exemplify diverse strategies for interacting with one’s environment and cultivating relationships with non-human life.

This exposition is structured in four sections that follow the trajectory of my reflective process on this topic.

 

 

 

FOUR SECTIONS BELOW ↓


 

DIALOGUE BETWEEN ECOLOGIES

This section explores the question of balance within and between the works and the Natural-Cultural contexts where they take place and examining how these works negotiate the dynamics between human and non-human participants.

OUTRO

The essay concludes with a personal reflection on the broader implications of engaging with the non-human through artistic practice in our Planetary present.