IPS launches Fall 2025 Online Seminar Series

The Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) opens the fall academic season with five online seminars that bring together artists, researchers, and practitioners to reflect on ecology, technology, and collective futures. Conceived as spaces of critical inquiry and experimentation, these programs extend IPS’s commitment to exploring postnature as a framework for contemporary thought and creation.

Check out our new website to explore our programs, faculty, and upcoming events!

From September to December 2025, participants from across geographies are invited to join these collective learning journeys, each unfolding across four online sessions.

20% discount available for all IPS alumni.

Sound Ecologies
^{Led by Yuri Tuma}

How do the echo of an extinct bird, the clicks of dolphins recorded for interstellar communication, and the persistent hum of extractive machines reverberating across ecosystems resonate together? In each case, sound is not just a trace of the world; it is a force that inspires relations, holds memories, and opens possibilities for resistance and care.
This seminar explores sound as an ecological, political, and queer practice. Listening is never neutral: sonic cultures encode hierarchies of gender and race, colonial violence, and extractive economies. Yet attentive listening also carries the potential to reimagine kinship, generate solidarity across species, and resist capitalism’s demand for endless growth.
Over four sessions, we will navigate across soundscapes, interspecies communication, sonic gendering, and practices of dedicated mishearing. Through theory, artistic practices, visualizations, and collective listening exercises, participants will engage with methods that expand our notion of postnatural ecology in an anthropo-oculocentric society. Together, we’ll ask: what futures emerge when sound and listening are placed at the center of ecological imagination?

Mondays, September 22 – October 13, 2025
18:00–20:00 CEST · 4 sessions · Online via Zoom
→ Register here

Postnatural Matter
^{Led by Gabriel Alonso}

From cloned animals in laboratories, to new minerals forming in industrial ruins, to microscopic plastics circulating in our oceans and bodies—what ties these postnatural phenomena together? Matter is no longer simply “natural” or “artificial”; it is postnatural, transformed through processes that blur the boundaries between culture, technology, and ecology.
This seminar explores the notion of postnatural matter as both a critical framework and a lens to reimagine our relationship with the material world. Matter is not passive, inert, or merely available for human use. It acts, shapes, and conditions our pasts, presents, and possible futures. By questioning the entrenched dichotomy between nature and culture, participants will investigate how contemporary materialities such as genetically modified organisms, synthetic biology, human-made minerals, urban wildlife, and microplastics demand new ethical, ecological, and philosophical perspectives.
Across four sessions we will trace genealogies of contemporary materialities, reflect on melting ecologies and viscous matter, explore kinship beyond the human, and consider how art, science, and philosophy world new material futures. Together, we will ask: how do we live responsibly with the substances, entities, and hybrid forms that now compose our shared planet?

Wednesdays, September 24 – October 15, 2025
18:00–20:00 CEST · 4 sessions · Online via Zoom
→ Register here

4 Degrees of Simulation
^{Led by Julia Nueno Guitart - Forensic Architecture}

Guest speakers: Matthew Fuller, Lucia Rebolino, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, and Bahar Noorizadeh

What connects the tracking of a body reduced to a line as it moves through a stadium crowd, the rainfall sensors scattered across a river basin anticipating monsoon floods, and the satellite images of crop fields that trigger shifts in global wheat prices during wartime? In each case, technologies of sensing, measuring, and predicting don’t simply represent reality—they actively shape it.
This seminar explores sensing as a political and contested practice of knowledge production. Perception is never neutral: infrastructures and techniques determine what is made visible or remains hidden, which claims are amplified or dismissed, whose lives are recognized, and which futures become imaginable.
Over four sessions, artists, curators, and researchers will guide us through the digital and technical environments where their practice unfolds. Together, we’ll examine how modelling and simulation participate in governing bodies, producing evidence, managing risk, or speculating on collapse—and how they can also be reimagined as instruments of inquiry, resistance, and collective imagination.

Mondays, November 3 – 24, 2025
18:00–20:00 CEST · 4 sessions · Online via Zoom
→ Register here

For, Against, After, Towards—Architecture Beyond the Human
^{Led by Filipa Ramos}

Can we conceive of architecture as something more than a human-centered practice? This seminar invites us to rethink design traditions through animal, vegetal, and fungal perspectives, exploring architecture as an interspecies process shaped by collaboration, tension, and fiction.
Rather than seeing architecture solely as the product of human authorship, we will consider how it emerges from entanglements with nonhuman life and material agencies. From the spaces built to host, detain, or exhibit nonhuman beings, to infrastructures inspired by vegetal and fungal cultures, architecture becomes a field where relationships of care, control, domination, and resistance unfold.
Each session, For, Against, After, Towards, marks a different direction through which to approach architecture beyond the human. Drawing on case studies from design, contemporary art, anthropology, and bioacoustics, this seminar examines the inclusive yet violent, collective yet exclusionary dimensions of architectural practice. The aim is to imagine an expanded, interspecies conception of architecture that questions power, redefines materiality, and foregrounds the entangled agencies that shape our spaces.

Tuesdays, November 4 – December 2, 2025
18:00–20:00 CEST · 4 sessions · Online via Zoom
→ Register here

Blue Ecologies ~Sweet
^{Led by Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano}

Guest speakers: Elizabeth Gallón-Droste, Zahra Malkani

Fresh waters—rivers, lakes, wetlands, aquifers—are not passive backdrops to human life but living bodies with their own rhythms, urgencies, and memories. This seminar turns to sweet waters as beings entangled with infrastructure, extractivism, spirituality, and resistance, at a time when climate disruption and colonial legacies place them under increasing threat.
Guided by Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, we will ask: what does it mean to listen to fresh waters as relational and sacred? How can communities—human and more-than-human—live within damaged watery ecosystems, and what embodied strategies of survival, solidarity, and repair emerge from them?
Guest contributors Zahra Malkani (Pakistan) and Elizabeth Gallón-Droste (Colombia) bring situated perspectives from their long-standing engagements with the Indus and Atrato rivers, offering methodologies that weave art, anthropology, activism, and care.
From the emergence of lakes in the Indus Delta to the flood cycles of the Atrato and the droughts of Madrid’s Manzanares, Blue Ecologies ~ Sweet foregrounds how water communicates—and how we might learn to listen.

Wednesdays, November 5 – 26, 2025
6–8 PM (CET) · 4 sessions · Online via Zoom
→ Register here

Registrations are now open.
We look forward to welcoming participants to this fall’s programs, continuing IPS’s mission to weave theory, artistic practice, and ecological thought into new imaginaries for the present.

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