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
This session explores the intersections of art, history, and multispecies migration within ecological systems, drawing on exhibitions such as Start Sniffing at Vienna’s Kunsthalle Exnergasse, curated by Lena Lieselotte Schuster. The show examines ways to challenge entrenched anthropocentric perspectives, using art to reveal new frameworks for understanding migration as inherently multispecies and ecological (Schuster, 2025). By situating migration within these broader networks, this session highlights the critical, speculative potential of art for rethinking migration discourses.
A foundational context for this inquiry is the shifting legal status of animals in Western law. Since 2015, France and other nations have reclassified animals from “property” to “sentient beings,” reflecting changes in public attitudes toward animals since the “Animal Turn” in the 1960s (Singer, 1975). Yet, hierarchical classifications persist, as shown in ancient taxonomies like Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, which divides animals into useful and wild categories (Isidore, 1986). Modern European policies maintain similar divisions, often limiting protections for wildlife (Di Concetto, 2023).
Contemporary artists like Ivana Philip address these gaps in policy, offering grassroots models of interspecies empathy. Philip’s documentary on the cohabitation of free-roaming cats and local residents in Split, Croatia, exemplifies “living politics” through community-driven interspecies coexistence (Philip, 2025). This session thus contributes to multispecies migration studies by showcasing art’s role in reshaping ecological and ethical narratives.
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.