Welcome to the Ecological Imagination Lab

Our lab is our artist's studio.

This is where we follow our feet for what feels urgent to us, at our own pace. We gather around live questions and run our Systems Artistry Action Research Inquiries: experiments in how we perceive, participate in, and make relationship with a world undergoing profound change. This is it not commissioned work.

Ecotonic Methods

We call our methods ecotonic: two ecosystems held in ongoing contact rather than blended into something homogeneous.

Concretely, systems thinking and signal tracking meet somatic and decolonial practice, clowning, and death doula training. Data and dreaming both belong here. 

The discipline is in knowing which register a moment calls for. 

Temporal fluidity

This is slow work on purpose. 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 a board's schedule.

Some of what happens here stays in the room. Some becomes artefact: song, article, film, embodied practice, form. Some eventually 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 that 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.