Future Rains: Propositions For a Multispecies Society 2025-2026


Future Rains follows the rain to understand water and its entanglements. Future Rains converges and challenges artistic and scientific methodologies to surpass an ontological human bias. It proposes a human decentring process that allocates agency to biotic and abiotic factors. The project explores the generative role of artistic practices in the relationship between people and their ecosystems in the Zézere catchment area.

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This project follows the rain to understand water and its entanglements. Future Rains converges and challenges artistic and scientific methodologies

to surpass an ontological human bias. It proposes a human decentring process that allocates agency to biotic and abiotic factors. The project

develops from previous artistic and research experiences to explore the generative role of artistic practices in the relationship between people and

their ecosystems.


The project explores new ways of engaging with water, rethinking its perceptions while contributing to improving water management practices (SDG

goal 6) and taking immediate action on climate change (SDG goal 13). The proposal aims at a more equalitarian and (bio)diverse society with the

potential to expand existing notions of sustainability and green economy to the complexities of a multispecies society where coexistence,

coevolution and empathy are vital markers rather than yielding, competition, exploitation, and domestication of the Other. The investigation focuses

on water and its entanglements: material, biological, aesthetic, nonhuman, cultural, political, economic, and social. Departing from the Zêzere

catchment area, it implements an exploratory study expandable to broader discussions on ecosystem functions, biodiversity, environmental

awareness, and climate action.


The methodological approach combines walking along a long-distance hiking route, producing a photographic project reflecting on the catchment

area, encounters with the population, interviews with water stakeholders to debate and share the project’s findings and contaminate

stakeholders's discourses with more-than-human perspectives, reflection and introspection formulated in a website for future research. The

outcomes include new methodologies for multispecies interactions, improved relationship with water and the natural environment, expanded

notions of ethnographic and environmental engaged practices, re-evaluation of languages and narratives employed in ecosystems functions and

water-management processes; new works of art and several outreaching actions impacting on environmental perception; direct climate action.

The outputs will be materialised in a combination of scientific and artistic propositions: one international peer-reviewed publication, two conference

presentations, a project’s monograph, an exhibition, and a website aggregating and documenting the project for future studies.


In this project, we look forward to the prospect of:

1. Challenge different and complementary perspectives and languages of inquiry, i.e. artistic and scientific.

2. Re-evaluate binary notions of the environment (e.g. Industrial versus Wilderness, Human versus Nature, Us versus Them) and how these

epistemologies detach people from their environment.

3. Investigate the value of decentring the human importance in the world, producing, and discussing novel ways of relating to the more-than-human

world through art-based research to be transposed to other disciplines.

4. Contribute to a more equalitarian and emphatic society among its citizens (biotic and abiotic).



Principal Investigator:

MIguel Santos


Hosting Institution:

LiDA, Arts and Design Research Laboratory, ESAD.CR | Polytechnic of Leiria


Team:

Aprígio Morgado (LIDA - ESAD.CR - Polytechnic of Leiria)

Lígia Afonso (LIDA - ESAD.CR - Polytechnic of Leiria)

Jorge Varanda (University of Coimbra)

Paula Castro (University of Coimbra).

Consultors:

John Wainwright (Durham University, UK)

Patrícia Barbas (ISCTE and Barbas Lopes Arquitetos)


Funding:

2023.11253.PEX - FCT Exploratory Projects in All Scientific Domains 2023. FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.

LiDA - Arts and Design Research Lab, UIDB/05468/2020, with the support of FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.