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Contribution short abstract:

The contribution discusses colonial projects of extractivist power in their new geographical frontiers and temporal dimensions, specifically, the new wave of extractivism in Finland. The contribution also maps out other visions that aim to contest the encroachment of extractivist power.

Contribution long abstract:

The contribution presents an analysis in progress for the research project “Pluriversal Waters: Tracing Hydro-Ontologies across Colonial-Extractivist Assemblages.” More specifically, the contribution discusses colonial projects of extractivist power in their new geographical frontiers and temporal dimensions.

While some regions are experiencing post-extractivist pasts or presents, this research explores the extractivist futures. Specifically, it examines the new wave of extractivism in Finland, driven by the so-called green transition. These new extractive developments can be characterized as colonial, as they employ similar tropes of "empty lands" for the sake of extractivism, benefiting the state and transnational capital. This new wave of extractivism is further militarized within the current geopolitical environment, as the EU's search for Critical Raw Materials opens up new frontiers within its geopolitically friendly camps.

These extractive futures are now being projected onto mineral policies and acts, as well as the cartographies of newly discovered minerals on these “empty lands”. However, these "empty lands" are the living environments of the indigenous Sámi population and Finnish reindeer herders, as well as numerous other species. For the communities living on these lands, this creates uncertain futures, materialized in the present through the knowledge of minerals existing in the ground. These futures concern both human and non-human inhabitants, as well as the water cycles that traverse these environments. Despite the dominant vision for the extractive future, the contribution also maps out other visions that aim to contest the encroachment of extractivist power.

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Contribution short abstract:

This project explores climate adaptation through a sculptural meganest for white storks on an 18th-century lake, surrounded by animatronic bird poos. It critiques climate messaging and art, advocating for ‘æffect’ — affective practical outcomes towards sustainable, pluriversal, speculative futures.

Contribution long abstract:

Climate adaptation strategies face a multitude of systemic and ideological obstacles, played out on the contested histories and futures of landscape/land use, with its competing demands to produce food, habitation, power, wellbeing, capital, cultural identity, alongside a rapidly declining biodiversity.

Climate messaging often entrenches these positions, as alternately catastrophic, self-congratulatory, didactic, idealised, conspiratorial, blandly universal, or politically romantic — inducing widespread inaction, or ‘stuckness’.

In addition, climate-focussed art and curation that seeks to address these issues risks failure for being either:

- tokenistic

- overly pragmatic, disappearing as art

- majority self-serving and extractive

- exploited through green washing

- detrimental to earth, people, or future through its mode of production, without overriding reciprocal positive impacts.

The most successful cultural outputs combine affect with effect, or ‘æffect’ (my term) both in their making and their residual outcomes.

As pluriversal artwork embracing multiple positions, my project aims to explore and acknowledge these pitfalls and positions as part of its making, through reflective critique contributing to insight, knowledge, and understanding.

The project’s development will call into dialogue living beings, real or imagined, from diverse spheres, sectors and communities of expertise, with their concomitant challenges and insights.

As living ‘supernodal’ artwork, my art practice research aims to manifest novel landscape relations through a reconfiguration of existing texts, forms, methods, materials, and creatures that have potent ancient, political and cultural histories as well as future-contemporary potentials, to prefigure speculative imaginaries in which multiple entities creatively, or disharmoniously, coexist.

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Contribution short abstract:

The presentation outlines how an ‘experiential’ urban walking intervention can help subvert the currently hegemonic conformations of power by catalysing respectful acknowledgement of and relationship with other-than-human nature.

Contribution long abstract:

The epoch we live in is informed by a variety of hegemonic and variably synergistic power formations centred around the Anthropos, capital, the plantation, as well as others. Among the notable effects of these power formations are the unfolding ecological crisis and expanding urbanization.

With other-than-human (OTH) nature fast disappearing and the majority of human beings living in towns and cities, it is particularly in the urban environment that OTH-human entanglements proliferate; it is therefore here that opportunities to think and practice subversively different ways to be-come human and to experience, conceive and relate to OTH nature can, and must, be found.

Mindful of these considerations and focusing on the U.K., the presentation outlines an ‘experiential’ urban walking intervention.

The intervention draws on a number of insights, from phenomenology to Material Feminisms, and conceptualises walking as a world-shaping-world-shaped poietic process through which OTH and human entities continually materialise.

Building on this theoretical framework, the walking activity mobilises multisensory perception, behaviour, and language to achieve a number of interlinked objectives. These include, firstly, to answer in an emancipatory way the largely unmet public demand for contact with OTH nature and boost human well-being; secondly, to promote respectful acknowledgement and interaction with OTH nature. Lastly, to provide first-hand experience that every OTH natural entity, even the most ‘mundane’, should be acknowledged and respected in a non-utilitarian way.

By aiming to achieve these (and other) objectives, the intervention would unsettle the currently hegemonic conformations of power that be and help materialise alternative worldings.

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Contribution short abstract:

I present the case of a variegated community of practice whose rooting for a conservation-for-the-people approach as the foundation of an alternative model for protecting biodiversity has fuelled a meaningful interaction among its members and substantiate advocacy efforts in Guatemala.

Contribution long abstract:

Mainstream nature conservation stems from a fortress notion of natural parks whose goods and services are set aside from human use thus reinforcing a problematic gap between humans and nonhumans. The contemporary ecological crisis has prompted global efforts to increase nature conservation under this paradigm which have also brought about prefiguration thinking stemming from subaltern subjectivities and engaged scholarship. This paper deals with an example of the latter where environmental activists, Indigenous leaders, environmental solicitors, and engaged scholars have maintained a community of practice for eight years whose ideas and suggestions for a conservation-for-the-people approach as the foundation of an alternative model for protecting biodiversity have both fuelled a meaningful interaction between its members and come up with tangible outcomes used in advocacy efforts. I am also a member of this community and therefore my method is participant observation between 2017-2025 both at face-to-face meetings and by a fluid exchange of text messages about nature-related pressing issues, conservation science, underdevelopment, and politics. My analysis suggests that this community of practice has been successful in providing its members with a sense of concrete utopia by which like-minded subjects reinforce their reasons for maintaining an ethical commitment with a transformed way of going about nature conservation. These findings dovetail with existing literature on convivial conservation, metabolic value, and eco-Marxism.