Welcome to the Ecological Imaginations Lab
Our lab is our artist's studio.
The Ecological Imagination Lab is home to our inquiries into how we perceive, participate in, and make relationship with a world undergoing profound change. We follow what feels urgent to us, at our own pace, without knowing in advance where it will lead.
We call these Systems Artistry Action Research Inquiries. They bring our lived experience into contact with systems practice, research, fieldwork, artistic practice and unlikely encounters, sometimes over an afternoon, sometimes over seasons. This is not externally commissioned work, and it doesn't emerge from a deliverable.
Some inquiries hold invitations for others to join, some become films, writing, maps, practices and other forms, and others simply change how we live and work.
Ecotonic Methods
We call our methods ecotonic: distinct ecosystems held in ongoing contact, where their differences, frictions and contradictions create new perspective and possibilities.
Different epistemologies disclose different aspects of reality, and systems artistry involves becoming skilled at moving among them without collapsing their differences. Concretely: what happens to an inquiry when systems thinking and signal tracking meet somatic and decolonial practice, clowning and death doula training?
The discipline is in knowing which register a moment calls for, and when the method itself may be preventing us from seeing what is there.
Temporal fluidity
Grief has its own pace, and so does building trust with a river, a fungal network or an ancestor.
We do not compress an inquiry to fit a programme length, a grant cycle or external schedules. An inquiry may travel with us for an afternoon or for years, go quiet for a while, change shape, or return somewhere we weren't expecting it. We stay with things until they indicate otherwise.
Some of what happens here stays here. Some becomes artefact: song, article, film, embodied practice, form. Some finds its way into the work we do with others, though that is a consequence rather than a purpose.
Working at the root
Long before a system becomes unjust, it becomes possible because something was agreed generations ago about not being kin to the water, the forest, the fungal web.
The Lab is where we work on what follows from taking this seriously. Grieving before strategizing. Sensing before deciding. Belonging to a wider kinship before intervening in it. Holding more than one paradigm long enough that a genuinely new one can appear. Learning the difference between a mark that repeats the old story in new language and one that sings back a new tone.
That is what the Lab is for.