Summer Camp 2024
A Collective Narrative Bricolage
The second edition of the Posthuman Summer Camp, held from August 9 to 13, 2024, was a convergence of body-minds across the globe. Researchers, artists, philosophers, students, and scholars gathered at Naturama to co-create a unique space of shared thought, collaboration, and existence.
This event not only favoured the exploration of diverse themes within posthumanism, but also provided a platform for alternative experiential practices—embodied and embedded—where theory and practice seamlessly merged into a journey of “co-living” for the 21st century.
More than just a meeting, the Summer Camp became a transformative experience, fostering new trajectories for participants to carry forward in their lives. To preserve the essence of this remarkable event, we have compiled impressions, memories, and reflections from some of the Camp participants. The collective bricolage delights in the transversal alliance, expressions of zoe, nonhuman and human, the geo/bio/techno. We hope that these snapshots of energy and emotion will inspire visitors to this page, whether they are future participants curious about joining the next edition or past attendees looking to rekindle the spirit of this unique experience.
As we look toward the 2025 camp, we hope these shared moments resonate with you, inviting you to feel the vitality, depth, and interconnectedness that defined the Posthuman Summer Camp.
"Towards Applied Philosophy /Performative Art /Applied Art /Performative Philosophy"
by Orsola Rignani (Organizer)
The more-than-human (pluriverse), i.e., a hyper-complex, inter/intra-relational, inter/co-implicated world with which the human is entwined in a fluctuating tangle of forces, overlaps, slippages, actions, and feedback, in its manifestation, points to the obsolescence of binarism, dichotomies, (anthropo)centrism and hierarchies and thus contextually to a more-than-human human. But how is/does the human become a more-than-human human? Is there such a thing as a catalyst for this process? Perhaps the anthropo-poiesis of the more-than-human human happens through art.
The sculpture workshop used the interstitials and interstitial spaces as red threads, to understand connections with otherness. Indeed, sculpture opens cracks that allow light to pass through, breaks compactness, deactivates, suspends, encourages, opens to coexistences; it is a metamorphic zone of interception of agencies, it unravels monism and binarism, (re)opens to the multiple and to variety, and restores the porosity of matter, its spongy texture, and its fluidity; in other words it catalyzes the in-betweenness of the human in a more-than-human pluriverse.
If, as we have experimented, art reveals itself, so to speak, as the (rediscovery of the) creative relational force that emerges from the dissolution of human anthropocentric subjectivity, in an anti-anthropocentric and anti-dualist more-than-human perspective, it is not surprising, then, to find under its umbrella suggestions such as that of the abiotic living being aesthetically/artistically implicated (stone as artist, stone art, mineral art, spontaneous and primordial beauty of stones, etc.), that of a universal aesthetic, that of the indistinguishability between natural and human works of art, that of art as a figure of chance, of assemblages (stories with open potentials), of latencies (beginnings in waiting), catalyzed precisely by the artistic process. A process that, with its relational agency, makes a valid contribution to reinforcing the sense of the inter/intra implication of the human with the more-than-human, in the perspective of a more-than-human ‘us’.
Katarzyna Ferworn-Horawa
Kasia (Partecipant)
During one of the sessions I doodled in my notebook. Francesca was with us on-line then, as if connecting from a profound state of her body/mind, as if from one to another, ir/reality.
A drawing which felt safe to, descended from the heaven of our entangled sensitivities. Enjoy!
We are all singular, yet without singularity. Forward we go, measuring and extracting, limiting being with name tags, leaping from trauma to trauma with no memory. Money sacks overflowing with bones, the trajectory of the Big Bang continues outwards, and time, as linear, is mistaken. There are no rest stops in the colonialist cog running on a Tesla-made battery, approved by the Anthropocene. When the material leaves behind the spiritual, and techno-transhumanism races ahead, animal, tree, ocean, and plant are all products, globalised as neo-dogma.
Look closely under the microscope: the molecular universal that traces all. Staring at an ant, we see an ant crawling slowly around a flower and grassy patches of dirt. From the ground, we observe the landscape and all the plants and trees bordering the horizon. Beholding the horizon, our eyes are filled with blue, woolly clouds, and warming rays of sunlight. Returning to the ant, we no longer see the ant, but the entire world, once more, made whole.
"Mug-puddling"
by Nina Maria Szukała (Participant)
"La dent-de-lion"
by Joanna Pascoe (Partecipant)
Consider the creativity in a dandelion gone to seed,
leaping out of the frame,
an affirmative line of flight,
a labyrinthine geometry of potentia,
each dot a possibility
each seed on fairy wings, desiring conatus,
a landing
the hope of a home for a soon-to-sprout body,
roots heading down,
a bright spring green and
wondrous yellow flower head
opening up to the sky,
a small solar explosion of joy as the sun’s rays beam
down on terra-firma
our beautiful Earth.
In the context of Posthuman Studies, attention towards education is gaining increasing significance to address the anthropocentric axioms embedded in contemporary worldviews.
What is posthumanist education? This paper addresses this question affirming the importance of embodying posthumanist theory in practice.
Attention will be dedicated to three original keywords: selves-care; flex(st)ability; commUnity. They will be investigated as possible posthumanist focuses to respond to current educational needs. This paper is not purely theoretical; it is anchored in material experiences that are being explored by posthuman communities worldwide. We will reflect, more specifically, on the Posthuman Summer Camp, a collaborative event organized by the Italian Posthuman Network (Italy, August 10–13 2023).
In this essay, the realities and possibilities that emerged during the first edition of the Camp are embraced as embodied and embedded, experiential and experimental – clearly, existential – praxes, enlightening our vision quest on posthumanist education.
