Responding to the separations that have dominated the natural sciences over the last centuries, within paradigms inextricably linked to Europe’s imperial expansion, many artists who engage with political ecology are proposing more relational understandings. Their works activate experimental creative vocabularies and reaffirm alternative bodies of knowledge to disrupt constructed human/nature and mind/nature divides. They attend to non-human forms of intelligence—that of rocks, water, plants, other animals—and underline forms of interconnectedness that bind the entire planet. These research-based artistic practices are contributing to broader cultural and political conversations that seek to collectively address a cumulative crisis—that is already ‘ancestral’ in many places, as artist and theorist Elizabeth Povinelli, member of Karrabing Film Collective, points out.¹

Artistic research practices often investigate and articulate different positions and worldviews which have been sidelined in the construction of dominant forms of knowledge. They develop strategies of epistemic disobedience to disturb these dominant perspectives and make visible suppressed histories. The shift toward forms of situated knowledge production and circulation within interdisciplinary relational projects over the last two decades has engendered new institutional models and forms of exhibition making. An example is the durational Cosmopolis platform that I initiated in 2015 at the Centre Pompidou to give visibility to these modes of practice, drawing particularly on experience as one of the curators of three editions of the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT 2006, 2009 and 2012), an event that had been developed relationally, with a network of collaborating curators, researchers and artists that thickened across time.² Cosmopolis generated a series of interlinked investigations where artists and critical thinkers mapped genealogies of present-day social, political and ecological dynamics, while also beginning to imagine alternatives. The interdisciplinary knowledge that artistic research generates helps to create the conditions for dialogue between different systems of thought and between different geographies and histories.

The Cosmopolis platform has operated through an open process that can change course and shift focus in response to emerging questions, centred on listening and exchange. It was conceived as a framework to sustain conversations and relationships across time and geographies—against the grain of art institutions that privilege the new and not-yet-seen—and to support process-oriented and research-based practices in different contexts. Over the last decade, this network of artists, theorists and activists has worked to bring critical thinking into dialogue with artistic experimentation that draws on locally rooted, relationally dense vocabularies, tools and strategies. These practitioners reimagine how art can function: not simply as material production and distribution, but as knowledge-sharing, community-building and civic engagement. The 'open process' of curation is fundamental to the creation of a rich, evolving platform to nurture exchanges and generate new lines of inquiry. If artists are receivers and transmitters of ideas and questions thrown up in a particular place and moment in history, curators may respond to this through mapping high- and low-pressure zones in these artistic preoccupations, making connections and also collaborating as researchers.

Cosmopolis: curating conversations across time and place

Cosmopolis #1: collective intelligence, the platform's first thematic cycle culminating in an exhibition held in 2017 at the Centre Pompidou, aimed to bring situated, collaborative practices into cross-cultural conversations.³ Building on my curatorial discussions across Asia, Africa and the Pacific, particularly as informed by my work within the APT curatorium (the Triennial was established in 1993), it traced a pronounced turn since the 1990s towards collaborative and social forms of artistic practice. In contexts where publicly funded art infrastructure was scarce, artists and others worked together to initiate art spaces, curate exhibitions and programmes, run festivals, workshops and schools—and in the process generated new forms of artistic practice focussing on the development of relationships and the circulation of knowledge.

For the two-month duration, the Cosmopolis #1 exhibition space in the street-level south gallery of the Centre Pompidou was transformed into a school and activated through a regular schedule of talks, reading groups, workshops and concerts. Fifteen collectives and collaborating initiatives, many of them in residence for the period of the show, presented installations and programmed the space together with curators and critical thinkers; many other artists and groups intervened in the events running on a regular schedule each week from Wednesday to Sunday.⁴ Vietnamese collective Art Labor ran a café within the gallery and for the first time at the Centre Pompidou, the show had a season ticket, with audience members paying once and returning as many times as they wished, often following particular strands of the programme: reading groups, keynote talks, concerts (‘Music as Knowledge’ curated by Moorish Elements with Tamar-Kali, Cheick Tidiane Seck, Theaster Gates, Matana Roberts, Alioune Agbo and other high-profile musicians and artists from the African continent and its diasporas). A satellite programme by Cape Town-based platform Chimurenga ran at Kader Attia’s artist-run space, La Colonie, which had opened a year earlier.

In conjunction with a screening of their speculative video works, Karrabing Film Collective members spoke on how Indigenous practice displaces European ideas of art as primarily about aesthetics and asked the question ‘What can art do?’. The Argentinian collective Iconoclasistas provided a response through their use of participatory cartography as a political tool to transform bodies of knowledge and rethink geographical areas. Their monumental wall work and takeaway poster stack, À qui appartient la terre ?, mapped women farmers and their key role in food security across an ‘inverted’ Peters projection of the world that more accurately represents continents’ surface areas. Political philosopher Walter Mignolo led a reading group on ecology and decoloniality, with a focus on the dispossession and extraction around which relations between humans and the environment have been structured for at least the last 500 years. Philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva spoke on hospitality and cosmopolitanism in relation to her analysis of processes of racialisation that emerged during the Enlightenment and excluded large parts of humanity from legal protections, thus enabling the colonial and capitalist resource extraction projects of the modern period.

What I call open-process curating involves the curator acting as conduit or bridging critical thinker to help draw into dialogue critical theoretical vocabularies and artistic practice, weaving webs of relationship and discussions that thicken over time. In practice, the thematic explorations from Cosmopolis #1: collective intelligence expanded in 2018 with Cosmopolis #1.5: enlarged intelligence in Sichuan. The project was a collaboration between the Centre Pompidou, the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation and the City of Chengdu (Chengdu Municipal People's Government). Here, over fifty artists and collectives presented work relating to ecological and technological intelligence in collaborative practice, with many taking part in research and production residencies across rural and urban sites.⁵ At a curatorial level, thinking from and in relation to dynamics and questions specific to particular contexts was fundamental to the conception of the platform.

Important interlocutors in the definition of the project in Sichuan included artist duo Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, who work durationally in an extended river system reaching from Chengdu to the Qinghai Plateau. Deeply interdisciplinary, these artists’ practice involves environmentalists, geologists and musicians, as well as communities of fisherpeople, farmers and herders living along these rivers. In the 1970s and 1980s massive dam construction and large-scale deforestation had transformed ecosystems around the rivers to the northeast of Chengdu. One of the artists’ collaborators, farmer Wang Yizhong, conducted tree planting over three decades that reintroduced biodiversity and forests; others include indigenous Qiang minority farmers building a centre for transmission of agricultural and cultural knowledge. Cao and Chen’s work, although strongly rooted in specific social and ecological contexts, produces tools and research that can come into conversation across geographies.

Two collectives of artists and architects, ruangrupa from Indonesia and Arquitectura expandida from Colombia, both participants in Cosmopolis #1, worked with local residents in Shiyan village in a traditional bamboo paper-making area in Jiajiang County south of Chengdu, from which many young people had emigrated. Their residencies explored artist-led consultation processes in relation to community development and ecology and were facilitated by a regional cultural official who recognised the limitations of top-down approaches. In response to community requests, the two collectives brought new resources and visibility to existing communal activities, as well as proposing new street furniture for common areas. Australian artist Yasmin Smith worked in a nearby ceramics factory in the town of Wuchang, holding workshops with factory workers and linking ceramics to environmental science, particularly in relation to pesticide use in agriculture. This participatory research resulted in the commissioned installation Rose Flooded Red Basin that includes ceramic replicas of eucalyptus and bamboo branches covered in ash glaze that shows what chemicals the trees from which the branches were taken had absorbed in their lifetime.⁶ Other major commissions for this edition also included two research-based audiovisual and sculptural installation works by Liu Chuang—Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities and Gluttonous Me—both exploring relationships between the expropriation of indigenous peoples’ land, seasonal migrations of bitcoin miners in search of cheap hydroelectric power, popular media and artificial intelligence.

Returning to Paris in 2019, Cosmopolis #2: rethinking the human addressed questions generated across the preceding years and focused on scale and sustainability, examining how smaller social formations can articulate alternative models.⁷ This cycle also explored how to move away from universalist European ideas of the human, drawing particularly on the work of philosopher and essayist Sylvia Wynter, as well as that of Ferreira da Silva. What Wynter calls European ‘Man’—a figure with attendant rights and protections—historically excluded most of humanity (including women), enabling the expropriation of other peoples’ land, resources and labour. Artistic propositions in relation to ‘rethinking the human’ pointed to alternative cosmologies, economic and value systems that could contain the foundations for different social and technical configurations. Argentinian artist Adriana Bustos created the large-scale wall painting Planisferio Venus which presented non-linear cartographies of knowledge, power and social transformation: annotated astronomical charts reinterpreting history from feminist and anti-colonial perspectives and calling for more comprehensive and situated historical narratives.⁸

In dialogue with works by Cao and Chen on reactivating Indigenous Qiang cultural/ecological practices, Bangladeshi artist Munem Wasif presented Seeds shall set us free II (2019), developed through his long-term collaboration with the UBINIG seed bank in Tangail district in the centre of the country. Active since 1984 under the direction of poet and activist Farhad Mazhar and feminist Farida Akhtar, organisers of Nayakrishi Andolon (New Agriculture Movement), the seed bank supports rice biodiversity and local agricultural knowledge, in a context where these had been severely curtailed when farmers were forced to cultivate Indigo and Jute in the British colonial period. Wasif had been in residence at UBINIG and produced a series of photographs of the rice seeds in the seed bank. In our discussions in relation to the presentation in Cosmopolis #2, we decided to also include documents, images and archival elements relating to the history of the seed bank and to broader cultural practices relating to rice. In her work AmaHubo (2018), artist, traditional healer and Sangoma, Buhlebezwe Siwani similarly made visible alternative forms of knowledge, in this case bodily based, expressing forms of resilience through movement and voice in the face of the violent expropriation of land and the suppression of spiritual practices.

Rethinking nature and methodologies

The Cosmopolis platform continues to generate projects that build on its methodologies and network of interdisciplinary collaborators, notably the research exhibitions Rethinking Nature (2021-2022, with a related book published in 2023) and Green Snake: women-oriented ecologies (2023), which reflected critically through artists’ eyes on the historical and philosophical roots of imperialist and patriarchal visions of nature.⁹ In terms of the specificity of the open-process curatorial approaches that were developed through Cosmopolis, the initial framework never took the form of a pre-established curatorial thesis that artists’ works were selected to illustrate. Rather, a line of inquiry was identified in response to observed densities or clusters of artists’ research, preoccupations and experiences, that then evolved and transformed through dialogue. Other curators, researchers and thinkers also engaged in the discussions and nourished the processes with critical vocabularies. This has generated longstanding working relationships whereby a dialogic process is cultivated through sustained listening, dialogues 'thickening' as deeper understandings develop of each other’s working methods, common research interests and frameworks.

Both Rethinking Nature and Green Snake drew attention to economies that treat nature—including much of humanity—as reserves of resources to be exploited. The projects presented works by artists challenging how specific forms of knowledge have been constructed and made to seem natural, while other knowledge systems have been effaced. For Rethinking Nature, Elizabeth Povinelli and Karrabing Film Collective produced three conceptual mappings—or ‘weather reports’—to show how, globally, the colonial eye perfected its cartography as it ravaged worlds. Two clans / Weather reports (2021) spans five centuries and evokes the upheavals of ecologies and geographies as Europe asserted control over territories and peoples. These cartographic wall drawings traced the diasporic history of Povinelli’s family’s move from clan lands in the Italian Alps to settler lands in the United States alongside Karrabing members’ experience of the expropriation of their ancestral lands. Povinelli’s film The Inheritance (2021) examines how, as people move through the world, their inheritance positions them in relation to existing mechanisms of extraction and accumulation, creating differential access to the ability to increase economic wealth and to make choices about their future.

Karrabing’s speculative, improvisational video works reaffirm spiritual relationships to land in the face of dispossession and environmental damage, linking their practice to that of other artists across broad geographies. Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Karikpo Pipeline (2015/2021), shot in Ogoniland, overlays the infrastructure of oil extraction in the Niger Delta with an evocation of invisible and spiritual energies, setting an Ogoni antelope masquerade in a landscape of pipelines. The monotype series Defend Sacred Mountains (2018) by Edgar Heap of Birds collects the toponymy of North America's First Nations peoples’ places of ritual, worship and healing, registering histories of environmental desecration and vectors of cultural resistance. Sandra Monterroso draws on the material thought forms of Q’eqchi Maya culture in Guatemala, deploying women’s textile practices as spiritual technologies and loci of lamentation. Expoliada II (2016) references Mayan cosmology and colour symbolism: its three rows of yellow threads progressively lose colour, signalling histories of plunder and dispossession. To assemble these works is to trace connections, conversations and solidarities across geographies.

Toxicity and how this extends industrial environmental effects into future human and non-human relations is at the centre of the artistic research of Yasmin Smith, who, after major works produced in the contexts of Cosmopolis #1.5 and Cosmopolis #2, for Rethinking Nature created the ceramic installation work Terra Dei Fuochi (2021).¹⁰ It was produced in an area of the Campania region where criminal disposal of waste by industries in northern Italy has taken place since the 1980s. The area takes its name from illegal fires lit by those paid to take the toxic waste, incinerating surplus beyond what can be buried in agricultural land. Smith collaborated with Massimo Fagnano (Professor of Agronomy at the University of Napoli Federico II), using poplar branches gathered at the phytoremediation project, where the trees were planted to absorb heavy metals from the contaminated soil. Fagnano surprisingly found that the mineral-rich local volcanic soil itself acts to neutralise toxicity through ionic bonds, so that contaminating elements are held in the soil in inert forms—an extraordinary mechanism of self-healing in local ecologies. As noted by the artist,

Bioremediation and phytoremediation show us that the soil and plants have the incredible ability to rehabilitate from the destructive effects of activities performed by some of humanity. Indeed, the plants are performing the task of rescuing the site and making it safe for humans and other beings.¹¹

Other artists included in Green Snake and Rethinking Nature imagined alternative narratives enabled by technology, biology or altered consciousness. In Genetic Drift: SYMBIONT, Indian artist Rohini Devasher’s intertwined snake and plant elements crept across the internal skin of the exhibition space like an intelligent symbiotic biomass. The work is inspired by genetic drift in evolutionary biology—random changes in the frequency of gene variants leading to mutations that may generate as-yet-unknown, hybrid organisms. Australian artist Tricky Walsh’s The age of amnesia (2023), commissioned for Green Snake—sculptural paintings including text in English and Cantonese as well as a dimension in augmented reality—presented a story inspired by the theories of physicist Melvin M. Vopson. Vopson has suggested that, at the current rate of information production, 350 years from now the number of digital bits on Earth will exceed the number of atoms. The power required to sustain the conservation of digital information will exceed the total power consumption on the whole planet today. And 500 years from now, digital content will account for more than half the Earth’s mass. Walsh speculates that perhaps this critical overload could lead to a new state of consciousness called ‘Mutual Reception’, the spontaneous emergence of a state of empathy, where human beings become deeply linked and sensitive to other remaining life forms and non-living existents. Drawing on rich Indian miniature traditions, Manjot Kaur combines ancient stories and precarious ecologies with speculative visions of relationships between deities, humans and the environment, imagining new hybrid beings inhabiting existing mythological narratives. In her series Forest invoking the Ashta Matrikas, it is the forest that invokes the protection of transformed deities: goddesses who have taken on the heads of the animal consorts upon which they are traditionally shown riding.¹² In Of other tomorrows never known (2023), Natasha Tontey brings to life as feminist pantomime the double-headed serpent Rembet mi Wailan in Minhasan cosmology in Sulawesi, a guardian figure between the seen and unseen worlds.

Following waters: artistic research across expanded Himalayan ecologies

Myths and stories centred on the more-than-human bring into question narratives that separate the human from nature and deny the forms of responsibility necessary to the reproduction of broader entangled existence. In their film commissioned for Rethinking Nature, Lost shadows (2021), the artistic collective Gidree Bawlee, working in the village of Balia in the Thakurgaon area of north-west Bangladesh, use shadow theatre to conjure a powerful image of non-human environmental agents in the form of spirit beings. These beings are driven away by water scarcity and the toxic effluent of fertilisers and pesticides used to increase yields from the marginal lands onto which increasing numbers of climate refugees are arriving from further south. The collective’s practice is rooted in the local community and nourished by experimental processes, merging forms of longstanding aesthetic heritage with socially-engaged practice. The film, made together with a puppet theatre group of mainly teenage girls, speaks of the drying up of the Skukh, Dukh, Vulli and Pathraz rivers—tributaries of the Teesta River that in turn runs into the Jamuna River—leaving farmers to increasingly depend on dwindling groundwater. It recounts how the tributaries once carried numerous varieties of fish and other aquatic life; a procession of shadows crosses the screen, fabled beings that were once part of the village community.

Like Gidree Bawlee, artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun have a longstanding research interest in a particular extended river system. As presented in Cosmopolis #1.5, over the past decade, their Water system project first focussed on areas near Chengdu that are downstream and upstream of Dujiangyan, a water management system engineered in 245 BC by observing how geomorphology and processes relating to movements of sand on the river bed could be harnessed to shift more water during dry seasons through the streams of the Min River (a tributary of the Yangtze) into agricultural areas across much of Sichuan; it is one of the largest and oldest such systems still in use. Today, Cao and Chen are collaborating with communities of herders in the headwaters of the same river systems on the Qinghai Plateau in Tibet. They are facing dramatic desertification and erosion, but are working to reseed grasslands and stabilise these processes. The artists’ double-channel video commissioned for Green Snake, Back to Mu Village's Fairy Big Lake (2023) tells the story of the disappearance and re-emergence of a lake near Maixi Township, to the north of Zoige wetlands. From being a mudflat, the ecology of the area has changed, perhaps due to fast melting glaciers; the artists speak of the loss of ice stored in glaciers as another form of extraction. Originating in this area on the Qinghai Plateau are not only the Yangtze but also the Brahmaputra River (called the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet), that runs from the Himalayas into India and Bangladesh, where it is known as the Jamuna, into which the Teesta flows, the river along which the members of Gidree Bawlee work. The geomorphology of river systems, where water has carved through mountains and earth, and the vital energy of the water flowing through them, connect ecosystems and artists across political and natural borders. Dialogues created through open-process curating between works rooted in these linked geographies testify to parallel struggles and to parallel practices of empathy and responsibility for non-human existence.¹³

Karan Shrestha similarly addresses relationships to water and land further west along the Himalayas in Nepal. In the large ink drawing Shared sensualities (2020/2021) and the painting, valvala (2023), both shown in Green Snake, Shrestha depicts connections between living and non-living beings in the cosmological systems of particular Indigenous groups in Nepal, where the elements of water and earth are celebrated as inseparable from humans and other animals. valvala particularly references the arrival of monsoon, and spirits and goddesses that are associated with water. The Newar people of the Kathmandu Valley, from whom the artist’s family originates, recount how the river descended from the celestial sphere in the form of rain. From above, the rain-river valvala surged out of the pregnant cloud-lake teeming with aquatic and mythical beings. As the artist notes, ‘the sound of the word valvala hints at rain, the gurgle of flowing rivers and the dance of life’.¹⁴ Another recent work, cloud babies, is a kinetic sculpture composed of a wooden ring that has been hollowed out to hold water. The suspended ring tilts gently to keep the water in constant motion, allowing it to flow through the many animals and mythical creatures carved around the vessel.¹⁵ This movement recalls hitis or dhunge dharas, everflowing public waterspouts that were essential infrastructure and symbolic of traditional water systems in the Kathmandu valley during the Malla period (1201 - 1779). Water was maintained in constant flow, making it accessible to all living beings, humans, animals and plants, and then returning it to the earth; a cycle that was considered a social and sacred duty.¹⁶

Around the world, artists and collectives are working in deeply embedded ways and developing initiatives that respond to specific social, ecological and political conditions. Not merely cultural producers, they are engaged in research, pedagogy and civic processes, generating context-sensitive knowledge. Such practices emphasise duration, the creation of relationships and mutual attention—qualities that are essential to building collaboration and trust. Offering perspectives that are bottom up and strategies that are sustainable, these practices and initiatives constitute object lessons in scale and community-making, particularly in the context of confronting unfolding structural crises that are unevenly distributed in their effects yet touch all parts of the globe. Today, artists’ networks that are partly inside and partly outside the art world—with members who may also be educators, scientists, activists—develop schools, explore new economic models, share methodologies and experiment with participatory forms of civic engagement. When curating becomes an attentive open process, it may begin to support these initiatives in co-creating projects that not only reflect local realities but also contribute to transnational conversations and new narratives, amplifying voices and knowledge systems that have been side-lined. These situated knowledge practices can also provide tools for enabling multi-directional dialogue to help create sustainable practices and communities that together cultivate fine-grained perspectives on social and ecological transformations.