Archive

Composting Knowledge: Art, Ignorance, and Multispecies Thinking

Miguel Santos

RESEARCH SEMINAR OPEN CLASSES
NOVEMBER 4TH OF 2025, 2.30PM
ROOM 19 EP.2 – ESAD.CR

The seminar departs from an artistic and investigative practice that approaches art as a process of reorganizing the world. Through observation and attentiveness to the more-than-human, the work asserts itself as a field of experimentation in which matter, image, and language mutually compost one another—giving shape to ways of knowing nourished equally by knowledge and ignorance, in a continuous process of fermentation.
The session invites us to think of artistic practices as processes of knowledge in motion—capable of decentering human-centered approaches and redistributing the sensible through multispecies relations and ecologies of coexistence. In this context, artistic practice and research emerge in consonance—as exercises in listening, composition, and transformation that arise from living with other beings, places, gestures, and materials, actively participating in the creation and reorganization of the common world.

Miguel Santos is an artist and researcher at the Laboratory for Research in Design and Arts (LiDA), ESAD.CR, Polytechnic of Leiria. His practice bridges methodologies from art and science to investigate the interdependence of subjectivity and nature, exploring forms of creation addressed to nonhuman beings and geomorphic systems as a way to recentre the human role in the world and to imagine possibilities for a multispecies society.
He holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Sheffield Hallam University (UK, 2011) and has developed work in international art and research contexts—including the California Arts Institute, the German Cancer Research Center, and the Department of Geography at Durham University—exploring the intersections between ecology, materiality, and artistic practice.