Reenchanting Wounded Worlds: Fermentation, Decay, and Interspecies Grief in Post-Violated Landscapes – Experimental Format

On Thursday, Monika Dorniak will be convening her first panel at the STS-CH conference in Zurich – at the beginning of the year she invited five artistic researchers to collaboratively create a collective lecture performance that expands the idea of learning into a multi-sensorial experience, engaging touch, taste, and sound.

If you happen to be in Switzerland, you are warmly invited to attend *Reenchanting Wounded Worlds: Fermentation, Decay, and Interspecies Grief in Post-Violated Landscapes – Experimental Format* Participating artistic researchers: Paola Bascón, Mariangela Beccoi, Martyna Miller, Kamila Narysheva & Vicky Clarke, Óscar Perdomo Detailed info: This experimental panel, featuring a joint 60-minute lecture performance, brings together artistic research projects that focus on human-decentred approaches to memory studies and indigenous cosmologies. It explores how landscapes –fractured by catastrophe, nuclear testing, extraction, and war– can be re-enchanted through the generative powers of decay, sound, poetry, breathing, fermentation, and interspecies dialogue. Traversing Amazonian and West-German fermentation practices, Andean necropolises, post-hurricane Polish forests, a nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan, and the very air we nurture, we ask: how do more-than-human agencies and world-making practices help us sustain lives and lands marked by loss? These threads converge in an experimental lecture performance that interweaves molecular presence, olfactory landscapes, and interspecies grief. Through scent, sound, and touch, the lecture performance unsettles anthropocentric notions of agency and memory, inviting participants to experience the enduring echoes of environmental trauma and the possibilities for collective healing.

Together, these projects propose that holding fractured worlds together requires us to listen to the generative murmurs of decay, fermentation, material witnesses, and more-than-human kin — re-enchanting our relationships with landscapes, histories, and futures in the face of uncertainty. The session will begin with a 60-minute multimedia lecture performance, collaboratively created by the participating researchers, followed by a moderated Q&A with the presenters, offering insights into the individual works and perspectives of each artistic researcher.