An interdisciplinary program that took place in November 2022 and brought together scientists, humanities researchers, activists, and community leaders. 

Conservation biologist and author Neha Sinha addresses animal sentience, arguing that understanding the wilful animal is a means of understanding our own place in the world.

Curator of literature Ranjit Hoskote conceptualised a program of conversations with prominent writers, poets, and essayists for State of Nature: New Natures, 2022.

This travelling exhibition, co-produced by the ZKM, Karlsruhe and Goethe-Institut Mumbai, invites visitors to engage with the critical situation of our planet.

Since 2018, the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai, has focused on the key questions surrounding ecology.

Provoking a paradigm shift in academic research, public policy, and social engagement through collaborations with scientists and artists.

Matthew C. Wilson traverses ancient prehistory to speculative futures, meditating on the chancy throughlines that make up the world as we know it.

Conversations on the question of habitability and the task of keeping the Earth hospitable.

Conversations on a multispecies approach to pandemics, the Anthropocene concept, and the visualization of knowledge.

Six Brazilian researchers from different areas talk about ways of approaching the brutal effects of climate change.

Exploring the accelerating processes and cumulative events of species extinction by examining biotic changes in the sediments of the San Francisco Bay.

Part of State of Nature 2022, the exhibition New Natures: A Terrible Beauty is Born was a proposition to rethink the world as we know it today.

Poet and author Ruth Padel delivers the second keynote lecture of the State of Nature: Dialogues conference.

Imagining the satirical intersection between two disparate worlds—field biology research on army ants and working for a machine learning startup.

Feral Atlas stretches conventional notions of maps and mapping, revealing “feral” ecologies—the non-designed consequences of imperial and industrial infrastructure.

Artist Ellie Irons documents her travels to Natchez, Mississippi, to meet the American kudzu plant on the contested terrain it has colonized.

Closing the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, this meal-at-a-distance brought speakers to the transatlantic kitchen table along with so-called invasive species from the US and Germany.

Reporting live from the Mississippi River, travelers question how transforming the act of sensing might remake social, political and environmental relations?

Artists discuss sturgeons pushed to the edge of extinction and the future of a chemically polluted river near Cape Town.

In addition to its position as a pillar of New Orleans cuisine, the humble oyster has also taken on another, more troubling role—serving as an indicator of water contamination in the Mississippi River Delta and the Lousiana Gulf.

The annual “All Species Puppet Parade” in Carbondale prompts Andrew Yang to contemplate just how all-encompassing the phrase really is.

Seen from above, the banks of the Mississippi appear to be flanked by rich expanses of plant life. Yet this verdant appearance is deceptive as this essay on the “dark green” explores.

Reflecting on a workshop where participants engaged in a sensorial manner with the invasive kudzu plant—creating watercolor paints from its blossoms and leaves.

The introduction of Kudzu into the American South has a storied history connecting rhetoric around migration and race with ecology.

Focusing on the limits—and opportunities—exhaustion engenders, in this seminar the difficulties of being out of energy and out of ideas will be related to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

More than a metaphor describing the technosphere, addiction in fact characterizes it. Artists Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann collage a series of interviews and research vignettes on methamphetamine in the US.

Is there a chemical shortcut for producing social change?

What does it take for the life sciences to reflect on themselves and their conceptual models in the era of the technosphere?

Looking at opium at a historical intersection between Western European culture and Chinese tradition, philosopher Paul Boshears examines how addiction has come to define human relations and intelligence.

How do we find new forms of coexistence in the landscapes of the Anthropocene?

Artist and environmental humanities scholar Elaine Gan tells the story of two different grains of rice. To engineer the ecology and growth cycles of these grains is to change river flows and the multiple rhythms of life and death.

Using the slime mold Physarum polycephalum as a many-headed case in point, artist Jenna Sutela delves into the petri dish that is cognition.

The human body produces five hundred liters of urine and fifty liters of feces per year, which is equivalent to about half a kilogram of phosphorus. One day’s urine from an adult is sufficient to fertilize a square meter of cropped area for each cropping period.

“Today I woke up and I was completely stunned.” A Flora Universalis for the Anthropocene.

If the human capacity to own property bestows political agency, independence, and even personhood upon the owner, what if a tree is given this same capacity?