Are you interested in exploring how non-human perspectives and elements such as ice, water, rock, scientific data and equipment, animal lives, historical artefacts, and artistic responses can be included in a collaborative story-making process?
Set out more-than-human story-making as an interdisciplinary field of artistic research, establishing some theoretical, methodological, and ethical sources of inspiration, interrogating issues of practice, aesthetic, and interpretation.
Extractivism is the mass removal of the Earth’s resources for profit, an exploitative approach in which our global economic system unfortunately remains deeply rooted. A key obstacle to challenging this extractive approach is the prevailing ethos which divides the world into two groups, ‘human’ and ‘other’, with the latter encompassing animals, land, minerals, and other nonhuman entities, all primarily treated as resources for the human. These assumptions also pervade much academic research, and nowhere is this more conspicuous than in Antarctica, the only continent without an indigenous human population.
Our research aims to support collaboration between the arts, humanities, and natural sciences in developing climate interventions, via a creative practice-led methodology based on making ‘more-than-human’ stories. Stories provide connection and convey complex ideas in ways that resonate deeply with emotions and values as well as the intellect, and thus, without instrumentalising stories or artistic practice, we believe story-making can enhance how we make and value knowledge about the world. More-than-human story-making emphasises the relationship between human and non-human elements such as ice, water, rock, scientific data and equipment, animal lives, historical artefacts, and technologies.
