How the World Speaks- Tuning into Language Beyond the Human

Half-day workshop | CERES, Naarm (Melbourne) | April 19, 2025 | 11am–4pm

There are better ways to be human than the colonial-capitalist habits we’ve inherited.

If we weren’t raised with cultural practices that teach us how to attune, connect, or relate to lifeways beyond the human—then we must learn them.

In an era of deep rupture and ecological precarity, learning to tune our bodies, practices, and attention toward more-than-human worlds is vital groundwork for collaborative earthly survival, reciprocity, and repair.

How can we listen closely to lives unlike our own?
What is the language of mountains?
The syntax of seaweed?
How do mycelial networks, migratory birds, or wind-carved stone speak?
What is the grammar of a planet unfolding across scent, vibration, gesture, decay?

From slug trail to shoreline, the world is in conversation—if we learn how to listen.

This half-day workshop explores the possibilities and complications of attending to multispecies communication. Through slow observation and sensory practice, we’ll explore meaning made through colour, scent, chemistry, pulse, quake, and flow.

Beginning from Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative concept of therolinguistics (nonhuman languages), and drawing from decolonial, new materialist, and posthumanist methods, we’ll move through reflective and embodied activities that open us to more-than-human language and explore what it is to cultivate meaningful attention, and what futures might be possible when the voices of a multispecies world are included in the conversation.

Suitable for all creatively, critically or ecologically inclined humans.

Facilitated by Audax. M . Gawler

Audax is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and world-builder exploring multispecies futures, more-than-human agency, and ecological world-making. Drawing from a decade of facilitating ecologic connection and multispecies awareness, their work focuses on dismantling the nature/culture divide through creative practice. You can see more on their work at https://www.audaxaudax.com/