Alys Daroy

Industrial agriculture exerts significant ecological pressures, leading to biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and biocapacity drawdown. Environmental impacts are often concealed due to physical (remoteness from city centers) and conceptual distancing (romanticized portrayals through advertising), hindering agricultural transparency. This article documents a creative digital methodology developed to communicate the scale and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture and to link consumers’ food choices with their sources. Research centers on the creation of “Food Landscapes Australia,” an interactive digital dissensus archive designed to expose the environmental consequences of the country’s agri-food system. The methodology integrates systematic spatial-statistical analysis, typological classification, continental-scale field research, a visual method for drone-image capture, and the immersive online dissemination archive. The archive includes 881 curated cinematographic drone videos, distilled from over 10,000 images captured across 38,000 kilometers of field research, systematically framing Australia’s agricultural activities and environmental impacts. Findings reveal the potential of these digital methodologies to produce high-resolution, incisive visual evidence that challenges dominant agri-food sustainability narratives, exposing often-concealed practices. The methodology, therefore, offers a contextually adaptable approach for sustainability researchers, educators, and policymakers to enhance environmental communication of agricultural impacts. Outcomes foster public awareness and critical reflection on sustainability issues and, by bridging the gap between production landscapes and food consumers, demonstrate the potential of digital tools for encouraging informed discourse and decision-making around sustainable food systems.

This article explores Anthropoiesis, the authors’ eco-performance installation presented as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Time, Space, Existence  exhibition at the Venice Biennial during the Venice Biennale Architettura 2023. Drawing on David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics (2019), the project investigated how ecocritical texts might be reconceived as multisensory artworks, advancing the concept of slow listening to engage with the Anthropocene’s scalar extremes. By integrating spoken word performance, soundscapes and visual poetry, Anthropoiesis sought to disrupt anthropocentric narratives, compelling audiences to confront the disorienting temporal and spatial dynamics of ecological crises. Foregrounding the urgency of improving attunement to landscapes, the article situates Anthropoiesis within the broader challenge of anthropogenic planetary destabilisation. Its multidisciplinary design reimagines Farrier’s ecocritical text as a sonic and visual assemblage, layered with living, organic and technologically generated soundscapes. Positioned within a nested exhibition alongside Ainslie Murray’s Registry of Itinerant Architectures and Joshua Zeunert’s Shallow Roots, Deep Incisions, offered a multisensory exploration of fluctuating scales and temporal horizons, creating an immersive experience to transcend traditional narrative structures. The article argues that sonic ecologies can help to reorient audiences within fractured Anthropocenic landscapes. Through the lens of slow listening, it analyses how the installation provokes reflection, destabilises linear perceptions of time and space and facilitates poiesis as a threshold moment of ecological revelation. Discussion moves from the project’s interdisciplinary approach to examine the transformative possibilities of careful listening as a critical and creative intervention. In doing so, it seeks to foster heightened attentiveness to more-than-human presences and advance collaborative performance-making to address the sublime tensions of the Anthropocenic moment.

Konstantin Stanislavsky’s System of acting training emphasizes the interplay between experience, embodiment, and the actor’s connection to “nature,” which he considered a better guide to a living organism. Grounded in the laws of organic nature, Stanislavsky’s holistic approach integrates the actor’s mind, body, and environment in a complementary manner to that of ecological and postcognitive approaches. Alongside this interconnected vision, however, Stanislavsky demanded precision and actionable steps, rejecting emotional generalities. Without concrete tools, key Stanislavskian principles such as “nature,” “life,” and “dynamism” risk becoming abstract or unattainable. This article addresses this gap by introducing biophilic pattern analysis, a rehearsal room methodology inspired by E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, which identifies nature-derived patterns that foster cognitive and affective engagement. Using a process of “landscape mapping,” the article applies biophilic design principles to textual analysis to support actors’ connections to internal and external landscapes. Discussion situates biophilia within existing critical frameworks, introduces biophilic patterns with examples of ecological metaphors in Shakespeare’s Othello and Stanislavsky’s An Actor’s Work, and offers rehearsal room exercises. By linking ecological principles to actionable practices, this preliminary foray investigates how biophilic patterns might foster dynamic performances and forge deeper ecological connections. 

The Latvian Song and Dance Celebration's 150th Anniversary (2023) offers a unique case study of community performance's capacity to express solidarity on a spectacular scale. This article argues that the choral concerts may be viewed as applied theatre given their historical and continuing expressions of political resistance, cultural resilience and community renewal. In 2023, the UNESCO listed Celebration incorporated 40,560 performers, around 500,000 in-person spectators and the world's largest choir of 16,500 singers. The mega-event invokes solidarity and spectacle's nested paradoxes amidst historic and continuing socio-political tensions and the Russo-Ukraine War (2014-) while simultaneously highlighting their powerfully affective impact.

У статті досліджується небезпечне ставлення людини до світу природи, що криється у прагненні збирати та колекціонувати природні ресурси та цікавинки. Авторка статті розглядає суперечливі прояви збирання в культурі колекціонування Англії доби Відродження як симптоми проблемного процесу, за яким стоять конкуруючі ідеології. Ставиться питання, чи п'єси Шекспіра можуть пролити світло не лише на фрагментарний процес збирання, але й запропонувати потенційні рішення, які можуть об’єднати їх з методологічним підходом “more-than-human”. Застосовуючи презентистську, екокритичну та біокультурну оптику, авторка статті висловлює міркування щодо того, чи можуть текстові репрезентації низки образів як окреслені, відокремлені та категоризовані приклади, що уособлюють ідею зібрання, уможливити нове екокритичне прочитання Шекспірового слова. Таким чином, в статті досліджується, чи може біокультурний екокритичний погляд на текстовий ландшафт Шекспіровий творів виявити потенційні рішення щодо людських стосунків із природою у світлі нинішньої екологічної кризи.