Bioart Society's eight Field_Notes field laboratory, Field_Notes – Living Methodologies, will take place in Sápmi during 14–24 September 2025. This unique edition responds to shifts in the field of art and science insisting that how we research matters. Half of the working group are invited experts, including theorist, researcher and artist Anastasia (A) Alevtin, artist-researcher Sam Nightingale, practice-led cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, veterinary pathologist and researcher Aleksija Neimanis, and artist and researcher Leena Valkeapää. Other half of the group consists of professionals who applied to the open call we facilitated earlier this Spring, including researcher Ellie Ballentine, research-based multidisciplinary artist Marjolijn Dijkman, visual artist and researcher Hanna Husberg, audio sculptress, sound artist & curator/facilitator Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF), architect Camille Sineau, visual artist Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith, designer/researcher Manuel Díaz Tufinio, and the Zettel & Sivanesan duo. You can read more about all of them below.
Anastasia (A) Alevtin writes and reads as a theorist, researcher and artist. Their work inquires into fleeting instances and established practices of quiet quotidian subversion of the dominant Western normativities lived by non-binary, queercrip, and migratised communities. They play with multi-sensorial and multi-media story-telling, performative gestures, and collective readings in their artistic practice. Their project Dormancy, Reseeding, and Resistance (2024-2025) engages with communal gardening, seed-saving practices and grandmothering in the inflamed contexts of anti-ableism and food in/security—specifically lived by chronically sick and other precarious bodies. With Brandon LaBelle they are developing an Errant Bodies Press book series which focuses on practices of attentional work and dirty theorising. Other recent work includes Aquatic Encounters. A Glossary of Hydrofeminsms co-edited with Elina Suoyrjö, and “terminal socialites” a short artist film that figures a Finnish passenger ferry terminal as a site of greenwashing, migratised struggles and solidarities, made in collaboration with Camille Auer and Joni Judén.
Aleksija Neimanis is a veterinary pathologist and researcher who works with wildlife health and disease surveillance. She studies wildlife health issues, including emerging and re-emerging diseases. Aleksija frames wildlife health findings within a One Health context, in which human, animal and ecosystem health are all connected. Since 2020, Aleksija has been part of an arts-science collaboration Learning Endings together with Astrida Neimanis and artist Patty Chang. Currently, Aleksija leads the Research and Development Section in the Department of Pathology and Wildlife Diseases at the Swedish Veterinary Agency and is Associate Professor in Wildlife Health at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Astrida Neimanis is a practice-led cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Astrida’s international research practice includes collaborations with artists, writers, scientists, makers, educational institutions, and communities, often in the form of experimental public pedagogies. Her 2017 book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds, and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies. Her forthcoming book, co-authored with longtime collaborator Jennifer Mae Haumilton, is called How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change (2026)—an accessible theoretical and practical guide to the redistribution of shelter and vulnerability, guided by anticolonial, antipolarizing and antifascist feminist commitments. Currently, Astrida is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, on stolen territories of the syilx Okanagan people in Kelowna, BC, where she is also Director of the FEELed Lab, established in 2021.
Sam Nightingale is a UK-based artist-researcher working within environmental media. He works with creative methodologies and speculative fieldwork to re-imagine and re-image the spectral-material complexities of settler colonialism, extractivism and their ongoing environmental, ethical, and political impact on human and more-than-human worlds. Sam is involved in various interdisciplinary projects, including conducting field labs and collaborating with rural communities, geographers and social scientists in Europe, Namibia and Australia. He is co-editor of the book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-based Research (2022/24). Other publications include ‘Sensing seaweed and practising photography differently’ in Common Sensing, Centre for Research Architecture #3 (forthcoming); ‘SEETANG’, Journal of Media Studies (2024). He teaches Media Studies in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London.
Leena Valkeapää is a Finnish artist and researcher with a DA (Doctor of Arts) from Aalto University 2011. Since 2004 Leena has lived and worked with Oula A Valkeapää in the Arctic Sápmi. They live up on the fells near Kilpisjärvi village and follow the Sàmi reindeer herding tradition, continuing in Oula A´s heritage. Leena has been producing internationally recognised art and research-driven projects with Oula A. Ther work is based on their mutual dialogue and the artworks emerge from everyday practices. Their art allows an intimate view into the Arctic landscape, where the fates of humans and the reindeer are deeply entangled. Leena is a mentor in Ars Bioartica residence in Kilpisjärvi Biological Station. She is also a visiting researcher in Helsinki University part of Jussi T. Eronen´s group PAES (Past Present Sustainability).
Ellie Ballentine is an Arts and Humanities Research Council PhD researcher at Edinburgh College of Art, with an interest in creative and environmental geographies, multispecies approaches, time and artist's fieldwork practices. She convened the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network (2022-24), through which she arranged field residencies for researchers via the EEHN PhD Lab and was an AHRC/British Council Earth Scholar in 2023. I have undertaken artist residencies and exhibited work in the UK and Iceland. My writing on field recording was published in the sound art journal Row of Trees. This summer, I will be presenting my paper 'Active witnessing in active landscapes: Creative field practices in Scottish conservation' at the Royal Geographical Society's conference panel 'Practicing Vegetal Geographies: Creativities and Beyond'. My paper explores experiences of artist field research, forest temporalities, and the conflicts in working with plants as both collaborators and photographic material.
Marjolijn Dijkman is a research-based, multidisciplinary artist who works with film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores the intersection of culture and other fields of inquiry, strongly focusing on the rapidly changing environment and its human and nonhuman interdependencies. She combines field research with speculative imagination to create works that unfold over multiyear, process-based research projects. These projects result in artworks, exhibitions, publications, and discursive events. The research and production process is often experimental and collaborative, involving scientists, technicians, and artisans. Over the past two decades, she has developed projects that explore diverse forms of knowledge production—including scientific fields such as physics, electricity, astronomy, magnetism, macro-biology, ecology, anthropology, and forms of collective imagination. In 2005, she founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS) with Maarten Vanden Eynde.
Hanna Husberg is a visual artist and researcher who – bringing theory, criticism and scientific research together with art and poetics – often collaborates across disciplines. Developed through several art projects and collaborations her research looks at layered, inconsistent, muddled, unruly, contaminated gatherings of air, inquiring how air has been conceptualised and perceived, and how the construction of environmental imaginaries enables specific ways of engaging with the world and excludes others. Since 2017 she develops Towards Atmospheric Care, with Agata Marzecova, which using installation, lecture-performance, writing and co-learning workshops explores the porous boundaries between the aesthetics, science and politics of air and atmosphere through three studies: As the Air Became this Number; From Aurora to Geospace; New Electronic Ecosystem. She currently works at the Research Center, SKH, and previously worked with the Collective Practices Postmaster course, KKH, Stockholm.
Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF) is an audio sculptress, sound artist & curator/facilitator, poemproducer & intersectional feminist networker. Born in 1969, and raised in East Germany, she has lived and worked in Hailuoto, Finland since 2008. She works with language, sound, listening, voice, and politics, expressed in mixed media, audiovisual live performances, digital communication, sound installations, commissions for radio, movies and theater, exhibitions and conceptual works. Since 2020 she faciliates rec-on.org where she creates space for political sound & listening. She is member of bioartsociety.fi and has faciliateted sound camps around 'sonic wilderness', 'radical mycology' and 'sound as growing' and draws on feminist sound technologies with focuses on political sound and the planetary.
Camille Sineau is an architect based in Lausanne, Switzerland. He explores alternative approaches to architecture through the lens of skills, dwelling, and inhabitation, drawing on anthropological and ecological perspectives to challenge conventional views of architecture, urbanism, and landscape. From 2016 to 2018, he completed a Master by Research in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen under Tim Ingold's supervision, while contributing to socially engaged projects like The Town is the Garden and curating at Peacock Visual Arts. These experiences continue to shape his architectural practice, deepening its connections to politics, ecology, production, and education. Since 2020, Camille has been a teaching assistant and collaborator in Methods of Assembly, led by the British collective Assemble at EPFL. His work engages the social and cultural dimensions of architecture through exhibitions, workshops, and public activities alongside professional practice.
Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith is an American, French-naturalized visual artist currently based in Oslo, Norway. She will complete an MFA at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway in June 2025 and holds an MA in Cultural Mediation from the École du Louvre in Paris, a BFA and a BA in Art History from Boston University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and Atelier Nord in Oslo. Taylor understands the climate crisis as a crisis of perception, and thus capacity for affect. With this in mind, she attempts to cultivate attunement and emotional sensitivity to seemingly abstract or distant geobiological entities like permafrost or biofilms. She collaborates with other species and entities, scientists, poets, dancers and architects in attempt to deconstruct perceived boundaries between scientific and artistic knowledge. Materially, her practice explores the poetic intersections between analog and biological media.
Manuel Díaz Tufinio (he/him) is a Mexican Designer/ researcher based in Helsinki, Finland working at the intersections of ecology, history, contemporary art and design to address collaborative, critical futures around sustainability. He currently is studying a M.A. in Creative Sustainability at Aalto University, Finland. Manuel has worked as a designer and in R&D team at EWE Studio, txt.ure, Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura museum, and taught at CENTRO university. In 2019, he founded Tzompantle, a studio dedicated to exploring Mexico's biological diversity through research and design.
Zettel & Sivanesan have co-convened the Society since 2018, building on earlier work with bee ecologies & alternative economies as Plan Bienen (2014-16). Founded at Nida Art Colony's Inter-format Symposium ‘On Rites & Terrabytes’, its first offering was a performative picnic/guided walk through the Curonian Spit, that laid the groundwork for a cumulative narrative & methodology still unfolding. The Society has since written experimental texts for poetry journal Litmus (2020), presented ‘singing out’ broadcasts & lecture-performances at symposia ‘Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices’, Linnaeus University/Laboratory for Aesthetics & Ecology (2019) and the annual meeting of Society for Social Studies of Science (2021), made a radio play/meditation for Mustarinda’s Lichenfest (2020), hosted a hackathon & jam with lichens via its Photosynth Social Club for Pixelache (2023) and set up its Therolinguistics Reading Group with feminist baker Aliisa Talja at Saari Residence (2024).