(Re)present-ing erased More-than-Human bodies through affective methodology
24 February, 16:00 CET
Agenda (~90 min)
- Welcome and introduction to the network.
- Workshop session #2:
Thomas Laurien and Moniek Driesse will share their complementary affective and embodied methods for making absent more-than-human bodies present. Drawing on affect theory and ecofeminist pedagogy, the workshop speakers and participants will explore how sensing, imagining, being and becoming with absence can open learning processes beyond discursive and representational approaches. Together, we will reflect on more-than-human bodies that have been erased, displaced, or rendered invisible, and experiment with how these absences can be imagined and sensed in the present.
- Q&A
The presenters:
Dr Moniek Driesse works at the intersection of research-creation, critical heritage, and environmental justice, and is currently based at University of Antwerp’s Cultural Heritage Sciences research group. With a background in design and architecture, she develops situated and collaborative projects that explore how water and other elements shape more-than-human relations across time and space. Her practice often unfolds through immersive fieldwork, performative mappings, and publishing, examining how memory, care, and power circulate through places marked by inequity, colonial continuity, and environmental precarity. She founded The Imaginary Agency (2011), a platform for situated research and diverse ways of knowing. In Leaving Dry Land: Water, Heritage and Imaginary Agency (University of Gothenburg 2023), she developed an affective methodology to think-feel with water as narrative force, witness, and mnemonic ally. Across writing, walking, swimming, feeling-thinking, performing, co-labouring, and teaching, she explores how imagination can act as both method and form of care—and how reimagining heritage can open space for more just and diverse pasts, presents, and futures.
Dr Thomas Laurien is an artist/designer/curator, educator and researcher based at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg. He is also the chair of the advocacy group The Natureculture Association Shimmer and Entanglements, and co-founder of one of its initiatives, the Species Embassy Viskan-Borås. His research and artistic practice focus on issues of more-than-human representation, and multispecies justice/Rights of Nature. Laurien is an active member of the Confluence of European Water Bodies network where he tries to make the Swedish water bodies Lake Vättern and the watershed Viskan present, and where a collective learning process is taking place on how to implement the Rights of Nature in European contexts. He is also part of the organising team that arranged the Nordic Summit of Species in Aarhus in September 2025.