how the world speaks: exploring interspecies languages

This ongoing workshop series is a practical and conceptual exploration of how worlds beyond the human speak, and how best to hear them. Delivered both online and in-person for diverse global audiences, this workshop troubles the narrow frame of anthropocentrism, asserting that language is not the sole domain of the human. Across species, scales, and sites, the world speaks. The lexicons of the living earth unfold in many material tongues, with vocabularies that include pheromone, colour, migrational maps, proximity, direction, and decay. Place-based, relational, queer, intergenerational, and polytemporal, the myriad tongues of the multispecies world float, bloom, flow, sing, and sporulate around human endeavours in each moment.

How might we learn to hear interspecies speech, from root systems to waterways? Outside machine-mediated methods, how might we cultivate the multisensorial, imaginative, and embodied attention needed to observe and engage with more-than-human communication?

These sessions examine the ethical questions of interspecies translation and the possibilities for a personal practice of deep listening and creative exchange with a multispecies world, drawing from posthuman and new materialist methods, entangled with embodied and creative inquiry, to build a material lexicon for a chosen species or site. Rather than decoding the voices of multispecies others, we will relearn how to slip into dialogue with the living world as co-creators, and consider critical frameworks for engaging with emergent, urgent discourse on interspecies communication.