15/03/2026
IONION CENTER FOR THE ARTS & CULTURE
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 2026
‘’The Animal That Therefore I Am’’
Art and Speculative Research Field School
Kefalonia, Greece
May 09-23, 2026
The Animal That Therefore I Am is an intensive speculative research field school for artists, writers, curators, and interdisciplinary researchers interested in rethinking how being—human and nonhuman—is categorized, valued, and governed. It is hosted at the Ionion Centre for the Arts and Culture in Kefalonia, Greece, in partnership with the Geopark of Kefalonia and Ithaca.
Applications
Web application: http://goo.gl/forms/q2f8aD9uzk
Email application: [email protected]
Deadlines for applications
• Early Bird registrations: March 30th, 2026
• Final Deadlines for applications – registrations: April 10th, 2026
WEB PAGE : https://www.kurtislesick.com/research/animal-therefore-i-am-fieldschool-2026
Contact & Information (submissions, fees, grants info): [email protected]
FACULTY
Kurtis Lesick is an artist, curator, researcher, and award-winning creative content specialist. His installations, media works, digital performances, and cross-media collaborations explore the limits of materiality, knowledge, and themes of indeterminabilty. Lesick’s practice draws heavily on his experience in archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, as well as both his love and disdain for technology. His work has been presented and exhibited internationally in Canada, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.A. He is an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, has held an adjunct professorship at the Digital Futures Initiative in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (Canada), has been visiting faculty at the Banff Centre (Canada) and the University of California at Irvine (USA), and was a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol (UK).
Tom Roach is Professor of philosophy and q***r studies at Bryant University in Rhode Island, USA. He is the author of two monographs, both published by State University of New York Press: Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (2012) and Screen Love: Q***r Intimacies in the Grindr Era (2021). He is currently writing a new monograph, tentatively titled The Joy, Pain, and Politics of Q***r Friendship, which explores the ethical and political stakes of the complex affective entanglements emergent in the dissolution of the friend/lover binary. Roach is also a musician, whose recorded output spans the art punk of Lifter Puller, the brooding film scores of Le Feeling, and the luminous darkwave of Wolfgang Tillmans
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In 1997 French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, gave a seminar in which he posited that the category of “the Animal” functions as a conceptual boundary through which the human defines itself. To name something “animal” is not to describe biological life but to designate a negative identity: that which lacks reason, language, history, or ethical standing (Derrida 2008, 32–33). By grouping all other living beings into one undifferentiated class, humans have rationalised their right to use, consume, and dominate nonhuman life.
Posthumanist thinkers extend this critique to ecology and environmental relations. Cary Wolfe shows that the human/animal divide mirrors the divide between culture and nature, where nature is framed as an external resource available for extraction (Wolfe 2010). The metaphysical hierarchy Derrida identifies is thus directly tied to capitalist logics that stratify life into what is protected and what is expendable (Derrida 2008). This same mechanism operates in other contemporary categories of exclusion such as “trans,” “migrant,” “disabled,” “neurodivergent,” or “racialised,” where heterogeneous lives are collapsed into manageable groups that can be regulated, devalued, or rendered disposable.
This field school asks how such categories might be complicated, refused, or rethought—using ecology as a laboratory for thinking otherwise.
• This is not a conventional residency or a science course. It is a space for rigorous speculative research, where uncertainty, dependency, and difference are treated as productive conditions.
• This field school does not aim to answer questions. It invites participants to remain with complexity—and to imagine new forms of relation across difference, species, and systems.
• Participants leave with new conceptual tools, expanded ethical vocabularies, and fresh openings for their artistic and research practices.
• While exhibition(s) and presentations will be facilitated, the emphasis is on process, inquiry, and shared learning rather than polished production.
Focus
Participants are invited to consider:
• the animal, ecosystem, or relationally dependent organism that they are;
• the dynamic and self-regulating composition of (eco)systems;
• the precarity and contingency of boundary making processes and their naturalisation of substance;
• the effects of naturalised reductive categories on our relations with others and with ourselves;
• alternative ways of thinking and acting toward more ethical and sustainable relations;
• emergent ethics of otherness grounded in interdependence rather than hierarchy.
The landscapes of Kefalonia and Ithaca—mountain forests, grazing zones, caves, coastlines, and geological fault lines—are approached not as scenery, but as active sites of inquiry, where boundaries are continually made and undone.
What Participants Will Do
The program includes:
• guided field excursions across ecological and geological sites (please note that excursions will involve more rigorous walking/hiking in natural areas);
• workshops, presentations, and discussions with artists and researchers;
• time for independent and collective research and making;
• public outreach activities;
• and collective presentations/exhibitions of research outcomes.
• accommodation at the Ionion Centre;
• access to a shared studio for production.
• Participants are responsible for their own supplies.
• In general, the working language is English.
Who Should Apply
We welcome applications from experienced, interdisciplinary practitioners, including visual and media artists, performance and sound artists, writers, curators, and research-based practitioners.
No prior background in ecology or theory is required—only curiosity, critical engagement, and a willingness to let your practice be unsettled.
Participants are expected to engage with utmost respect, support, and kindness with all attendees of the field school including staff, faculty, and facilitators.
IONION CENTER FOR THE ARTS AND CULTURE INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM 2026
ALL THE RIGHTS RESERVED, Ν. 2121/1993 , N. 3057/2002 (article 81) Ν.3207/2003 (article 10, paragraph. 33)
Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture, https://ionionartscenter.gr
