Multispecies Futures

Learnings of the future expand with the recognition of the collective of beings that share the land; a reunion of bodies, territories and their memories, a conscious and deliberate exchange of what we know as experience: being born, growing, sowing, harvesting, eating, digesting, sensing, perceiving, dying, decomposing. As human beings, we have our navel-string tied to the earth, entering and leaving, all in different directions, at multiple speeds, while sharing the ecosystems that always transgress our own understandings of what constitutes our bodies.

A square grid of 36 equally large square-shaped cropped photographs showing parts of boats, human bodies, and water

The connections we make anew through the corporeal to understand the territories that we are admitted into or pass through, the assemblies we are caught in, are part of the endeavor to grow a multi-scalar consciousness, necessary to move and guide us towards future living formations. We begin by asking ourselves: how do we recognize our bodies? Recognize them in the touch from the river, from the jungle, from the mountain; through embodied situations experiences become pathways to our essence.

A stylized section drawing showing human figures in silhouette on 7 boats on the surface of grey-green water, who appear to be transporting a tree through the water

A stylized section drawing showing human figures in silhouette on 3 boats on the surface of grey-green water, in the water below them a sunk tree and fish swimming in schools around the tree

The land as recognized by the river, by the mountain, by the jungle, by the flies, by the body. The landscape emerges between the relationships of beings and entities that inhabit it, we are the ecology of everything that intertwines to protect itself. Departing from a recognition of our expanded bodies as the tools with the future is learning of itself, we reach towards that future: sinking trees along a shallow coastline to create underwater gardens, collecting litter to grow aromatic herbs—these, among others, are technologies that promise a future where knowledge of land and body is genuinely shared.

A hand drawn map of a coastal region with whales and other lines suggesting movement sketched in yellow against a green background

Think of what the tools of the future could be: being able to connect fairly with what we recognize ‘our’ bodies to be, and with what awaits them beyond the fate of a singular species.

*Multispecies: Relations between humans and non-humans, of care, cooperation, and mutual exchange.

*Antispeciesism: Holding that the individuals of one species should not determine the superiority or inferiority of any other species.

Pedro Aparicio Llorente

Pedro Aparicio Llorente is Principal and Founder of APLO Architecture and Landscape, as well as Adjunct Faculty at Los Andes University, Bogotá. He is also a Mellon Researcher at Canadian Centre for Architecture's project The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality where he is pursuing a project situated in communities on Colombia’s Pacific coast as well as in the North Amazonian basin in order to participate in ways in which these rural communities produce forms of digital architectural knowledge.