Rethinking Human Relationships with the More-than-Human: Spiritual, Indigenous and Relational Paradigms in Conversation

Thursday, 30 October

Location: Address: Øster Farimagsgade 5. Room: CSS 35.3.13

Friday, 31 October 

Location: CApE, Læderstræde 20, 1st floor

Anne Jesuina Tobias de Andrade and Thais Di Marco: Interactive session

Abstract

Part 1: Art, Liberation, and Relational/(spiritual?) Ecologies

Dutch-Brazilian anti-disciplinary artist Anne Jesuina interviews choreographer, director, performance artist and activist Thais di Marco. Thais’ work spans performing arts, Afro-Brazilian-Indigenous diasporic cosmologies, social movements for democracy, land reform, and education. Growing up in Candomblé communities with strong anti-colonial agendas, they have spent decades developing art as a collective practice of resistance, spirituality, and ecological attunement. Our conversation will explore how their methods of choreography and direction emerged directly from collective contexts and how these methods might inform contemporary ecological thought. What does it mean to see art as a form of relational ecology? How do Afro-Brazilian-Indigenous cosmologies expand current European discussions on the relational turn? And how do current neo-liberal discourses continue to silence fugitive artists from within contemporary arts spaces and institutions? 

Part 2: Ancestral Dissimilation as Ecological Practice

Thais di Marco and Anne Jesuina are developing a workshop on Ancestral Dissimilation, which they will share during this seminar either by facilitating a participatory session or elaborating on the visions and ideas behind it. Thais’ current theater work The Obsessors, inspired by the Umbanda practice of desobsessão, uses their methodology Retelling Structures to replace key narrative elements and destabilize dominant frameworks. Through comedy and critical entertainment, they create spaces for grief, release, and dreaming futures. One of their guiding principles is “to mobilize pain until it turns into possibility”—a practice of making visible and palpable what is often invisible yet deeply felt.

Since their graduation from the MA Ecologies of Transformation, at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, Anne has been working on creating a method to take emotional responsibility for internalized oppressive narratives in artistic ways to support the embodied transformation of colonial paradigms.

Together, their workshop asks: how do neoliberal narratives, even when seemingly welcoming, reproduce oppressive structures that alienate us from our embodied ancestral technologies? How can we shift not only what we know, but also how we feel entangled with the web of life and reproduce stories? Seen through an ecological lens, Ancestral Dissimilation becomes a practice of relational ecology: disrupting internalized narratives that separate us from ancestral, emotional, and embodied lineages, and re-rooting in affective, intergenerational, and more-than-human relations. This session explores how dissimilation is not disconnection, but a reconfiguration of ecological belonging.

Bio: Anne Jesuina Tobias de Andrade

Anne Jesuina Tobias de Andrade (all pronouns) (1989) is a decolonial, anti-disciplinary artist of Northern Dutch and Afro-Brazillian descent, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Anne is also one of the two first Speakers for the Living in the world’s first public Zoöp. Their work moves between post-activism, multispecies justice, and somatic abolitionism, and investigates the relationship between worldview, emotion, relationship and ecology. Through writing, music, voice, moving images, and performance, Anne seeks to uncover the invisibilized socio-somatic dimensions of white “supremacy” culture in order to heal individual, eco-collective wounds and to reclaim regenerative sources of power.

Bio: Thais Di Marco

Thais Di Marco (they/them), a Queer Roma descendant, performing arts director and multidisciplinary artist originally from São Paulo, Brazil, born in the Candomblé community of Redandá in Cipó-Guaçú where they hold the title of Egbomi and it’s Caixeira do Divino Priestess at House of Nagô in São Luís do Maranhão. Thais has been based in Amsterdam since 2017.

In 2018, graduated from DAS Choreography in Amsterdam, having undertaken a research in Benin, West Africa, on post-colonial aesthetics, under the mentorship of artist Romuald Hazoumè. They have studied and collaborated in the intersection of decolonial movements and arts with EZLN guerrilla in Mexico, the independent space Bon Gah in Iran, with Lucha Libre wrestling master El Gladiador, the anarcho-feminist movement Mujeres Creando in Bolivia and currently organizing with the Roma decolonial movement in Europe. In 2024 Thais was a grantee artist of 3 Package Deal by the city of Amsterdam in partnership with Framer Framed and the Social Design Coalition. 

Thais has worked on international collaborations and under the direction of choreographer and activist Mia Habib, promoting community based art practices. Thais was a guest teacher at the Masters in Dance at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp in 2023 and presented at De Singel’s Radiant Nights in the same year. Thais serves as the director of Stichting The Goldfish Bleeding in a Sea of Sharks, BIXARIA - Queer Brazilian Club Night and CIRCULO - Decolonial resistance, priestessing, chanting and women’s drumming. Their works mixes critical thinking with comedy and popular shows. Thais is currently working on a new group piece called “The Obsessors” in co-production with De Singel, ICK - Dans Amsterdam and others.

Whitney A. Bauman: Fossil-Fueled Times and Planetary Times

Abstract

Of all the habits of becoming that enable some within the “Anthropos” to live “as if” we humans are not part of the larger planetary community, chronological time is perhaps the most seductive.  Some have noted that since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since WWII, we are experiencing the so-called Great Acceleration. Of course, acceleration for some means destruction for others (human and non).  Regardless the speed at which we lived is outstripping the carrying capacity of the planet, including many entities on the planet and human bodies as well. How has the fossil-fueled era that many of us now live in kept us from engaging with human and earth others? How might we begin to break away from the chronological GMT time, and begin to open on to planetary times?

Bio

Whitney A. Bauman is Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, FL.  He is also co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a non-profit based in Berlin, Germany that holds public discussions over social and ecological issues related to globalization and climate change.  He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Humboldt Fellowship, and in 2022 won an award from FIU for Excellence in Research and Creative Activities. His publications include: Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (Columbia University Press 2014), and co-authored with Kevin O’Brien, Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Tackling Wicked Problems (Routledge 2019); 3^rd edition of Grounding Religion: A Fieldguide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, co-edited with Kevin O’Brien and Richard Bohannon, (Routledge 2023). He is also the co-editor with Karen Bray and Heather Eaton of Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking (Fordham University Press 2023). His next monograph is entitled, A Critical Planetary Romanticism: Literary and Scientific Origins of New Materialism (Columbia University Press, Forthcoming 2026).

Christiane Bosman: Representing Dogger Bank, Breeding Ground of the North Sea

Bio

With a background in heritage studies, art history and communication management, Christiane Bosman has over 15 years of experience in developing, curating and producing cultural interventions in the public domain, with a focus on human non-human relationships since 2019. Previously she worked at SKOR | Foundation Art and Public Domain and TAAK cooperative. At the Embassy of the North Sea she is public programme director since 2019, and Confluence of European Water Bodies lead, a network of over 35 grass roots interdisciplinary collectives all over Europe, working on the legal, cultural and political representation of water. Since June 2023 she is also curator at the Ministry for the Future.

Marjolijn Dijkman: ‘Turbid Tides’

Abstract

Marjolijn Dijkman will present ‘Turbid Tides’, an artistic research project that reflects on ecological restoration and depoldering in the context of the Ems-Dollard estuary on the border between Groningen (NL) and Ostfriesland (DE), which is part of the Wadden Sea. The estuary is depleted of life due to siltation of the water, which is caused by various factors that interact, including dredging, land reclamation, soil subsidence due to gas extraction and peat oxidation, sea level rise, and water management infrastructures like the major dam, the ‘Afsluitdijk’. ‘Turbid Tides’ presents an intuitive and speculative narrative about the increasing siltation of the Ems-Dollard estuary alongside the growing influence of computational thinking, with silt and data as the main protagonists. The research within the landscape examines the impact of different paradigm shifts on this particular landscape over time, from the pre-Christian Wierden dwellers living on mounds in a tidal landscape to the turbid estuary in the present day. The project is developed during an artist engagement residency, part of the large-scale EU Horizon project ‘WaterLANDS’ (2023-2026). Marjolijn aims to produce an essay film, installation, and publication that will explore shifts in Western thinking about sentience, intelligence, and our place in a more-than-human world.

Bio

Marjolijn Dijkman (b. 1978, she/her) is a research-led, multidisciplinary artist working with film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores the intersection of culture and other fields of inquiry, with a strong focus on the rapidly changing environment and its human and non-human interdependencies. By combining field research with speculative imagination, she creates works that emerge from multiyear, process-based research projects resulting in artworks, exhibitions, publications, and discursive events. In 2005, she co-founded the artist-run organisation Enough Room for Space in Brussels and she is currently an artistic Ph.D. researcher at LUCA & KU Leuven. www.marjolijndijkman.com.

Roberto Jones Romo: Alchemy at the End

Abstract

‘Alchemy at the End’ examines the persistence of alchemical discourse within contemporary science and posthuman debates, offering a lens for rethinking human relationships with the more-than-human. Beginning with CERN’s recent production of gold nuclei through ultraperipheral collisions, it frames the event as both a technical milestone and an allegorical return of chrysopoeia. Alchemy is not treated here as obsolete mysticism but as a symbolic and epistemic framework for reimagining transformation, artificial life, and the technological sublime. Historical accounts of the homunculus - from the Book of the Cow to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān’s cosmic incubator and Andreae’s Alchemical Wedding - demonstrate how alchemy envisioned artificial generation as at once miraculous, sacrificial, and deeply relational. These visions find renewed resonance in contemporary practices such as biotechnology, CRISPR, AI, and longevity research, where life is increasingly reduced to a programmable substrate. Drawing on William R. Newman, Francesca Ferrando, Rosi Braidotti, and Donna Haraway, the analysis repositions the homunculus as a proto-posthuman figure: a subtle body embodying dissolution, recomposition, and hybrid subjectivity. Against transhumanism’s logic of mastery and control, alchemy re-emerges as a counter-discourse that foregrounds ambiguity, care, and metaphysical reflection. By tracing continuities between esoteric imagination and technological invention, Roberto argues that alchemy endures at the thresholds of science, offering an alternative vision of creation grounded in transmutation rather than domination.

Bio

Roberto Jones Romo is an art historian and political scientist whose research weaves together contemporary art, Western esotericism, and critical posthumanities. He is currently pursuing a dual PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and University of Groningen, where his dissertation, The Art Politics of Transmutation, explores how esoteric discourses resurface in contemporary art to challenge humanist assumptions and imagine alternative futures. Beyond academia, Roberto has extensive experience in education, intercultural communication, and digital media, and his recent publications reflect a commitment to understanding art as both a vehicle of symbolic transformation and a tool for political imagination.

angela Snæfellsjökuls rawlings: Glacial Relations

Abstract

Modern-day humans and their ancestors have only ever lived within icehouse Earth environs. As inhabitants who evolved within the Quaternary ice age with its alternations of glacial and interglacial periods, human habitability and survivorship on the planet has been intrinsically linked with the presence of ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers, and permafrost. With the tipping of seven of nine planetary boundaries, Earth’s icehouse veers towards a premature entry into a greenhouse period—untested for human species as a climate much hotter than any human has ever lived within.

Glacial Relations invites a consideration of humans as entwined with the cryosphere. From exploring a glacial vocabulary to nominating the glacier Snæfellsjökull for the Icelandic presidency, artistic interventions provoke a shift in the ways humans relate to icehouse Earth. Utilising artistic practice-as-research, Dr. angela Snæfellsjökuls rawlings will share a selection of their creative processes and outputs which explores how to að jökla (become-with glacier).

Bio

Dr. angela Snæfellsjökuls rawlings is a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher with an ecological emphasis. They work with languages as dominant exploratory material. Rawlings’ books include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), Gibber (online, 2012), o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015), si tu (MaMa Multimedijalni Institut, 2017), and Sound of Mull (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2019). In 2022, Rawlings co-curated SPHERE Festival for the Canadian National Arts Centre’s Orchestra in partnership with the Canadian Museum of Nature, Royal Danish Library, and Nordic Bridges. In 2024, Rawlings founded Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta, Iceland’s first rights of nature movement. They teach at Iceland University of the Arts.

Michael Schüßler: Christian Stewardship Belief and the Relational Turn

Abstract

Christianity is known as the most anthropocentric Religion of the World. Even the eco-theological mainframe of “stewardship” as in Pope Francis “Laudato Si” often reproduces paternalistic, patriarchal and dualistic patterns. “Making peace with nature” (UNEP 2021) means for Christianity shifting their doings and sayings away from the Kantian Frame towards a relational and planetary view of creation. By turning from Kant to Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues for a more entangled mindset. Donna Haraway or Karen Barad have shown that theory can move beyond the nature-culture divide and beyond sovereign anthropocentrism without losing its critical grounding. (Practical) Theology’s response to the climate crisis in the West will benefit from unlearning “dependency denial” (Katharina Hoppe) even in Christian ecological stewardship and discover a more entangled response-ability of religious and social-material practices.

Bio

Michael Schüßler is a Professor of Practical Theology at the Catholic-Theological Faculty of Tübingen University. He works on the transformation of church and society in the 21. Century and on practical-theological Diversity Studies. His most recent popular book is “Es kommt was ins Rutschen. Eine theologische Reise an die Kipppunkte der Gegenwart“ (It’s starting to slide. A theological journey to the tipping points in the present).

Kocku von Stuckrad: Enter the Nonhuman: Relational Thinking in the Sciences and the Arts

Abstract

The critique of binaries such as nature–culture, mind–matter and human–nonhuman has given rise to a movement known as the ‘relational turn’. While the emerging focus on relationality, entanglement and ‘becoming with’ has largely stemmed from the sciences (particularly ecology), this shift would not have been possible without significant contributions from the arts (including fine arts and literature), as well as philosophical conversations spanning the humanities. Three lenses are particularly helpful when we consider the evolving understanding of human relationships with the more-than-human: spirituality, decoloniality and the arts. A system change that is only rudimentarily visible is needed for the full emancipation of the nonhuman. This change will only come about with the inclusion of spirituality and the acknowledgement of planetary ecologies of agency.

Bio

Kocku von Stuckrad is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and currently the Director of the Groningen Graduate School of Religion, Culture and Society. His work explores contemporary ‘alternative’ European spiritualities and their genealogical entanglements with scientific and philosophical discourses and intellectual traditions. His most recent book is After Exploitation: How We Can Build Flourishing Relationships with the Earth, forthcoming with Equinox in 2026.