Land as Pedagogy

Gabriela Aquije

Gabriela Aquije Zegarra (she/her) is a Peruvian architect and PhD candidate in art and design research at the MAKE/SENSE program in Basel. Through gardens and recipes she explores the nested relationships between Peruvian and Swiss foodscapes (Wiskerke, et al., 2018)

Cooking with the landscapes
Cooking with the landscapes, is a collectively developed method for carefully sourcing and processing food – and its relationships – while rehearsing recipes as local, traditional, ecological knowledges (Lo-TEK, Watson 2019). This method will encompass collective foraging and cooking explorations between the Merian Garten and the Critical Media Lab.

Harshavardhan Bhat

Harshavardhan Bhat is a researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Translational Data Analytics Institute and Co-PI of the Abolitionist Epistemologies Working Group at The Ohio State University.

Pedagogies of Monsoonal Time
For this instantiation of Land as Pedagogy, I will be speaking about the land’s relationship to rain in the high plateaus of Ladakh. Drawing from my work on A Monsoon Air Methodology, I will discuss pedagogies of refusal, settling, extraction and death in the making of borderlands – the switching of the winter snow fall with monsoonal rain; its implication to those that maintain lands and the desire for a different kind of air-water, than those subjected to by anthropogenic climate breakdown. In an otherwise subcontinental landscape where rain is called for in innumerable ways, what does it mean to ask for it to go away? What happens to pedagogies of seasonal time when the snow begins to die?

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer. Chattopadhyay produces works for exhibition, installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, and decoloniality. His works have been widely exhibited, performed, or presented across the globe. Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in media arts history, artistic research, media theory and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of five books, including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), Basel, Switzerland, and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen, Norway.

Landing
Drawing on two recent projects: Landing: Rituals for Situated Sonic Reverence (2023 – 2024) for Terra Libera (Rijksmuseum Twenthe) and Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land (2023 – 2024) for Polyphonic Landscapes (ArtEZ Arnhem, Zone2Source Amsterdam), this presentation underscores the symbiosis and relational entanglements between land, environment, and sound. Landing develops a participatory artistic position led by an extensive auto-ethnographic fieldwork in the presently turbulent regions of East Netherlands, proposing an intersubjective and reciprocal engagement with the land sites. Co-sounding is an artistic research that delves into a sonically empowered unpacking of the term ‘landscape’. Considering the canonical European landscape paintings as constructs of the Anthropocene and a colonial gaze, the project aims to destabilize their stasis by live sensory interactions.

Laura Cinti

Laura Cinti is an artist at C-LAB and research fellow at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She works within the intersections of art, biodiversity, space science and genetics. More recently, her artworks have focused on drone technology and artificial intelligence. She was the recipient of the Roots and Seeds Production Award (2021-2022) to develop an artwork addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. This work, Living Dead: On the Trail of a Female (2022) received a S+T+ARTS Prize 2023 Nomination and won the MUSE Digital Art Award 2023. Recently, she won the NOVA_XX Award as part of the COAL Prize 2023 to develop AI in the Sky (2024) for the Biennale Nova_XX 2024 at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles | Paris.

Synthesis between art, technology and conservation
In this workshop, I will be discussing my current research project, a synthesis between art, technology and conservation. My current work focuses on the search for a female partner for a rare male cycad species, the Encephalartos woodii, on the verge of extinction. I will speak about how we use drones, sensors and artificial intelligence to survey sections of the forest where the single male specimen was discovered. As no sexual reproduction is possible without a female, the Encephalartos woodii remains the last of its kind – the paradoxical result of human entanglements.

Stijn Demeulenaere

Stijn Demeulenaere is a sound-artist, field recordist, and searching musician. Stemming from his background as a sociologist and radio journalist, Stijn is fascinated by the question of how we give meaning to sound, and the relationships between identity, sound and listening. His love for listening also sparked a research into the symbiosis between places and their sound. Stijn tries to understand places by listening to them. Stijn was resident at among others, Overtoon (BE) and Imagine2020 (UK/EU). He’s currently associated artist with the Kunstenwerkplaats in Brussels (BE). He was nominated for, among others, the 2016 LOOP Discovery Award
(ES), and the 2016 European Sound Art Award (DE ). His work won prizes at the 2021 Sound of the Year Awards, the 2020 Split Videoart Festival Grand Prix (HR) and the 2019 Engine Room International Sound Art competition (UK). Stijn works and lives in Brussels.

Between biophony and antropophony – An exploration of the underwater soundscape of the North Sea.
For this edition of Land as Pedagogy, I’ll tell the story of my installation Zijlijn / Linea Lateralis. It’s an exploration the underwater soundscape of the North Sea. I’ll recount how my own understanding of the sea changed over the course of this research. How it changed my perception and how through listening it became evident Zijlijn somehow had to tackle the question of marine noise pollution. The North Sea is the busiest sea in the world.
Every inch of it knows some form of human occupation. This makes the North Sea also the loudest sea in the world, with human sounds blanketing the whole sea. Noise from the countless ships, but also from drilling, oil rigs, the construction of wind farms, fishing, fish farms…

Felix Gerloff

Felix Gerloff is a research associate at the Critical Media Lab. He graduated in 2013 as Magister Artium (M.A.) at the Humboldt-University’s Institut für Kulturwissenschaft (Institute for Cultural History & Theory). In his work he strives to understand the ways in which media, epistemic practices, and the formation of culture constitute each other, specializing in sound studies and media ecology. Besides his work within the MITWELTEN research project he is writing a PhD on computational thinking and coding cultures.

Brian House

Brian House is an artist who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. Through sound, subversive technology, and multidisciplinary research, he makes our interdependencies audible in order to imagine new political realities. House is a Creative Capital awardee and has exhibited at MoMA, Los Angeles MOCA, Ars Electronica, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Eyebeam, among other venues. The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Guardian, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work, and his academic writing has been published in Leonardo, Journal of Sonic Studies, and e-flux Architecture. House holds a PhD in Computer Music from Brown University and is Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College.

Listening to the Expanded Local
A discussion of experiments using an infrasound array to listen to the planet and the climate crisis. Infrasound comes from distant geophysical and anthropogenic phenomena and is normally inaudible. By enlarging our perceptual scale to hear it, a potential alternative to dominant epistemologies of remote sensing emerges.

Olivia Höhener

Olivia Höhener studied History, English and Media Studies in Basel and completed a CAS in Research Management. She worked for the Mercator Foundation Switzerland for eleven years, where she was responsible for science communication, dialogue between science and society, participatory research and international exchange. She joined the team of what is now called Citizen Science Zurichin March 2021 and is Managing Director since January 2023. She is committed to science with and for society and wants to contribute to the emergence of new forms and formats of collaboration that benefit both sides.

The inclusion of “unauthorized” expertise in mainstream knowledge production
In her talk, Olivia Höhener will address the power imbalances between expert and non-expert knowledge and how we can challenge those notions of expertise. She will introduce the concept of Citizen Science, using different project examples from different research fields, showing its potential for building and empowering communities.
How can Citizen Science contribute to enabling future-oriented and inclusive learning? What are the benefits of citizen-science related learning practices? And what impact does Citizen Science actually have?
To conclude, she will raise the question of how to transform “mainstream” academia and why initiatives such as Citizen Science Zurich play an important role in that process.

Humanes, spontanes & lokales

Timon Strübin
@humanes_kaffeebar_mobil

Christoph Küffer

Christoph Kueffer is Professor of Urban Ecology at the Landscape Architecture School in Rapperswil (OST – Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences), senior scientist (Privatdozent) at ETH Zurich, an affiliated professor at the Division of Arts and Cultures at Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano, and a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. He studied Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich, and completed his PhD in plant ecology and habilitation in plant and global change ecology at the same university. Christoph’s current research focuses on urban ecology, biodiversity conservation in novel and human-dominated ecosystems, and environmental humanities.

Daniel Küry

Since 1996 Daniel Küry is co-owner and manager of the consultancy Life Science AG in Basel. He works mainly in the field of conservation of urban biodiversity and applied aquatic ecology. Since 1995 he works as a lecturer at the university of Basel and the ZHAW (university of applied sciences Zurich). He is author of several books and publications on urban ecology, aquatic ecology and faunistics and realized several exhibitions.

Merian Gardens Excursion
The excursion is based on the web-based environmental program “regionatur.ch” which is regional environmental «encyclopedia» covering an area of 1,000 square kilometers in Northwestern Switzerland. It is an easy to use tool for the public, for politicians, planners, conservationists and students to learn about the changes that have occurred in nature and the landscape in the Greater Basel Area (GBA) over the past 500 years. The program wants to help the users to raise awareness for the development of the landscape as well as the regional flora and fauna and therefore better understand the natural history of their local area. On the excursion in the Merian Gardens we will try to “read” the landscape and its history by interpreting our perceptions of geomorphology, vegetation, structures of the settlements and other sensations.

Anna Nacher

Anna Nacher is an Associate Professor at Jagiellonian University, a 2020 Fulbright alumna, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her research centers around digital aesthetics and media, with a focus on new media art, electronic literature, and sound art. She also ventures into environmental humanities and postcolonial theory.
In addition to her academic pursuits, Anna Nacher is also a musician and sound artist with a particular emphasis on voice and field recordings, collaborating with Victoria Vesna on Alien Star Dust Online Meditation and Noise Aquarium Meditation. She is an active member of permaculture community, Biotope Lechnica, which she has been building in the Carpathian mountains since 2014. She currently is working on the project bridging her theoretical academic endeavors on postdigital aesthetics, media materialities and mediation as well as her creative and permacultural pursuits, under umbrella name of Breath Library.

Pedagogies of Vulnerable Collectives as Counter-Extractivist Practices
In my presentation, I would like to offer a micro-case study of working with the land (and not against the land) based on transformation of a small family farm in Carpathians into a Not-Only-Human-Habitat, capable of providing hospitable environment for multi-species, rich and resilient collective. Its resilience comes from tapping into the intelligence of land as well as acknowledging all the contingency and interrelatedness of such a constant work-in-progress, increasingly self-organizing assemblage. A tiny farm has its own history of “polytemporal, polyspatial knottings” (Haraway, 2016). I would like to bring in a story of transformation based on a principle of Deep Listening embedded in the very core of permacultural design – namely, its non-orthodox, dialogic, recurring movement between land and theory “generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice”, understood not only as “intellectual pursuit” but as “woven within kinectics, spiritual presence and emotion”, “contextual and relational” (Simpson, 2014). Our work at Biotope Lechnica mirrors the Anne Tsing’s observation that “only appreciation of current precarity as an earthwide condition allows us to notice this – the situation of our world.” This diagnosis leads to radical redefinition of the concept of design beyond purely human endeavor.

Karolina Sobecka

Karolina Sobecka is an artist and researcher interested in imaginaries of post-natural landscapes and histories of ecosystem ecology. Karolina’s artwork has been shown internationally, from the Queens Museum NY, to National Art Museum of China, to ZKM Karlsruhe, and Transmediale Festival Berlin, and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Princess Grace Foundation. Karolina has a PhD from Kunstuniversität Linz, in 2021-23 was a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and is a researcher at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media at HGK Basel.

Jan Torpus

Jan Torpus is a senior researcher at the Critical Media Lab at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW. He studied audio-visual arts, interaction and interior design and develops practice-oriented research projects in interdisciplinary teams. He investigates techno-social responsive environments to draw conclusions about human experience, behaviour and sense-making. He also applies his approach to ecology and biodiversity promotion in urban and recreational areas.

Aude Vuilli

Aude is a PhD Candidate funded by EPSRC at University College London (UCL), affiliated with the Connected Environment Lab in The Bartlett CASA, and the People and Nature Lab in Biosciences CBER. Her research titled “Gardens of Things” combines elements from computer science, ecology and interaction design. Her work involves building and deploying Internet of Things (IoT) systems to monitor and observe ecological communities. She explores how various stakeholders such as ecologists, forest school teachers, and urban planners use outputs from data-driven technologies to inform their practices. Her approach investigates how to design, collect, format and share ecological knowledge to enrich human relationships with and appreciation of the natural environment. Aude holds a BSc in Food Science from ETH Zurich and an MSc in Smart Cities and Urban Analytics from UCL. Before starting her PhD, she worked as an engineer in the vertical farming industry, where she developed her skills, passion, and curiosity to inquire about how technologies can help us connect with nature. She is an active member of the London National Park City (LNPC) movement and the Urban AI community.

Bats, Buzzs & Bytes: Exploring the role of technology for engaging communities with nature.
The growth of our cities has distanced us from the wonders of the natural world. Where trees, mycorrhizal networks, and buzzing insects have been replaced by tower blocks, underground infrastructure tunnels, and traffic noise. Humans have become disconnected from their native, wild, and biodiverse landscapes (Beery et al., 2022). In today’s changing climate, cities and their inhabitants are asked to embrace nature – a resource that is scarce, intriguing and often unfamiliar.
In this presentation, Aude, will discuss how data-driven technology, coupled with community engagement practices, can bridge the gap between nature awareness, acknowledgment and stewardship. Drawing from her PhD research case studies, she will showcase her work on developing IoT systems to gain insights into cryptic and unloved organisms; bats and wasps. Aude will also delve into her project “Electroncis in Nature”, conducted in collaboration with a forest school teacher, with the aim to foster children’s curiosity and learning practices from their local outdoor park.