On Thursday afternoon the conference offers a range of workshops, excursions, and other activities that participants can sign up for. Each activity is capped at 30 participants, allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Please scroll down to read the descriptions of the different options. All are free or charge. Click here to register.

1. The Weather Has Been Cancelled

Jasmijn Visser (studio.jasmijnvisser@gmail.com)

In ‘The Weather Has Been Cancelled’ (TWHBC) Jasmijn Visser offers an immersive performance lecture based on the interactive-fiction videogame developed at the Rachel Carson Center. In TWHBC, the player wakes up and discovers that the weather has been ‘cancelled’. Then, the quest is revealed: “The world needs you! Discover who cancelled the weather and get it back! If you fail to restore the weather by midnight, all life on Earth will begin to perish. Good luck.”

The weather’s disappearance leaves a stunned world. Global speculation arises on who took the weather and what the possible relationship with climate change could be. Notably, now that the weather has disappeared, climate change has been ‘solved’… In a heated debate, the hard and soft sciences battle over what the weather is, different cultures question the disappearance of the weather as a mystical, supernatural event, philosophers debate the concept of nature in its Platonic form, while various countries blame geo-engineering and colonialism. Meanwhile, people mourn the weather: through cultural expressions such as songs, poems and films.

During the performance sounds, texts and excerpts from TWHBC will be used to create and immersive, atmospheric experience. This will be followed by a critical link to the concept of cultural modelling, and an exploration of how artistic techniques complement humanities research.

Duration: 40 minutes

2. Walking and Wondering with Japanese Knotweed

Sidsel Overgaard (s.overgaard@cas.au.dk), Charlotte Grum (chagru@ruc.dk), and Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri (vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com)

This participatory walk will include stories and memories from our own experiences of becoming-with knotweed, connecting inner and outer landscapes, as well as reflections on what knotweed has taught us, collectively and individually, about land, relations, conflict, grieving and healing. Based on site-sensitive on-site inquiries into the urban nature of Utrecht, we include three tableaus on the walk inviting the participants to engage with our respective practices.

What our wonderings and wanderings share is a sense of an emerging negotiation that, for once, does not originate with the human, but grows from knotweed’s insistence on being seen, felt and understood; from her challenge to accepted ideas of belonging, vitality and legitimacy. 

This participatory walk invites participants to join our inquiries and collaborative insights into a variety of site-specific onto-sympathic practices navigating with(in) unruly vegetal and human entanglements (Bennett, 2020).

Duration: approx. 2 hours

3. Peatland Extraction and Restoration in Giethoorn

Het Potgrond Collectief (Ronja Kops and Nina Litsios)(hetpotgrondcollectief@gmail.com)

Het Potgrond Collectief offers a performance on peatland extraction and restoration in Giethoorn. Upon entering the room, you will become a visitor of Giethoorn, the Venice of the North. Giethoorn was created through centuries of peat extraction. As you move through space, you will move through the water of the oh-so-idyllic canals, once built to transport heaps of peat over the Southern Seas to the large cities in the West of the Netherlands. Over time, the water that carries you is swept away from your feet and you are in turn absorbed by the soil: historical peatlands have looped through time and reappropriated space! With the rewetting of the peatland comes a vast array of more-than-human creatures – sphagnum moss, pirate spiders, cranes, mole crickets – you will be surprised to find themselves transformed à la Kafka. Who are the righteous inhabitants of Giethoorn’s waters? How can we find ourselves in symbiosis with the soil and critters around us? You are invited to learn about their peat alter ego, reconnecting with their transformed selves.

Short description:

In this performance, Het Potgrond Collectief invites you to Giethoorn, where you will explore peatland extraction and restoration through immersive and interactive exploration of the vast array of more-than-human creatures – sphagnum moss, pirate spiders, cranes, mole crickets – that populate Giethoorn. (This performance will be held in Utrecht).

Duration: 15 minutes

4. Sensing into Plant Times: Leaning into Resistance?

Linda Lapiņa (llapina@ruc.dk)

In this sensory walk, Linda Lapiņa (associate professor at Roskilde University, Denmark) invites you to connect with urban nature-cultures and with each other, with a special focus on sensing plant life cycles, seasonality and plant temporalities. While the walk foregrounds embodied experience, our movement and interactions with plant life will also give opportunities to reconsider conceptual questions about nonhuman and interspecies resistance, such as:

• How can slowness, gentleness and reciprocity offer modes of resistance?
• Who defines and recognises “resistance”? How can we sense into modes of resistance beyond human-centered frameworks and affects like anger and retribution?
• How do our senses and bodies offer ways practicing interspecies solidarity with plants?

The walk will have four stages: arrival and awakening the senses; quiet walking; an encounter with a plant being and attuning to plant time(s); and sharing through voicing and movement. The route will be adapted to the weather. Besides leaning into the company and timeliness of plants, the walk will also invite you to attune to your own bodies and share a sensuous space with others, practicing embodied togetherness – in itself a way of resisting regimes of extraction overproduction, individualism and species loneliness.

Duration: approx. 2 hours

5. Warn Data Lab Exploring Resistances

Heide Maria Baden (heidenjoy@gmail.com) and Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri (vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com)

Long description:

Join our Warm Data Lab, in which we will be tending together to the art of multispecies care across multiple contexts (economy, education, art, technology, science, media, ecology, family, and others).  It is a space for simple, meaningful conversations that flow.  These experiences have been described as a “kaleidoscope of conversations”, containing enriching stories, laughter, and insight. They nourish the soul, transform the way we approach each other, plant worlds, work, life, and our communities, and ultimately, create space for new relationships to flourish. They can even plant new seeds for community projects to renew and revitalise community life. 

Our conversations will include participants across diverse multispecies (re)search fields to discuss what is present for us as we explore our various questions we are carrying. 

Warm Data is contextual and relational living  information about complex systems. It doesn’t isolate variables or seek answers in one domain, but holds the complexity of many contexts simultaneously. Warm Data Lab (WDL) invites us to share stories and memories from our lives helping us notice inter-dependencies and generate understandings of systemic patterns, even for those with no previous exposure to systems theory. WDL help us widen our vision of the many relationships that coexist in any living context, increasing our capacity to respond with care, new awareness and relational insight.

The space will be held by hosts trained in Warm Data Lab processes, developed by Nora Bateson and stewarded by the International Bateson Institute. This two-hour session is participatory, offering possibilities to converse in big groups and small groups. In each group you will converse with a new set of people guided by different context. Whatever is alive in you in the moment, this space invites you to share that which wants to emerge.

Duration: 2 hours

6. Writing(with)Plants: Nonhuman Resistance as Practice

Heide Maria Baden (heidenjoy@gmail.com), Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri (vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com), and Wendy Wuyts (wendywwuyts@gmail.com)

You are invited to a creative workshop, Writing(with)Plants, which combines performance, storytelling, collective reflection, and experimental writing to explore vegetal modes of nonhuman resistance. The workshop invites you to rethink entrenched human–nature binaries not through imaginaries of retribution, but by cultivating practices of interspecies solidarity, attention, and care.

The workshop will be situated outdoors in Utrecht, engaging directly with the local environment and a “guest plant” that serves as focal point and interlocutor. Drawing on ecocriticism, critical plant studies, and posthumanist theories of multispecies justice and care ethics (cfr Marder, Puig de la Bellacasa, Haraway, Mol, Bateson), the session foregrounds the agency of plants as more than symbolic figures. Instead, plants are encountered as co-participants who embody subtle yet profound forms of resistance: persistence, adaptation, rootedness, toxicity, and slowness.

The workshop will include forest-bathing-attunement, a storytelling circle, and creative writing prompts inspiring writing not about but with plants. By situating writing as a multispecies practice, the workshop fosters forms of conviviality and resistance that move beyond the logics of domination or revenge. It contributes to ongoing conversations in the environmental humanities by asking how we might write—and resist—otherwise, in collaboration with the vegetal world.

Duration: 1.5 hours

7. Chimera, Cadavre, Creation!!! An Exquisite Corpse Folding Workshop

Tine Jensen (tinex@ruc.dk) and Charlotte Grum (chagru@ruc.dk)

In this participatory workshop, Tine Jensen (associate professor at Roskilde University, Denmark) and Charlotte Grum (artist, theoretical psychologist and associate professor at Roskilde University) invite you to a participatory workshop.

We offer a configuration method dissolving entrenched dualisms and ideas of the sovereign human, exploring parasitic and monstrous becomings of living bodies – perhaps transgressing the notion of ‘resistance’? How can we grasp that life force is monstrous? Through the surrealist game of exquisite corpse (in French: Cadavre exquis) we want to apply the cadaver figure to explore absurd tensions all living beings share.

As theoretical psychologists with inspiration from feminist new materialism, we want to invite the participants to explore with us the tension between co-habitation and destructive zoe. Thus, we explore life as a dance macabre.

Together with you, we will engage in the game as a folding apparatus, producing new knowledges on frictious becomings. We explore the cadavre as a leitmotiv that already enacts variations in the monstrosity of multispecies relations. Playing Exquisite Corpse, you take turns writing or drawing on a piece of paper, fold it to hide your contribution and then pass it on. The game’s folding technique serves as a generator of thought, creating creative constraints, producing heterogeneous and parasitic knowledge; a lively worlding practice, generating new images to live by and die for.

Duration: approx. 2 hours

8. Amelisweerd: Toward Multispecies Justice

Elmo Vermijs (elmo@elmovermijs.com) and Marieke Nooren (mariekenooren@gmail.com)

Join artist Elmo Vermijs and dramaturge Marieke Nooren for an excursion to Amelisweerd, a historic wooded estate on the outskirts of Utrecht and one of the most contested ecological sites in the Netherlands. Amelisweerd has been at the centre of environmental activism for over fifty years: its old trees and biodiverse landscapes have repeatedly been threatened by plans to widen the A27 highway, sparking long-standing campaigns of civic protest, civil disobedience, and tree-sitting.

Participants will travel by bus to Amelisweerd, where they will be invited to walk through the estate, explore its ecological and cultural histories, and learn about the current pressures it faces. The excursion is connected to the ongoing art and research project Amelisweerd: Towards Multispecies Justice, which brings together artists, activists, ecologists, lawyers, and scholars to imagine new ways of recognising and representing the interests of more-than-human beings.

The afternoon will conclude with a hands-on workshop led by Vermijs and Nooren, introducing participants to the project’s artistic and conceptual methods and opening a discussion on what multispecies justice might look like in practice.

Duration: approx. 3 hours (including travel to and from Amelisweerd)

9. The Water Bodies Referendum

Off the Menu Research Group (philine.schiller@uni-a.de)

If a bite can “go down the wrong way,” can a river go down the wrong canal? The Off the Menu research group at the University of Augsburg invites you to a performance-based panel. Our research spotlights the relationship between eating and ecology at large, with a focus on watery worlds, to further what we call the culinary environmental humanities. Drawing from our individual projects, the session “The Water Bodies Referendum” will stage a dialogue between diverse watery citizens around the theme of resistance. Conceiving of “water bodies” on a scale from urchin to ocean, we follow Astrida Neimanis’s lead that “we are bodies of water ” (2017). Letting the likes of coastlines and ice, sea urchins and oysters, polluted harbours and exhausted rivers vote on questions of resistance and (in)justice, we will ask: How do nonhuman bodies resist extraction, contamination, or control? How does pollution and contamination map entanglements between bodies? And which bodies are welcomed back through rewilding and, therefore, count toward a desirable ecosystem?

We invite you to collectively swallow different waters by blending tactile, visual, and gustatory elements. Sharing salty, sweet, fishy, and fermented drinks; unlocking frozen objects with our melting touch, and casting votes with needles, this sensory exchange becomes a temporary commons where resistance is felt as temperature, taste, and texture. Watery thoughts and votes, usually running through our hands, will be turned into a tangible artefact.

The referendum is not about reaching consensus but about creating space for discussion, disagreement, and discomfort, and for multispecies presence and experience. Through bringing water bodies into conversation, we aim to unsettle habitual hierarchies, foregrounding the cycles of harm and care by linking human and more-than-human worlds.

Duration: approx. 2 hours

10. Narrative Games and Multispecies Storytelling

Laura op de Beke (l.h.opdebeke@uu.nl)

Sign up for this session to spend a cozy 2 hours playing multispecies storytelling games, featuring a selection curated (and run) by Laura op de Beke, Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at the UU (and seasoned DM). For a peek at the selection check out this link.  

Duration: approx. 2 hours