GUESTS
David Abram (USA)
Cultural ecologist and philosopher and founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. He is best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. David is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared in a number of publications and anthologies. Abram coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” as a way of referring to earthly nature, a term that has become a key phrase within the lingua franca of the broad ecological movement.
Nikola Benčová (Czech Republic)
She studied Performing Arts, International Relations and is a PhD student at the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University. She is a freelance editor at Radio Wave and a member of the climate justice collective Limits Are Us, where she co-produces the podcast Trhlina. She is dedicated to bringing themes of corporeality and encounters with the more-than-human world into the sphere of academia. She is interested in the intersections of specific spirituality and corporeality, and in how research through body and corporeal imagination can be viewed as a relevant and adequate source of knowledge for the emerging world in which we learn to gently coexist with the landscape that nourishes us.
Barbara Benish (USA)
California-born artist, who moved to Prague in 1992 as a Fulbright scholar. She founded ArtMill in rural Bohemia, an international eco-art centre with the goal of bringing the pressing environmental issues of our time into tangible art forms that inspire, ignite, and engage the public at large. From 2010–2015 she served as Advisor for U.N.E.P. in Arts & Outreach, and since 2015 is a Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center, (University of California). Benish is co-author of Form, Art, & the Environment (2017, Routledge). Her mixed media work critiques historical tropes that have kept unsustainable systems operating, and often celebrates non-human living systems. Benish’s art has been shown in hundreds of international exhibitions, including major museums in New York, Germany, and Prague.
Tomáš Daněk (Czech Republic)
University teacher and interdisciplinary researcher at the Department of Development and Environmental Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc. His research focus is on environmental philosophy and ethics, changes in Western approach to nature, and anthropology and sociology in relation to development and associated issues.
Monica Gagliano (Australia)
Research Associate Professor in evolutionary ecology at Southern Cross University where she directs the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab as part of the Diverse Intelligences Initiative of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own ‘voices’ and detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. Her work has extended the concept of cognition (including perception, learning processes, memory) in plants. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, she has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. Her latest book is Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants.
Lukáš Likavčan (Slovakia)
A philosopher focused on technology, ecology and visual cultures. As a researcher, he was based at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Vienna), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Hong Kong) and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht). Likavčan is a lecturer at Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU (Prague), faculty member at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design (Moscow) and a member of Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice (Prague). He is a co-editor of Czech anthology of contemporary philosophical realism Mysl v terénu. Filosofický realismus ve 21. století (Display / VVP AVU, 2018), and an author of Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019).
Ian Mikyska (Czech Republic)
Composer who mostly works at the fringes of sound – as an author of installations, performances, books and videos. He studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and is currently completing an MA in Directing at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU). He leads the Prague Quiet Music Collective and Stratocluster ensembles. He has also published the book Partitury pro čtenáře. He is the author of the jingle of the public address system in the village of Sedlice in the Pelhřimov region. He works as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Czech Music Quarterly magazine and as a translator from Czech to English.
Hana Nováková (Czech Republic)
Director, indologist and ethnozoologist. Her PhD research focuses on the clash between the Western zoological paradigm and the animistic perception of the world among tribal people in Bengal. As a filmmaker, essayist and a curator she has also been exploring the relationship between humans and other animals, and human alienation from nature. For five years, she was a permanent editor of Czech Television's environmental programme Občanské noviny. She cooperates with the Biology Centre of the Academy of Sciences, the A2 magazine and the ethnobiological anthology Pandanus. She interprets from Bengali for refugees from the sinking Bangladesh.
Jan Roleček (Czech Republic)
Environmentalist, educator and researcher at the Botanical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is an assistant professor at the Department of Botany and Zoology of the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University. He studies ecology and history of vegetation, focusing in his research on phytocenology, phytogeography and paleoecology. Between 2012 and 2018, he led two research projects of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic concentrating on the development of methods for quantitative reconstruction of vegetation during the Holocene using pollen data, and he is currently leading a project of the GACR that consists in the research of soil memory of species-rich steppe meadows.
Ľuboš Slovák (Slovakia)
University teacher and ecologist. He studied computer science and social and cultural ecology. He currently teaches at the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University, where he also leads the international DeepEn project aimed at developing experiential learning methods based on the broad tradition of deep ecology. His work at the Institute of Global Change Research of the Czech Academy of Sciences includes research on the intangible values of nature and landscape. He is interested in the relationship between humans and non-human nature and the transformation of concepts of nature. His professional interests also include ecophenomenology, ecopsychology and philosophy of science.
Vendula Tomšů (Czech Republic)
Visual artist and set designer. She studied at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at DAMU. Her work focuses mainly on original projects for smaller audiences, in which she explores a closer relationship between performer and spectator. This is the case with the performance Veduty (Vedutas, 2017) and Pět knih (Five Books, 2020). She is one of the founding members of the theatre group 8 lidí and the association Zvěřinec, which is dedicated to the development of cultural and community life in the Zlín region.
Andreas Weber (Germany)
Biologist, philosopher and writer. He teaches at Leuphana University and at the University of Fine Arts, Berlin. His work is focusing on re-evaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes understanding organisms as subjects and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. In his 2019 book Enlivenment. Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene he presents an alternative understanding of our relationship with nature, arguing not that humans control nature but that humans and nature exist united in mutual transformation.
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