SciArt collaboration at JRC
Artist, sound designer and researcher Jol Thoms has been exploring issues around the Right of Nature, Earth Law, Indigeneity and Biodiversity since the start of the NaturArchy project at JRC. Working across science, policy, arts and vernacular knowledge, he traverses different parts of the JRC, from agroecology, to soil research, to nature restoration law, large carnivores, pollinators, and more. Relating this knowledge back to indigenous knowledge, lawyers and anthropologists and presenting his findings and work-in-progress at Goldsmith, at the Kochi Soil Biennale and more. At the European Commission's Directorate-General for Environment he has been exchanging on Nature convservation and Green Capital.
He stands in listening mode and collets stories, data, histories and visions. Working across video, sound, text and performance, his final piece will be a growing polyvocal cartography of knowledge on nature database on nature.
NaturArchy Mapping Framework
We want to explore how Western approaches to mapping as a highly intellectualized, disembodied, abstract and flat way of apprehending Land allows appropriation, colonization and commodification to have contributed to the growing crises, and we ask how cartographic thought and practice might be transformed to become plural, nonlinear, and alive.
How can the law of NaturArchy also become apparent in these new cartographic imaginations and experiences?
Believing that strong protection for global biodiversity requires renewed relationships and imaginaries of European territories, this project challenges assumptions of what spatial representation is or can be, and aims at leading and changing the structure of how we think about European territory and landscape. The proposal recognizes that under the EU Biodiversity Strategy and EU Restoration Law, each member state will have to produce new maps referencing the areas to be restored, including within their Natura 2000 sites.
The work will draw special interest in the involvement of the public within these processes and proposes a NaturArchy Mapping Framework. This will be a counter-cartography, a polyvocal and multidimensional cartographic method that includes both material and immaterial culture, a citizenry of people and place, and is non-linear, multimedial, and breaks with the tradition of positivist law, instead embracing more-than-human legal pluralit
Lex Ecologicae
Jol Thoms will present the result of his research in a performative lecture "Lex Ecologicae" at the New European Bauhaus, Museum of Art & History Brussels, on June 10th.
Event Details
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Wednesday, 10 June 2026, 14:15â15:15 (CEST)
đ Museum of Art & History â New European Bauhaus Festival
Meet the artist
Jol Thoms (b. Toronto) is an artist, sound designer, and researcher based in London, UK. His transdisciplinary fieldwork and critical audio/visual practices interrogate the Wests troubled relationships with Nature, Technology, and Cosmos by signalling beyond the purely measurable and quantifiable, and by thinking, feeling, and sensing with more-than-human worlds.
His compositions, lecture-performances, and educational experimentations emerge from site-based fieldwork in remote âlandscape-laboratoriesâ situated at the forefront and intersection of experimental physics and environmental stewardship, where cosmic and planetary bodies become entangled as vast posthuman sensing arrays.
Meet the Scientists
Lucia Iglesias-Blanco - Policy officer, Nature conservation unit, DG Environment. EU Commission
Bruno Combal - Policy Officer, Nature conservation unit, DG Environment. EU Commission
Michele (Graziano) Ceddia - Senior Research Scientist, Sustainability Governance Impact Area, JRC. EU Commission
CĂ©line Charveriat - Independent Environmentalist and Educator, Public Policy Sector.
Grégoire Dubois - Project Leader, Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity, JRC. EU Commission
Saskia Vermeylen - Socio-Legal Property Scholar and Educator, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Falko Buschke - Africa Knowledge Platform, JRC. EU Commission
Claudia Capitani - Wildlife Ecology and Spatial Analysis
Maeva Labouyrie - soil biodiversity
Maria Luisa Paracchini - Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity