This year, Shaping Bonds zooms in on different so-called undesired microcosmic environments that surround us, asking what they might teach about coexistence. On the opening night, two of the participating artists — Venus Jasper (NL) and Madeline Schwartzman (US) — will be invited to explore other ways of organising life through a renewed imagination.

In this hybrid artist talk and embodied reflection, Venus Jasper (Stinky Mirrors) shares work from their multi-year project Wetlands Worship; an artistic exploration of speculative kinship with wetlands and a revival of possible swamp spiritualities. Interspersing fragments of art, Venus offers queer and neurodiverse perspectives on how the swamp offers pathways into a deep ecological and somatic kinship—one beyond the confines of secular modernity and colonial-capitalist frameworks of the natural world. Exploring the notions of nervous-system regulation and the sacred, the artist asks: how can the swamp offer us templates for recomposing ourselves in times of collapse? how to reconnect with more-than-human accomplices, as we attempt to hold space for emotional, ecological, and cultural breakdown?

Madeline Schwartzman dives into her newly published book Alive, which challenges established ideas about what it means to be alive. The book identifies entities on the cusp of the living, including synthetically produced biological beings like a silicone jellyfish propulsed by cells from a rat’s heart, a drone that navigates by smell using a moth antenna, predatory biomimetic robots that replace living ones driven away by the climate crisis, memoirist chatbots that return to tell their story after a brief and explosive life on social media, and other uncanny creations, both real and speculative, that draw from art and science.