The panel explores creative techniques for growing relations and resilience over long flows of time and space through work with communities, embodying ancient and emergent cultural practices in ways that are woven with the life of the Land.

In nature, flocks embody a dynamic collective unity, a convergence of energy. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, a saying composed by Tumatahina of Te Aupouri goes:

Te kuaka marangaranga, kotahi manu i tau ki te tahuna: tau atu, tau ra.


‘The godwit flock has arisen; one bird has come to rest on the beach: others will follow.’

Ecoimaginaries brings together creative collectives, Indigenous artists and cultural workers, creatives who work closely with the fluid dance of flocks, swarms, soil and mycelia networks, and the interdependence of peoples. Panelists consider how plural imaginings of creative technologies serve vital and more-than-human ecologies - from seed archives growing protected commons in germplasm, to digital embodied networks for community knowledge, and transcultural media art installations connecting with trees and migrating birds. Emphasising that technologies, as much as animal ecologies, are expressions of place and specific locales, our focus is to learn from long-term ecological engagements across communities, art and alternative technology cultures working for eco-social transformations.

Ecoimaginaries is designed with communities and collectives who are working with the land to grow ecologies of creative practice, imaginative activism and the new commons in deep connection with Indigenous perspectives.

This panel explores several creative projects that demonstrate how art and design can make multi-species metabolic landscapes of consumption, digestion and excretion sense-able to humans. We examine embodied and sensual methods that connect matter and situated material and bodily practices across time and space. We discuss human manure composting, heavy metal refining from human faeces, giant holobiont networks, mycoremediating textiles, and collaborative, and multi-species and multi-sensory participatory workshops, positioning bodies as thresholds in metabolic relations where acts of eating are webs that weave community and social relations through intimate and taboo digestive processes.