How might we, within a more-than-human world, contest the notion that participation requires ‘having a voice’? And what might participation look like within the ‘pluriverse’, where multiple positions, power relations, ‘voices’ and experiences are involved?

Zsófia Szonja Illés will present some of her artwork and research that explore sensory ways of embodied engagement with more-than-human landscape and natural phenomena – that would otherwise often remain inaccessible to human experience.
Zsófia will present her soundscape work from Barcelona (2021) and her current Phd research that is taking place at the flood meadows of the river Tisza at the Great Hungarian Plain (‘Alföld’). She will share about the methods of more-than- human sensory ethnography that are used within her research to ethically engage with the more-than-human world, and to explore the entangled relationship of flood meadow farmers with the ever changing landscape dominated by water.

Having delivered a diverse body of collaborative work internationally Zsófia Szonja Illés has worked with experts across art, design and architecture to create work that is socially and environmentally driven. She is a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and a land researcher at MOME (the Moholy-Nagy University of Design) in Budapest where she is currently completing a PhD in ‘More-than-human Placemaking’. Her research challenges human-centered notions of design to explore ways in which notions such as ‘having a voice’ can go beyond the metaphorical to mobilise alternative voices and experiences of the landscape.

Talk was hybrid / on site at KISD and recorded: