These Relations Are Forever - for NaturArchy catalogue

I am a media artist, originally from New Zealand and based in Berlin. My practice explores the spatial and emotional possibilities of light, sound and image in immersive and performative environments. Currently, I am investigating how immersive experiences and game environments can become tools to tell meaningful stories from other-than-human perspectives and build better relationships with ecologies. Topics that fascinate me are: the entanglement of earth systems with human systems, making the invisible visible, storytelling as a tool for change and amplifying non-human perspectives. The question ‘How can my work challenge and motivate audiences to take action, to become engaged?’ is a new one that motivates me. I get excited about cross-disciplinary collaboration and am pushing my practice towards projects that bring together art, science and technology.

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Instagram: @jemthemisfit

I am Caterina Cacciatori and joined the Water and Marine Resources unit at JRC Ispra in July 2021. In the water quality laboratory, I support the citizens engagement project “The gems of water”, which belongs to the work of the Social Engagement Platform of the World Water Quality Alliance. The project aims at linking an advanced method of water quality monitoring to citizens of local communities around the world. Trained as Environmental Engineer and researcher in water treatment at the University of Tokyo, I went on to study a Master at the University for Peace in Costa Rica, where I focused on the complex relationship bet- ween sustainable development, natural resources and peace. Working on “The gems of water” project, I really found the path I want to walk in the future: I am convinced that interdisciplinarity is essential if we want to solve the issues we are facing today!

Instagram: @aaguacaate

Dr. Sandra Coecke, senior scientist at EC JRC has a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics-based education from the Free University of Brussels followed by PhD degree at the Free University of Brussels, Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy. She has been managing and leading scientific teams since the 90’ies first in pharmaceutical industry and later joining the EC JRC. She has more than 30 years‘ experience in alternative toxicity methods. In 1994 she was already awarded the International Prize from the Foundation for the Substitution of Animal Experimentation and in 2020 was the recipient of the Björn Ekwall Memorial Award (BEMA) for the development and validation of new in vitro cell and tissue-based methods based on good in vitro method practices. She has established and managed the European Union Network of Laboratories for the Validation of Alternative Methods (EU- NETVAL), which includes 35 high quality laboratories across Europe. At the EC JRC she currently acts as a multi-stakeholder horizontal team leader for Farm to Fork (Feed & Food) models and methods for One Health. She published over 100 peer scientific publications and book chapters and lectured around the globe and published recently a major EC JRC study exploring how by using new innovati- ve technologies based on human biology cell and tissue and mathematics-based methods better understand the Covid19 disease.

LinkedIn profile

Twitter: @SandraCoecke

I am a Spanish PhD Ecologist with focus on Farmland Biodiversity. My research career has developed on the interaction of human activity and biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. This relation is central, as the functioning of agro-ecosystems, their capacity to provide, depends very much on their ecological integrity. As crucial to communities, this interaction between food production and nature is very much shaped by policy. Thus, inevitably I have become increasingly involved in supporting policy-making. I have worked most of my time in Academia, teaching ecology and plant biology in university programmes of agricultural science. Yet, my path towards agricultural policy has led me to my current position as a project officer in the D5 unit of the JRC here in Ispra.

Saskia Vermeylen is a reader in law and property scholar at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work on Indigenous Peoples’ cultural property is informed by legal anthropology and she has done multi-site ethnography across 6 different language groups in Southern Africa. Her empirical work has also informed her research interest in property and ethics through a phenomenological reading of the work of Levinas and Derrida which she has brought into conversation with postcolonial literary studies. The latter has also inspired her interest in the extension of ‘colonial’ property frontiers into outer space and the deep seabed. This research is embedded in Afrofuturism, ecocriticism, and science fiction. More recently, her legal practice also includes visual and performative art as a methodological legal enquiry, including curating. Finally, her work also engages with the material aspect of property, which she examines through feminist posthumanism, eco-philosophy, and speculative philosophy.

University of Strathclyde page