The Fish and the Artist as Ecologist: The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of Two Books

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher and writer based in London. He is the author of Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History (Bloomsbury, 2025), Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury: 2021), Technic and Magic: the Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Last Night (Zero Books, 2013). He is a Lecturer in World-Building at Diploma 19 at the Architectural Association (London), Lecturer in Intellectual History at the MA Fine Arts at ECAL (Lausanne), Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (London) and was previously Critical Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools (London) and Frances A Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute (London). He works as rights director at the UK/US radical publisher Verso, and as editorial co-director at the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo, which he co-founded.​ Campagna has a PhD from the Royal College of Art (London), with a thesis on Metaphysics and Metaethics in the Design of Strategy Video Games. He was the creator of the Library of Worlds at the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, Summer Exhibition 2024, later moved to LUMA Arles in 2025, and he was the host of the podcast Overmorrow’s Library, produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Campagna was philosopher in residence at LUMA Museum in Arles, (2024), and at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’arte contemporanea (2022).

Carlos Casas (b. 1974, Barcelona, Spain) is a filmmaker and artist whose practice encompasses film, sound and the visual arts. In 2024, Casas represented Catalunya at the Venice Art Biennale with his work, Bestiari, curated by Filipa Ramos. His works have been presented in international exhibitions such as Shanghai Biennale, Bangkok Biennale, and Istanbul Biennial. His films have been screened and awarded in festivals around the world, like the Venice Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Buenos Aires International Film Festival, Mexico International Film Festival, CPH DOX Copenhagen, FID Marseille, and many others. Retrospectives of his films have been presented at international festivals and cinematheques From Madrid to Mexico to Bruxelles. His work has been exhibited and performed in international art institutions and galleries, among which Tate Modern, London; Fondation Cartier, Palais de Tokyo and Centre Pompidou, Paris; NTU CCA, Singapore; Hangar Bicocca and La Triennale, Milan; CCCB, Barcelona; Matadero and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MAAT, Lisbon; GAM, Torino; Bozar and Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Bruxelles.

Daisy Hildyard is author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). She lives in the north of England.

Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser) is an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses. H/D aspire toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. They skew the linear imagination of time and space to produce divergences that elicit critical wonder. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and histories of migration, transnationalism and environmental cosmism to learn from the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. They are concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. Hylozoic/Desires use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.

Hylozoic/Desires work has recently been exhibited at Serpentine, London; Desert X, CA; Shanghai Biennale; Biennale Gherdeina; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Swiss Institute, NYC; Serendipity, Goa; MACBA, Barcelona among others. More recently, they have participated in the Sharjah biennale and the Bukhara biennale. They have had solo exhibitions at Somerset House and Tate Britain in London. Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences and entanglements. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. David Soin Tappeser is an artist, drummer and composer based between London and New Delhi. His practice explores socio-eco-spiritual-tempo-somatic dimensions of sound. His performances and compositions use rhythm as their primary medium. They explore intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference while thinking about environmental destruction and sociopolitical fissures.

Daisy Lafarge is a writer and artist based in Glasgow. She is the author of a novel Paul (Granta 2021), which won a Betty Trask Award, and a poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. Lovebug, a book on the poetics of infection, was published by Peninsula Press in 2023. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2027. 

Miranda Lowe CBE is a principal curator and marine invertebrate specialist at the Natural History Museum, London. She has a deep interest in the politics of natural history display of both fauna and flora, the role that art, science and museums play in our understanding of the natural world. Miranda was awarded a place on Radio Four BBC Women’s Hour Power List 2020: Our Planet as a woman whose work is making a significant positive contribution to the environment and the sustainability of our planet. She is also the Chair of UK arts charity Culture& and co-founder of Museum Detox, a network for people of colour who work in galleries, libraries, archives, museums and the heritage sector.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an academic, artist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, and Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is also the recipient of a Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Antwerp/Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts. Her many publications include, among others, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, for which Povinelli was awarded the Lionel Trilling Prize, and The Inheritance, a graphic nonfiction memoir. She has made over ten films with the Karrabing Film Collective. The Collective has received multiple prizes including Eye Award, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, The Visible Award, and the Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival. Povinelli’s drawings have been shown in multiple galleries, including a collection on permanent display in the Museo della Civiltà, Roma.

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a writer and curator. Her practice-led research focuses on how contemporary art engages with nature and ecology. She is Lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and Artistic Director of Loop Festival, Barcelona, dedicated to fostering artists’ cinema. Ramos was curator of the Art Basel Film sector (2020-24) and a founding curator of the online artists’ cinema Vdrome (since 2013). With Lucia Pietroiusti, she is the curator of the arts, humanities and science festival, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (2018-onwards). Recent projects include BESTIARI, the Catalan representation at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), Songs for the Changing Seasons for the 1. Klima Biennale Wien and in 2022, Persones Persons, the 8th Biennale Gherdëina (both with Pietroiusti). In 2021, she co-curated Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale. Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist (2025) pursues her key investigation of art’s engagement with environmental thought and action.

Curator, programmer and strategist Lucia Pietroiusti stewards research and experimentation at the intersection of art, ecology and systems. She is Head of Research & Emergence at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam, working towards the opening of the Hartwig Museum in 2028. Pietroiusti was the founder of Serpentine’s General Ecology project (2018-2025) and the curator of Sun & Sea (Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, and ongoing tour). Publications include The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos, 2025) and More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier., 2020). She is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Forma Arts, London.

Chris Watson was a founding member of the influential Sheffield based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. As a freelance composer and sound recordist Watson specialises in creating spatial sound installations which feature a strong sense and spirit of place. In 2013 Watson received a Paul Hamlyn Composers Award. His installations have been commissioned by international galleries and festivals such as Sheffield Millennium Gallery, Opera North in Leeds, The National Gallery, London, The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, The Louvre in Paris, the Aichi Triennial in Japan and Dark MoFo in Tasmania.

Rain Wu (Born 1987, Tainan) is a Taiwanese artist and architect based in London. Her work is conceptually driven and materialises in different forms and scales from drawing, sculpture, food performance to architectural installation. Wu works with the temporality of perishable materials to instigate discussions around our manifold relationships with nature. Following the geographic, political, cosmological and microbial traces of living materials, her work investigates the interconnection between the consumption of food, digestion of cultures, charting of lands and recalling the myths. She graduated from Royal College of Art and University College London. Her artwork has been exhibited in Sharjah Biennial (2017), Taipei Biennial (2016), The Palestinian Museum (2017), London Design Biennale (2016), Istanbul Design Biennial (2020), Hong-Gah Museum (2023), Manar Abu Dhabi (2023); she was in residence at the Design Museum London (2016), Fondation Thalie (2018), Jan van Eyck (2018-9) and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2024). She is currently a lecturer at Goldsmiths University.