How can repair, ecological ethics, and artistic practice reshape human relations with more-than-human life?

"Nele Buyst is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project that uses the metaphor and practice of kintsugi to think about the concept of repair and to explore the potential of aesthetic practices to heal modern relations to surroundings. She is interested in feminist arts-based research methods, ecofeminism, and posthumanist philosophy. Alongside her research, she publishes poetry and is an editor of Rekto:Verso, a magazine for culture and critique.\n\nKristien Hens is a full professor in Bioethics at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests include biological concepts, ethics of psychiatry, ethics of postgenomics, and environmental ethics. She has a particular interest in microbes and what they can teach us. She wrote Chance Encounters. A Bioethics for a Damaged Planet and Towards an Ethics of Autism .\n\nChristina Stadlbauer is an artist-researcher with a PhD in Chemistry and graduate studies from Apass, a post-master program for advanced performance and artistic research. Her practice explores relationships between humans and other-than-human life forms—including plants, animals, bacteria, and mycelium—seeking to re-negotiate our environmental connections. Working at the intersection of arts, sciences, and philosophy, Stadlbauer presents her research through installations, performances, rituals, and curated events.\n\nBart H. M. Vandeput (BE/FI), known as Bartaku, is an artist and researcher specializing in Bioart and intermedia art. His transdisciplinary practice explores the human condition through collaborations with plants, microbes, light, energy, and technology, integrating diverse entities, media, and disciplines into installations, interventions, exhibitions, talks, and lectures. He currently directs a research project on microbiomes in the cooling towers of nuclear facilities, involving artists and researchers from four universities in Belgium and Finland.\n\nFranlu Vulliermet is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy working on a normative account of environmental relationships in the context of pollution and epigenetics. His research engages with a variety of schools of thought, including non-Western perspectives informed by his time spent living with Indigenous populations in the Ecuadorian Rainforest. Prior to this, he was a research associate at INSEAD and Harvard Business School."