​Symbiotica is a simple idea: we are made with nature. Not next to it. Not visiting it on weekends. Our lives and the lives around us shape each other, all the time.

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While human culture provides enormous opportunities to change and improve our lives, we cannot escape the fact that we rely on this world we co-evolved with.

 

Why it matters

 

If we’re co‑made, then how we grow food, build homes, generate and use power and move around—these choices feed back into the living systems that also make us.

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Breathing together: Trees produce much of the oxygen we breathe and transform the CO2 we exhale.

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Food on the table: Bees and other pollinators help make fruit and veg possible.

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Cooler streets: Shade from trees can drop summer heat on a street by many degrees.

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Gut companions: Microbes in and on us help train our immune system and do many other really essential things; without the good ones we would not survive (I am a community).

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Symbiotica, through music, digital projections and story, practices noticing these ties, celebrating them and acting from them.

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It is not so much about being nice to nature but more about living as part of nature.

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Sometimes this feels beautiful.

 

Sometimes it feels more like coping and surviving.

 

Other times it is about repairing the damage we have caused.

 

Living with and restoring nature does not mean humans are bad or that nature is always kind. Rather, it is a way to pay attention and act with care.

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Our inescapable entanglement with the more-than-human world is increasingly understood by individuals, communities, governments and the international community, resulting in initiatives and actions to protect biodiversity and where possible, return land and oceans back to nature.

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From the UN led 30 by 30 project to return 30% of land and oceans back to nature by 2030, to the work of rewilding our cities, protecting, repairing, and returning land to nature is an essential part of reversing biodiversity loss and rebuilding a sustainable future for all life  

 

This project is an artistic celebration of this broad ambition.

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Symbiotica will

 

• Help awaken or remind our consciousness that human beings are but one part of the family of life on which our own being depends

 

• Provide an artistic opportunity to experience the sublime, the complexity and the beauty of the living world

 

• Reflect the more-than-human in a scientifically rigorous and artistically creative way

 

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This proposed new show will probably have three sections, each with a different focus and addressing a different ecological level:

 

The One

The individuality of non-human animals, their levels of consciousness, vulnerability to pain and desires to express their own natures has been catastrophically overlooked or ignored by most contemporary societies. Yet, the scientific evidence for all these things is growing at an extraordinary rate. Cows, if given the opportunity, can forge deep friendships, pigs can grieve the loss of companions, and some fish species have culture and powerful memory. The more we learn, the more we see birds, mammals and fish demonstrating remarkably diverse personalities. Every individual has their own ‘umwelt’; the unique way they relate to the world. This has profound ethical and practical consequences for human treatment of ‘animals’. There are wonderful, if not troubling stories to tell about lives of individuals.

 

The Many

 

Individuals can only exist as part of a diverse ecological community. This is as true for the human animal as it is for other animals. The misplaced ideas of the sovereign individual or the constitutive human/nature divide undermines our ability to create a sustainable future. All species, including humans, live inside nature, and our future is entangled with its health and vitality. The more we learn about this profound entanglement, the greater the wonder and joy that we can experience. Understanding our place in ecological communities is a cornerstone for humans long term survival. 

 

The All

 

Humans need to return land to nature in order to reverse the extraordinary levels of ecological destruction that our actions have wrought upon the world. Non-humans, just like humans, need places to live, and diverse and healthy ecosystems require place and scale. This cannot be a call to push human people out of landscapes, for many peoples have lived, and still do live, in ecologically respectful and beneficial relationships with the other beings around them. But the vast clearing of forests and the planting of endless mono-cultures and reckless plundering of oceans is pushing up against or exceeding the ecological limits of planetary boundaries. Returning much of this land and oceans back to nature is now both feasible, essential and urgent.

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