TIMETABLE

Find the conference schedule below. Scroll down to see all activities. Click on the activity on the timetable to navigate to details.

TANC_ProgrammeDownload

No progamme changes are expected, but adjustments may be made if needed for the proper implementation of the TANC conference.

REGISTRATION

The TANC conference is a free event with prior registration required. The online form to register will be out shortly.

If you are travelling from abroad, here you will find some basic information about travel and accommodation.

CONFERENCE OBJECTIVES

The aim of the programme is to create an inclusive and safe space for transdisciplinary experimentation, welcoming both academics and practitioners to engage deeply with the themes of the conference from their own lived experience and disciplinary knowledge.
With the programme, we seek to:
• Foster synergies that allow participants to zoom in and out of their own focus areas
• Encourage imaginative collaborations that might otherwise remain unexplored
• Cultivate space to orchestrate alternative responses to “end-of-times” logics.

CONTENTS

The TANC conference is composed of:

  • 2 keynotes
  • 9 panels
  • 10 parallel workshops + 1 cooking workshop
  • 4 theatre performances
  • 1 collective street performance
  • 1 collective audiovisual experimental session
  • 1 sound walk (satellite)
  • 1 research methodology workshop (satellite)

Coffee and snacks will be offered during the coffee breaks in the mornings and evenings.

VENUE

All activities will take place at the UAB Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Unless otherwise specified:

  • Panels will take place at the Faculty Conference Room
  • Registration and workshops will take place at the Sala de Revistes
  • Keynotes and theatrical performances will take place at the Faculty Auditorium

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

We hope participants will:

  • Encounter new perspectives and methodological provocations
  • Identify resonances across fields, approaches, and types of knowledge
  • Leave with a renewed sense of purpose, creativity, and agency
  • Be inspired to explore new collaborations, ideas, and projects
  • Step beyond their comfort zone into spaces of collective sense-making and imaginative risk-taking.

Collective outcomes might include:

  • Generate a living map of diverse actors, practices, and regenerative topics
  • Create conditions that encourage the cross-pollination of ideas and approaches
  • Initiate future avenues for collaboration, whether within academic formats, beyond them, or across their borders.

PANELS

For panel details check out the call for papers. Full panel details will be provided once the call for papers finalizes.

WORKSHOPS

Counter-Prepping: Practising Life Beyond the Apocalypse

What would you carry with you to the moon—or to the last island left standing?

This workshop invites participants to revisit a childhood game under the weight of today’s manufactured apocalypses: crises narrated and monetised by states, corporations, and the ultra-rich, who rehearse the end of the world while accelerating its conditions.

You are invited to bring three objects—physically or at least in mind—that you would protect “in case of”:

  • the global war regime expanding;
  • the EU’s defence script becoming daily instruction;
  • the nuclear dream resurfacing;
  • the bunkerisation of everyday life;
  • or any other ending imposed, imagined, or feared.

No longer fringe, “prepping culture” now permeates policy, design, and media as both a driver and a product of authoritarianism: a masculine, colonial fantasy of self-sufficiency repackaged as common sense. Together, we will examine the affective, political, and material stakes of the “survival kit.” Through the objects you bring—both intimate and strategic—we will dig into how we are taught to navigate crisis. By engaging critically with these survivalist imaginaries, we will explore how crisis governance fractures solidarity and normalises the idea that apocalypse is inevitable—and that we must face it alone, advancing the privatisation of care and the abandonment of the many for the survival of the few.

As a final gesture, we will create a collective digital gallery (via hotglue.me) that brings together the selected objects and the constellation of reflections they generate. This shared map will trace not how to prep for the end, but how to refuse it—and how to practise life otherwise.

Workshop language: English

Facilitator

Maddalena Fragnito. Postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), where she is developing a project on ultra-rich imaginaries of living in times of catastrophe, and teaches Arts in the Master’s programme in Gender Studies and Policies at Roma Tre University. Her work in cultural and visual studies focuses on the relationship between care and violence.

What possibilities are overlooked in our current approach to modeling the climate of the future?

Data-driven climate models are often presented as democratizing tools, yet their implementation depends on advanced computational infrastructure. Moreover, they inherit significant biases particularly in the Global South, where sparse observations and underrepresented processes lead to gaps in model training and accuracy. Due to their focus on physical representation of the Earth system, they tend to overlook the social, political, and cultural dimensions that shape how such knowledge is produced, interpreted and applied. Narrative-driven scenario modeling or storyline approaches aim to bridge these domains to explore possible future trajectories. However, if they are not informed by local narratives, actual practices and embodiments of transformative change, they tend to reproduce dominant assumptions about progress, technology, and governance, narrowing policy choices and reinforcing existing power relations. For instance, the current Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which are widely used as narrative frameworks linked to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios, are all grounded in a continuous economic growth paradigm. As a result, they assume that in all possible futures humanity remains tied to economic growth, leaving little space to envision futures centered on wellbeing, sufficiency, and ecological balance.

Our workshop, departing from current initiatives stemming from the Post-Growth Modelling Community (PGMC) or the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), will invite participants to interrogate and expand the neglected possibilities of computation, modeling practices and the use of artificial intelligence for envisioning futures centered on planetary health. We will question whose data and perspectives are encoded in these systems and explore how equity-focused, participatory approaches could redefine what futures become imaginable.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Amirpasha Mozaffari. At the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Amirpasha Mozaffari specializes in applying artificial intelligence to weather and climate science. He designs and scales machine learning models to enhance Earth system prediction, prioritizing high-resolution forecasting and transparent methods to improve the reliability of climate information for society.

Eulàlia Baulenas Serra. Researcher in the Earth System Services Group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where she investigates how climate knowledge can be co-produced and mobilised to support societal transformation. She holds a BA in political science and a PhD from the University of Freiburg on multi-level environmental governance and policy integration. In her current work, she explores how participatory methodologies, discourse approaches and knowledge networks shape the design and uptake of climate science.

Guillemette Legrand. Artist and researcher whose research-practice centres on developing modes of inquiry, documentation and intervention with the imaginaries of technological infrastructures. Through participatory and collective interventions – such as workshops, multimedia installations, guided tours in game environments and lecture performances – they rehearse other imaginaries of computation that can embody plurality, radicality and cooperability. Their current research focuses on climate modelling and imaging as cosmological practices through the figure of the cosmogram (the writing and drawing of worlds). Their work has been developed and presented in contexts such as ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL), LUMA (Arles, FR), the V&A and Design Museum (London, UK) and ISEA (Paris, FR), among others. Guillemette is currently affiliated with the Critical Media Lab HGK-FHNW and EnsadLab (ENSAD-PSL) and is a recipient of a Swiss National Funds (SNF) grant for their PhD research.

Pirate Radio: Listening at the End(s) of the World

This workshop explores pirate radio as a queer, collective method for imagining and building worlds in times of ecological, social, and political crisis. Drawing from my current research project, The Apocalypse is Always Now: Queer/Trans Sonic World-Building(s) through Pirate Radio, I will introduce examples developed with collaborators in London, Istanbul, and other locations. These projects investigate how sound, storytelling, and DIY radio infrastructures can become tools for survival, connection, and care when our worlds feel fragmented or unstable.

After a short presentation, the workshop will shift into participatory activities. Participants will be invited to share short stories, sonic memories, or simple scores that speak to endings, transitions, and renewals in their own lives or communities. Together, we will practise deep listening and experiment with accessible, low-tech recording methods. These small fragments may form the beginnings of a collective audio piece created during the session.

The workshop is process-based rather than outcome-driven. No prior experience in sound or radio is needed. My role is to guide the methodology, offer tools from my practice, and hold space for participants to explore their own perspectives. By listening together and creating in real time, we will consider how radio can be reimagined as a living, shifting infrastructure for community, resistance, and imaginative survival.

Workshop language: English

Facilitator

mine kaplangı (they/them). Independent researcher, curator and art mediator based in London, originally from Istanbul, Turkey. They are the co-founder of the curatorial collective Collective Çukurcuma (2015) and KUTULU (2021). They are currently developing an ongoing research project on a pirate radio of the Queer/Trans Imaginaries of the Apocalypse in art, curating the current programme of VSSL Studio, and participating in the ongoing research of the Carefuffle Working Group in London.

Fear and desire: on apocalypse audiovisual imaginaries

Film history is rich in conceptualizations the environment, significantly including its destruction. In the past decades, we have become increasingly familiar with apocalyptic tales concerning thoughtless or unrestrained industrial, scientific and/or technological activities and their connection with unquestioned ways of relation with and exploitation of the environment. However, these narratives, mostly dystopian and often situated within or close to the speculative domain of science fiction, are unequivocally rooted in a wide range of representations and interrogations of worldviews that precede and overlap the history of film itself as well as the current growing sense of looming environmental catastrophe.

In this workshop, we will explore the visual grammar of the apocalypse, both from a historical perspective and with a will to experiment with different narrative approaches to the trope. Through the creation of spots of a up to 20 seconds, in small teams, with the help of cell phones, and drawing from elements available at the venue and its surroundings, we will tackle the apocalypse, either as annihilation, eye-opener or both, through the analysis and problematization of the interplay between issues such as (eco)anxiety, submissiveness, fear, denial, anger, grief, guilt, technofixes, survival, agency, exclusion, resistance, resilience, and/or even awe and desire, among other aspects, and their embedding in the current visual ecology. We will therefore delve creatively into the increasing need to understand the evolving syntaxes of audiovisual narratives about the planet, which is imperative considering the current steady increase of environmental issues and of image-based production and management of knowledge.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Michele Catanzaro. Professor in the Journalism and Communication Department at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), a researcher at the Institute for the History of Science (IHC-UAB), and a freelance science, health and environment journalist for outlets such as Nature, Science and El Periódico. He holds a PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Catalonia and has participated in European and national research projects on quality in science journalism (ENJOI and PerCientEx). He is co-author of the book Networks. A Very Short Introduction, the documentary Fast Track Injustice. The Óscar Sánchez Case, and several research papers. His journalistic work has received multiple awards, including the King of Spain International Journalism Prize and Science Writer of the Year. In 2023, he was Nature–Marsilius Invited Professor at the University of Heidelberg.

Carlos Tabernero. Associate Professor of History of Science and Director of the Institute for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He previously worked as a molecular biologist at the National Cancer Institute in the United States and as a researcher on communication and technology at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia. His work focuses on media and the processes of construction, circulation and management of natural history knowledge, especially in relation to cinema, television and literature. He has published extensively in these fields, including several books, and also has experience as a director and screenwriter of short films.

Edward (Ned) Somerville. PhD in History of Science and is Associate Professor of History of Science and Science Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and of Technology Studies at Ramon Llull University. His research explores the intersections of science, technology and culture, particularly in relation to industrial heritage and the social construction of knowledge. His doctoral thesis, The Musealization of Barcelona’s Industrial Past (UAB, 2021), examined the transformation of the Vapor Vell de Sants—one of the city’s earliest steam-powered factories—into a monument of collective memory. His forthcoming book, Reclaiming the Industrial Past (Brill), expands this work to explore how neighbourhoods act as both products and producers of industrial modernity.

Deriva entretejida

Proponemos un experimento: una deriva entretejida. En lugar de recorrer un espacio, tejemos juntas su posibilidad. Trasladamos la idea de la deriva —explorar un territorio para habitarlo— al acto de construir un telar colectivo.

El trabajo textil, históricamente un gesto de resistencia frente al silencio, se convierte aquí en nuestro modo de decir cuando las palabras se agotan y no somos capaces de hablar del presente. Tejer nos permite pensar y sentir con el cuerpo, compartir un ritmo común, habitar el presente desde lo táctil y lo colectivo.

>>> Queremos invocar un espacio exploratorio compartido,

una deriva efímera.

Un espacio para traer los mundos que habitamos

desde nuestros cuerpos

mundos que no están separados.

Tejiendo la conversación en algo que se construye

P R E S EN CIAL MENTE

a su ritmo

con las manos

sin expectativas <<<

·UN TELAR·

No va de hacer terapia. Es un espacio para tejer un sentimiento colectivo.

Mientras exploramos otras maneras de conversar.

Mientras nos enredamos. Mientras derivamos.

Workshop language: Spanish

Facilitator

Elena Galán del Castillo. Investigadora del BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change. Doctora en Historia Económica y Licenciada en Ciencias Ambientales. Investigadora postdoctoral en el Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). Hizo su tesis estudiando la transición de la agricultura y la ganadería durante el siglo XX en Catalunya. Ha trabajado en los impactos del cambio climático y su adaptación en la ganadería lechera, en el estudio de los aspectos económicos, sociales e institucionales de los sistemas pastorales vascos y en Historia Oral Ambiental. Desde hace 5 años compagina su trabajo académico con el trabajo como pastora en el Pirineo y más recientemente en Castilla y León, lo que le ha permitido desarrollar una visión profunda y compleja del sector ganadero.

Using Art and Storytelling to Reimagine Urban Nature Beyond Human Perspectives

This transdisciplinary workshop invites participants to reimagine urban nature beyond human-centered perspectives. Participants will be guided to interpret multispecies stories and ask: what should urban nature look like from a more-than-human point of view? As cities confront climate change, urbanisation, and biodiversity loss, the workshop creates a collective space for reflection, creativity, and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Participants will engage with artistic representations of species’ needs and desires, building awareness of the more-than-human species who share urban spaces and exploring how affective art-based encounters can deepen empathy and understanding. By working with these stories and visuals, participants will explore how art and storytelling can reveal hidden dimensions of ecological adaptation and inspire new urban imaginaries. The relational approach highlights the interconnectedness of humans and more-than-human species in shaping the future of urban nature. The session will be facilitated by an interdisciplinary team of adaptation and ecological researchers experienced in creative and transdisciplinary approaches. Drawing from climate adaptation science, ecology, and art-based research, the facilitators will guide participants through interpretive exercises that bring together scientific understanding and imaginative speculation. The resulting insights will inform ongoing inquiry into how art-based, transdisciplinary methods can support ecological awareness and cross-species empathy in urban transformation processes.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Ana Burón-Ugarte. BC3 (Basque Centre for Climate Change). I’m a biologist doing her PhD on ecology, focusing on plant–insect interactions and how global change factors affect these ecological networks.

William Lewis. Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3); University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). William Lewis is a PhD candidate as part of the project IMAGINE Adaptation at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). His research examines how cities imagine and implement climate adaptation, with a focus on governance, evaluation, and the role of creativity in shaping urban futures. He has facilitated workshops in Malmö and Bristol that brought together researchers, practitioners, and community stakeholders to envision adaptation strategies for heat stress. William holds an MSc in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation from Lund University and a BSc in Geography from the University of Exeter. Before joining BC3, he worked with UN-Habitat’s Climate Change and Urban Environment team and in the UK housing sector on green infrastructure access.

Alba Skidmore Lapuente. Research Assistant at BC3 within the BlueAdapt project, working in the Health and Climate research group within the Adaptation Lab research line. After completing her BSc in Biology at the University of Leeds (2022), she obtained her MSc in Environment and Development at Lancaster University (2024), achieving a distinction. For her Master’s thesis, in collaboration with the UKRI GCRF Living Deltas Research Hub, she researched the impacts of flooding and riverbank erosion on livelihood sustainability and sanitation in Bangladesh, applying a Feminist Political Ecology approach to explore gender disparities reinforced by climate change. She also worked at DEFRA (UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) during her Master’s degree. Her current research at BC3 focuses on examining health risks within a watershed area from a socio-ecological perspective, applying a One Health interdisciplinary approach.

Jenn Rose. PhD candidate at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (ES), investigating the diversity of wild bee species in the Basque Country. Since 2023, she has been a key member of the ERC-funded project GorBEEa, surveying pollinators in the Basque mountains to understand the mechanisms of ecosystem stability and biodiversity’s role in buffering environmental disturbances. Building on this, Jenn’s current research examines wild bee diversity across mountainous and urban landscapes in the region, employing morphological and molecular techniques to assess the conservation status of these potentially vulnerable populations.

Andrea Albert Fonseca. I’m a Research Assistant at BC3 working in the Health and Climate research group within the Adaptation Lab. My research explores the interconnected relationships between humans and nature in socioecological systems, focusing on how these dynamics influence the health and resilience of ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. Committed to producing actionable science, I use transdisciplinary approaches and participatory methods to co-produce knowledge with stakeholders, bridging gaps between research, policy and local practice. I currently support the BlueAdapt project, which investigates climate-related health risks in coastal and transitional waters, with emphasis on the Bay of Plentzia and the Butroe River in the Basque Country. I hold a BSc in Environmental Biology and an Erasmus Mundus MSc in Marine Environment and Resources.

Bodies in Motion, Worlds in Transition

This workshop invites participants to inhabit and transform apocalyptic imaginaries through embodied and artistic practices, drawing from two complementary research projects in Barcelona: Cycling to Care (C2C) and Zona Temporal (Sandra Sotelo’s PhD on political ecology and performing arts).

We begin with a short framing on climate anxiety and apocalyptic imaginaries VS alternative, possible futures, asking: how do bodies register crisis? How do we embody narratives of change and uncertainty, and how somatic and performative practices can generate consciousness and knowledge on a range of alternatives that were otherwise – through rational thinking only – dismissed? And how can movement, performance, and intergenerational connection generate alternative narratives of futures, transitions, and changes? Participants will be guided through somatic and performative exercises by a professional dancer and an experienced facilitator. These embodied practices will open space for sensory mapping, improvisation, and reflection on lived eco-social transitions.

Using prompts from environmental psychology and autoethnography, participants will record emotions, metaphors, and gestures that articulate both collapse and renewal, uncertainty and trust, obedience and emancipation. Together we will co-create a visual/performative map of regenerative imaginaries, blending text, movement, and artistic documentation.

The workshop demonstrates how arts-based and nature-inspired interventions can be methodological innovations in sustainability research: weaving emotion and analysis, political ecology and performance, youth climate narratives and somatic practices. It is designed to host a representative group of agents engaged in political ecology from its multiple perspectives, including academic research, activisms, youth initiatives, artistic practice, critical thinking and interest requiring no prior experience.

By engaging the body as a site of knowledge, the workshop explores how performing arts and eco-psychology together can move us from paralyzing apocalyptic fear to active hope and collective courage.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Sandra Sotelo Reyes. I am Sandra Sotelo Reyes, a researcher, activist, and dancer, and I understand transdisciplinarity almost as a responsibility. I have studied music, dance, economics, humanitarian action, and feminisms in a system that fragments knowledge, and I have just started a PhD in feminist political ecology and performing arts. For twenty years, I have worked in different countries in East and Central Africa affected by violence as a direct consequence of colonialism and extractivism. I learned from other ecologies and worldviews while navigating all the contradictions. Recently, ecofeminist narratives and degrowth have shaped my vision and research, as well as my movement practice. My work currently orbits around the notions of urgency, ruins, safe future and radical needs.

Giulia Sonetti. MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at ISGlobal and former Beatriu de Pinós Fellow at UPC. She leads Cycling to Care (C2C), a project exploring how nature-based and intergenerational interventions can mitigate climate anxiety among young people and foster pro-environmental behaviour. Her expertise spans sustainability education, transformative learning, and arts-based interventions.

Dario Cottafava. Senior researcher and assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business (Business Department) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and a member of the Center for Studies and Research in Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CREIS). His work sits at the intersection of innovation, sustainability and the ecological transition. Trained in complex systems and innovation studies, he explores the complex dynamics at the meso level of ecosystems in transition. His research engages with participatory and speculative approaches to envision regenerative local ecosystems and bioregions. Alongside his academic work, he co-founded the environmental NGO greenTO in Turin and the startup BIOMA in Barcelona, which transforms coffee waste into regenerative biotextiles.

Alessia Gervasone. University of Barcelona (UB). Art, Globalization, Interculturality (AGI) research group, Visuality and Geo-aesthetics in the Era of the Ecosocial Crisis. Analytical Approaches (VIGEO) research project. Researcher, curator, and project manager completing a PhD in the department of Art History at the University of Barcelona. As a member of the AGI research group and the VIGEO project, her work examines the intersections between contemporary art, political ecology, communal care, epistemic justice, decolonial and post-extractivist imaginaries. Over the past five years, she has collaborated with Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture as curator of exhibitions, art residencies, and public programs, and as project manager of European projects (Creative Europe, Erasmus+), including E-ART, PAL Konnekt, WeSTEAM, Theatre in Palm, and PMP. Her last curatorial project, Cuerpos Errantes, Face to the Sea, Luzlíquida, and Rendering. The Institution in Transition, reflect her interest in situated ecologies, embodied research, and collaborative methodologies that foster new relational and transformative narratives.

Kraftwerk, la música del poble i els límits del retrofuturisme utòpic

This activity integrates sociological and musicological perspectives around the utopian imaginaries of popular culture. It is based on the retrofuturistic imaginaries proposed by Kraftwerk, a German electronic music group that during the 1970s published a series of albums dedicated to celebrating robots, mechanized travel (cars, trains, bicycles), electromagnetic radiation and computers, while trying to escape the hegemonic paradigm of Anglo-Saxon pop, which they considered colonial, and proposing alternative imaginaries with European roots. The workshop aims to explore to what extent those imaginaries could form alternative future scenarios adapted to the requirements of the multiple crises of the 21st century (climate, energy, environmental, social, political). It aims to provoke reflection at different levels:

  • A debate on the social functions of contemporary electronic music, the pioneering role of Kraftwerk and its influence on the current scene.
  • A sociological interpretation of the imaginaries and utopias presented by Kraftwerk’s work.
  • An analysis of the gender and Eurocentric biases of Kraftwerk’s proposal and the extent to which contemporary electronic music has confronted them.
  • A questioning of the capitalist, patriarchal and techno-optimistic mode of musical production, confronting it with a valorization of open knowledge, autonomy and manual technical work.

The workshop will combine two types of activities: i) short communications of sociological and musicological analysis, ii) the participatory production of electronic music with artisanal means, from a hardware-hacking and soft-circuits approach.

Workshop language: Catalan

Facilitator

Josep Espluga-Trenc. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Department of Sociology & Institute of Government and Public Policies. Coordinator of the Minor in Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship, and co-director of the Postgraduate course on Local Agroecological Promotion (UAB). Research on social perception of technological risks, socio-environmental conflicts and eco-social transition processes.

Cooking the apocalypse

We propose a cooking workshop on cooking the apocalypse. The workshop will aim to explore and taste people’s imaginations of the apocalypse with a situated approach. We will invite people to share, through food, what the end of the world might look like for them. What ingredients, food or dishes would they treasure, source, trade or cultivate in a state of apocalyptic crisis and regeneration? 

Before the workshop, participants will receive a questionnaire to prompt them to delineate their own apocalypse, and their own ideas about what foods, what food practices and what tastes they want to take with them for their apocalypse. They will also bring one or several ingredients that allow them to survive their apocalypse. 

The workshop will begin with a presentation of the individual apocalypses and the ingredients that the participants brought. This will be followed by a structured process (like in previous projects by the proposers, such as at Delfina foundation or EASST conference) in which the participants collaborate to create shared dishes from their ingredients. The workshop ends with a shared meal, where these dishes are introduced and eaten together. 

This workshop aims to consider: How narratives around dominant food systems and alternative food practices are imbued with a sense of emergency, crisis and impending apocalypse? How does this play out on a personal level? How do participants situate themselves in multidimensional regeneration responses through food practices?

Workshop language: Catalan

Facilitators

Laura Cuch. Cultural geographer and visual artist engaging with sociocultural food issues, material practices, migration, as well as urban (religious) communities and identities. Her interests in food range from spaces of commensality, community and soup kitchens, alternative food systems, as well as (interfaith) relations and solidarity through food. Her work involves engagement and collaboration with individuals, communities and cultural institutions and uses more-than-representational approaches to knowledge practices to explore the affective and performative potential of visual and participatory methods. Laura is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she co-directs the Kitchen Research Unit. Previously, she investigated food and everyday religious practices of diverse faith communities in West London, through the participatory arts project ‘Spiritual Flavours’.

Michael Guggenheim. Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Michael Guggenheim is a sociologist and STS researcher focusing on the work of experts and their relationship to lay people in various fields such as disaster management, architecture and environmental research. He has pioneered the use of performative experiments to engage lay people in sociological concerns. His interest in food comes from a parallel lay career as a cook and various attempts to bring his sociology to amateur cooks. He has created a large number of events to collaborate in sociological cooking. For example, he has run a sociological cooking class at Akademie Schloss Solitude, he has created new forms of food emergency provision at Delphina Foundation, and most recently has created an exhibition called “Taste! Experiments for the Senses” at the Museum of Natural History, Berlin. Michael is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-directs the Kitchen Research Unit.

After the End of the World: Space, Place and Sound

“It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” June Tyson chants, opening onto Sun Ra’s 1973 jazz piece, Space is the Place. June’s line proclaims a radical ideal: another, alternate world might not only be possible, but may already be here. After The End of The World will be a text and sound art based workshop to imagine, interrogate and sonically reveal what after the end of the world may feel like, embody and how we may encounter it. Taking from Afrofuturist philosophy that end of the world ideas are to be reimagined through sound and sonic possibilities, the workshop reflects the critical lens through which the TANC conference frames end of the world eschatologies. The workshop will introduce the sound work and texts of Black Afrofuturist artists who have, in various ways, creatively envisioned living at the end and edge of a lived apocalypse, namely slavery, colonialism and racial capitalism. Through this critical listening and reading of Afrofuturist text and music, workshop participants will be encouraged to think through the possibilities of starting anew, the ways we can collectively rebuild from the margins and how we are to locate and revive hope and warmth within the ashes. The final section of the workshop will involve a Deep Listening practice of communal sound making to centre the power of the sonic in collective flourishing. 

Workshop language: English

Facilitator

Natalie Hyacinth. Composer and academic creating and thinking about music at the intersections of technology, climate justice and Black life. Natalie’s creative practice and research are intersectional and interdisciplinary, inspired by diverse sonic fields such as free jazz, hip hop, dub and electronic music, while drawing upon conceptual themes from Afrofuturism, Philosophy and Cultural Geography, to Black Studies, Ethnomusicology and Aesthetics. Natalie’s works have been showcased at various festivals such as Ultima Oslo, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Grove and more. Experimenting with sounds and sonic technologies as a form of defiance and resistance, Natalie seeks to create new sound worlds as part of her activism, a creative practice she explores under the name The Black Astral.

Rendered Erasure

An invisible thread connects projects like the much-hyped ‘cognitive city’ NEOM, rising from the Saudi desert, to Trump’s dystopian Gaza Riviera – a vision of ‘peace’ and prosperity imagined atop a land devastated by genocidal war. The same logic appears in Trump’s proposed Freedom Cities, special economic zones and ‘smart’ infrastructures through which capital designs its own quasi-sovereign geographies, bypassing national law while experimenting with new forms of control, surveillance, and bio-technological engineering.

Whether disguised as green transition, start-up utopia, or peace plan, these projects share a single blueprint: the architecture of the future as tech domination. All promoted through AI-generated imagery and immersive storytelling, these renderings do not just illustrate, but shape perception and normalize narratives, blurring the boundaries between imagination and policy. What really matters is not whether they will materialize solid bricks or glossy mirrors, but the perceptual, geopolitical, and economic currents they unleash. Reality has become irrelevant, the image has overtaken it.

Rendered Erasure investigates the aesthetics and politics of these gigaprojects through a compelling hybrid format: a live feed that unfolds as part essayistic lecture, part immersive audiovisual performance. Conceived to mimic the experience of navigating a real-time social media stream, the piece weaves together user-generated material, found footage, and original interviews with people living in the regions most affected by these transformations, from Gaza to Saudi Arabia.

This workshop will present a preliminary version of the work and open a dialogue around the methodological approaches used by the artist collective: from aesthetic decisions and content selection to research strategies and fieldwork practices. The goal is to integrate the insights and critiques emerging from the workshop into the evolving project, enriching it through multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Noura Tafeche. Visual artist, onomaturge, and independent researcher whose practice moves across installation, archival methodologies, experimental laboratories, video, neologism creation, and miniature drawing.

Donatella Della Ratta Donatella. Writer, performer, and curator specializing in networked media, with a focus on the Arab world. She is a former Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, currently teaching Media Studies at John Cabot University, Rome. From 2007 to 2013, she served as Arab world community manager for the international organization Creative Commons. Her research on generative AI earned her the Italian Ministry of Culture ‘Italian Council’ award 2024-25. She is developing her concept of ‘speculative violence’ across multiple  formats, ranging from a book to the lecture performance Ask Me for Those Unborn Promises That May Seem Unlikely to Happen in the Natural developed in collaboration with The Void collective.

Tommaso Campagna. Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences). Practice-based researcher in media studies and a videographer. He is a researcher and editor at the Institute of Network Cultures, part of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His work examines the technical and political dimensions of online video, publishing, and tactical media. He recently co-edited expub | exploring expanded publishing, a book which examines contemporary debates around experimental publishing. He also co-curates THE VOID, a research project and video studio that produces live streams, video essays, and audiovisual publications in collaboration with artists, activists, and academics. His work has been presented, among many, at the Locarno Film Festival, Media-lab Matadero, and Roma Europa Festival.​​​​​​​

Jordi Viader Guerrero. Institute of Network Cultures.

OTHER EXPERIMENTAL FORMATS

What do we regenerate through regenerative practices? A conceptual approach through audiovisual (un)mappings

This session presents a curated selection of short audiovisual works that portray how individuals, collectives, and institutions inhabit the tensions between systemic decline and processes of regeneration. By bringing these situated practices into dialogue, the session proposes an experimental exercise in conceptualization: a collective, real‑time triangulation between the voices of the creators, the audiovisual artefacts, and an evolving cartography that situates the practices within their broader social and political contexts.

Through this multi‑layered lens, participants will be invited to examine whether shared elements, patterns, or criteria emerge that might clarify what constitutes a regenerative practice, while also creating space to question and problematize the concept itself, grounding the discussion in the specific conditions of an end‑of‑an‑era moment. The screening will conclude with an open conversation with the creators to surface convergences, divergences, and the productive ambiguities that accompany any attempt to define regeneration.

Session curator

Rodrigo Canales Contreras. Artist, playwright, performer, and researcher. His work examines performance in social spaces, documentary theatre, political art, and creative methodologies developed in contexts of social and political crisis. With over two decades of experience in theatre practice and academic research in Chile and Spain, he develops transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to creation and analysis. His practice is oriented toward politically engaged forms of artistic expression that address the complexities of contemporary life and critically interrogate dominant patriarchal and neoliberalism frameworks. As a researcher, he focuses on building connections between artists, academic institutions, and professionals from diverse disciplines, fostering collaborative processes that intervene in and contribute to the active dynamics of social space.

Sounding-voicing with trash + more-than-human allies

In this interactive walk, we move in urban spaces inhabited by discarded bodies and quiet, persistent plant and more-than-human allies. We attune to the subtle forces that gather around us: trash, weeds, birds, fallen leaves, roots pushing through asphalt, each carrying stories of survival, refusal, and ongoingness. We seek to make our bodies permeable and porous through letting in the vibrations of the spaces we move through, and that move with(in) us. We seek to leak out onto the pavement, to make kin with bodies enacted as trash and with more-than-human beings performing quiet acts of resilience, present in the cracks, edges, and margins. We seek to attune to their subtleties and sounds and enter into curious collaborations. As we move, we change. As we move, we re-assemble ourselves as/in communities with the discarded and disregarded.

Artist-facilitators

Linda Lapiņa (she/they/it). Knowledge worker, mover and psychologist. I am committed to expanding and multiplying our ways of imagining-enacting nourishing, life-bringing knowledge practices and relations within and beyond academia. I work as associate professor at Roskilde University in Denmark, where my research focuses on urban nature-cultures, multispecies worldings and eco-artistic methodologies. My work is inspired by my Baltic ancestry, learning to listen to plants and soils, waters and forests; and my ongoing movement practice with the multispecies ecologies of Utterslev mose, a polluted and protected urban marshland in Copenhagen.

Rae Teitelbaum (they/them). Visual artist and postgraduate researcher from Syracuse, New York based in Barcelona, working with film, video, performance, installation, poetry, and textiles. Rae is currently an artist in residence at La Escocesa in Barcelona, Spain and is also currently attending Goldsmiths, University of London, where they are finishing an MPhil/PhD in Visual Anthropology remotely. Rae’s PhD is titled Queer Worlding: Exploring Practices of Co-Creation in Queer and Trans Eco-Communities in Rural Spain and Portugal and involves a written dissertation and the production of a feature-length film, called Starry Earth Bodies, hand-made costumes, and performances, which they developed at Can Serrat, an artist residency in Montserrat National Park in Catalunya. Their research applies embodied, visual, and collaborative qualitative methods rooted in queer, intersectional feminist, and decolonial ethics to understand and participate in practices of queer worlding and the development of experimental ways of living in relation to other humans and more-than-human worlds in the Iberian Peninsula.

Agnieszka Bułacik (she/they). Artist, activist, space holder, and facilitator whose transdisciplinary practice interweaves artistic research, performance, and community-based collaboration. Her work centers on sensing, feeling, and deepening connections—to oneself, to others, and to the wider metabolism of planet Earth. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts & Education at the University of Barcelona, where her research investigates collective somatic artistic practices of reconnection co-created with artists and activists from Eastern Europe. Her doctoral work examines how embodied practices of collectivity contribute to processes of repair, resilience, and social transformation. As co-founder of new visions, an arts & education collective, she weaves networks of women and queer artists and activists from Eastern Europe, grounding her practice in queer-feminist and decolonial perspectives.

T.R.A.S.H. Transdisciplinary Research for the Anthropocene: Sense-Making as Humanizing Practice

Information coming soon.