Can we imagine technologies that foster new forms of coexistence between species?
Ports are territories shaped by intense material, economic, and biological flows. The global movement of goods and people also facilitates the unintended displacement of organisms to geographically distant ecosystems, bringing into contact species whose habitats had remained separated for millennia.
Between Species. Ways of Living Together takes these dynamics as a starting point to ask how a species comes to be considered invasive, and what role our infrastructures play in this process. Global transport systems actively intervene in the circulation of life, altering relationships between organisms and territories. From this perspective, what we call invasion becomes entangled with human-made models of mobility and the ecological transformations they produce.
The installation develops a speculative fiction articulated through three interspecies interfaces. Each one contains a science-fiction organism suspended in a transparent medium that evokes a cultivation or life-support system. A mechanical ring slowly travels along the interface and, as it passes across the organism, activates a sequence of light. These encounters suggest possible processes of communication, adaptation, care, or exchange between organisms sharing a transformed ecosystem.
The research engages with Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis and her understanding of cooperation as an evolutionary force; with Donna Haraway’s thinking on the need to learn how to inhabit multispecies worlds profoundly altered by human activity; and with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s research into the ecologies that emerge in disturbed landscapes shaped by the networks of global capitalism.
From these perspectives, Between Species shifts technology away from its conventional role as an infrastructure for circulation and territorial transformation, imagining it instead as a potential tool for mediation. If our infrastructures participate in reorganising life cycles and creating new encounters between species, could we develop technologies aimed at fostering other forms of coexistence?
