More-than-human worlds on the move: reframing and exploring migration from a multispecies perspective in art
Migration, understood as the movement from one location to another with the intent to settle temporarily or permanently, is fundamental to history and life on this planet. While postcolonial, Marxist and feminist scholarships have diversified discussions on migration, including in art history, these perspectives often retain a predominantly human-centric focus. However, migration extends beyond humans, encompassing plants, animals, fungi and other more-than-human organisms. Their movements are shaped by factors such as –but not limited to– climate change, extractive practices, habitat destruction, trade or hunting.
This panel explores other-than-human migrations in art and visual culture across historical and contemporary contexts. It considers representations, implications and intersections with histories of colonisation, globalisation, and environmental change. By expanding discourse on migration as embedded within larger ecological systems and networks, this session aims to demonstrate the critical, theoretical, speculative and epistemological potential of art practice and history for shaping multispecies narratives.
Themes include the migration of seed and plants, with reflections on the concept of so-called “invasive alien species”, to interspecies empathy, and borders systems. By shifting focus beyond the human, this session highlights the critical role of art and visual culture in engaging with and shaping multispecies narratives on migration.
Session Convenors:
Anne Daffertshofer, University of St Andrews
Eszter Erdosi, University of Edinburgh
Speakers:
Johanna Spanke, Universität Hamburg
“Invasive Alien Species”: Imaginations of Plant Agency and Migration in Iván Argote`s Descanso
Plants have played a central role in colonization processes. Together with humans, plants have crossed spaces through trade and travel. They have been transported to places far from their origin and are now part of the entangled postcolonial experience of the present. Like colonial monuments, they carry the memory of colonial violence and exploitation – a memory that is often overlooked.
Since the global protests in 2020, artists have repeatedly used plants to aesthetically reframe colonial monuments and deconstruct the ideas of oppression and subjugation associated with them. Within these decolonial artistic practices, plants become allies in the dismantling of colonial hegemony. My lecture analyzes the resistant potential of plants in monumental interventions using the example of the work Descanso by Iván Argote. The installation consisted of a copy of the Columbus Monument in Madrid, displayed as a ruin in the Giardini at the 2024 Venice Biennale and overgrown with local and migrant plants. In what seemed like a story of late revenge, the plants devoured Columbus, perforating his sculptural body. The plants, once forced to migrate by colonial processes, were now reclaiming space. Columbus, on the other hand, once a self-determined migrant, was forcibly transported by the artist from Madrid back to his home country of Italy and laid to rest as a useless symbol. Within Argote’s monumental intervention, I suggest, plants don’t function as a passive backdrop but have their own agency. They become decolonial agents – to which extent, however, will be discussed as a main focus of my presentation.
Chiara Juriatti, Catholic Private University Linz
Seeds of Subversion: Multispecies Migrations and Decolonial Histories in Thereza Alves’ Seeds of Change
This paper examines how Maria Thereza Alves’ Seeds of Change uses seeds as symbols of resilience and agents of migration within European port cities, drawing attention to planmigration as an ecological and historical phenomenon intertwined with colonial practices.
Through her creation of a floating garden filled with ballast flora, Alves transforms these migrated plants into living archives that reveal multispecies perspectives on colonialism, trade, and biodiversity. By following the routes of these plants—introduced unintentionally via ballast on trade ships—this project highlights how seeds, as cultural archives, embody histories of forced migration, habitat disruption, and ecological adaptation. In exploring how these “migrant” plants adapt and integrate into new ecosystems, Seeds ofChange engages with the complex entanglements of plant, human, and land relationships, challenging the colonial legacy embedded within the movement of non-human species. The project underscores the importance of multispecies storytelling to disrupt human-centric narratives in art and cultural history, presenting seeds as both witnesses to and participants in processes of cultural and ecological transformation. This paper aims to illustrate how Alves’ intervention reclaims the archive as a site of power through seeds’ preservation, and how these collective botanical histories foster an expanded view of decolonial memory in contemporary art.
Tijen Tunali, University of Rennes 2
Unbounded Migrations: Art, Ecology, and Multispecies Narratives Across Borders
Through an analysis of artworks from the exhibition Start Sniffing at Vienna’s Kunsthalle Exnergasse that focuses on collaborations between human and nonhuman artists, to challenge entrenched anthropocentric perspectives (Schuster, 2024) and the works of artists such as Ivana Filip, Betsy Damon, and Agnes Denes, this study questions if art can serve as a critical reflection for rethinking migration discourses beyond human exceptionalism. A key concern of this analysis is the evolving legal status of nonhuman entities and the enduring hierarchies that persist in Western taxonomies since Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (1986), which categorized animals based on utility rather than agency and the changing discourse since the “animal turn” in the humanities (Singer 1975). The discussion situates the implications of recent legislative changes in Europe that reclassify animals as sentient beings while maintaining restrictive protections for wildlife (Hinfray 2024) and underscores the limitations of legal recognition alone in addressing speciesism (Di Concetto 2023). The presentation underlines historical and philosophical shifts within posthumanist, historical materialist and eco-critical debates and aligns with the discourse of “living politics,” (Reynolds 2007, Chance 2021, Hohlfeldt and Popescu 2023) to interrogate if multispecies ethics and care with migratory and roaming animals can allow a more-than-human right to the city. Through this framework, the presentation underscores the transformative potential of artistic practices in fostering new paradigms of ecological ethics and interspecies care while advocating for a materialist and politically engaged understanding of nonhuman agency and migration.
Katherine Gregory, Wake Forest University
Illegal Crossings: Animals, Art, and Thwarted Migration at the US-Mexico Border
As America barrels toward a second Trump presidency, ecologists and climate change activists are bracing for the promised dismantling of the EPA. Additionally, Trump ran on the promise to crack down on immigration and continue to “Build That Wall,” which likely lead to fortifications of the US-Mexico border infrastructure. In the current era of criminalizing immigration and cross-border movement, both human and nonhuman critters on either side of the “wall” experience thwarted movement, barriers to natural migration, and increased violence at the hands of state actors. This paper explores three related contemporary practices: Alejandro Prieto’s “Border Wall” photographs, which capture the physical struggles animals face in response to the border wall; Richard Misrach’s “Border Patrol Target” series of photographs taken at the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge in Texas; and Sky Island Alliance’s Border Wildlife Study, a guerrilla data-gathering fieldwork project that tracks how animal and plant species’ migration has been thwarted by the border wall. This paper draws on ecocritical scholarship by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, border discourses by Edgar Picazo Merino and Linda Vallejo, and political histories of the US-Mexico border in the 21st century.