This performative lecture invites AVU researchers to consider how research can emerge from everyday encounters with more-than-human life. Drawing on work in the Gulf of Bothnia—where seals, microbes, algae, fishers, and regulators co-shape coastal futures—it explores how food can operate as both method and mediator in multispecies inquiries.

Using edible artefacts such as a placenta cake and other off-centre ingredients, the session examines how aesthetic and moral tensions become tangible when tasted rather than merely discussed. These dishes act as small portals into larger questions: Who participates in shaping the futures we imagine? Whose needs and desires—human or otherwise—are centred? And what happens when research begins not with representation but with sensory, embodied encounter?

The keynote demonstrates how artistic researchers can use food to sense multispecies relations, unsettle familiar moral frames, construct unsettling sensory data representations, and co-create “new-old” futures rooted in shared ecological entanglements.

AVU Research Groups: Forming Fields

Research Groups: Forming Fields – Event Schedule