Relational Ecologies: Perception, Mobility, and Collective Form

About the Symposium

June 24, 2026 | 10 a.m.–4:20 p.m.
Venue: The Home of The Human Safety Net at the Procuratie, 105 Piazza S. Marco, Venice

Relational Ecologies: Perception, Mobility, and Collective Form brings together artists, designers, curators, and researchers to examine how creative practice responds to increasingly interconnected social, cultural, and institutional conditions. At a moment marked by technological mediation, intensified migration, and rapidly shifting cultural infrastructures, the symposium considers how contemporary creative practitioners are developing alternative modes of inquiry capable of engaging the complexity of the present.

The Symposium approaches relational ecologies as a framework for understanding how perception, memory, cultural meaning, and lived experience emerge through relations between bodies, materials, histories, infrastructures, and systems of exchange. Rather than treating artistic production as secondary to theory or representation, Relational Ecologies positions creative practice itself as a form of critical and situated inquiry grounded in embodied experience, material experimentation, collaborative processes, archival engagement, and curatorial practice.

Across multiple sessions, presenters examine collaborative research structures, perception and cultural interpretation, and the movement of archives, narratives, and identities across diasporic contexts. Spanning art, design, documentary practice, curatorial research, participatory media, and interdisciplinary inquiry, the symposium explores how creative practitioners are rethinking inherited models of authorship, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural production through collective and process-oriented forms of practice.

Thresholds of Perception: Rethinking How We Know

10 a.m.–12:20 p.m.

This session brings together presentations on relational artistic practice, curatorial research, textile-based design inquiry, and the transformation of industrial space into cultural infrastructure. Speakers examine how creative work shapes the ways memory, perception, and cultural experience are documented, interpreted, and shared. Topics include ethical collaboration in contemporary art practice, curating as a form of knowledge production, object-making as a tool for recording lived experience, and the role of museums and cultural institutions in constructing collective narratives. The session ultimately considers how artists and curators shape the interpretation and circulation of cultural memory and lived experience.

The session will feature presentations by:

• Sara Wilson McKay — A Surplus of Vision: Collaborative Revolutions and Ethical Answerability in Relational Creative Practices
• Tirdad Zolghadr — I Knew This Would Happen: Revisiting Epistemic Boundaries in Contemporary Art — A Curatorial Perspective
• Maryam Al-Homaid —Nostalgic for the Present: Object-Making as a Tool for Documenting of the Now
• Caroline Hancock —Translating a Flour Mill Into an Art Museum

The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Chase Westfall, Co-Curator of Aghrab Idrak and Head of Gallery at VCUarts Qatar.

Translocal Knowledge: Archives, Diasporas, and Circulations

2–4:20 p.m.

This session explores how artists and researchers use archives, documentary practices, participatory media, and embodied forms of storytelling to examine migration, displacement, and cultural memory across diasporic contexts. Presentations address family photographic archives, VR-based emotional archives, documentary practices across diaspora, and material histories carried through dress, gesture, and everyday objects. Across these projects, speakers consider how memory is reconstructed through translation, reenactment, fragmentation, and acts of repair. Together, the session examines how archives function not as fixed records of the past, but as living spaces through which histories, identities, and forms of belonging are continually interpreted, carried forward, and reimagined.

The session will include presentations by:

• Hawa Stwodah and Sara Reed — Between Leaving and Arrival: The Body as a Quiet Archive)
• Dr. Semi Ryu — Sentiment Voice
• Paul Thulin-Jimenez — Archipelagic Documentary: Building Puerto Rican Memory Across Island and Diaspora
• Rola Khayyat — Wander Lines

The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Hesperia Illiadou, Co-Curator of Aghrab Idrak, Director, and Museums and Exhibitions Study Society in Venice.