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The Animal that therefore I am.
(May 09-23, 2026)
Art and Speculative Research Field School in Kefalonia, Greece
“The animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give. It designates a single being that they have instituted as radically other, inferior, and deprived of reason, language, response, or responsibility” (Derrida, 2008, p. 32).
“The separation of the human from the animal is inseparable from the separation of culture from nature, where nature is conceived as an external object available for use and management” (Wolfe, 2010, p. 19).
Derrida, J. (2008). The animal that therefore I am (D. Wills, Trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. (Original work published 2006)
Wolfe, C. (2010). What is posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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 queer 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: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era (2021). He is currently writing a new monograph, tentatively titled The Joy, Pain, and Politics of Queer 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.
PARTICIPANTS
Maggie Campbell is an artist and facilitator currently based in London, UK. Having been trained in costume and set design, their approach to art making is often collaborative and interdisciplinary, or anti disciplinary. They often work with a combination of experimental armatures, sculpture, things found, natural materials, costume, writing and filmmaking. Maggie likes to create processes and systems that lead into each other. Their work can been characterised by this entangled, collective relationship, entropic feedback loops, dialogues between materials, performance, unfurling and sensation processing. Working as part of collectives or groups is also a big part of Maggie's practice, they enjoy making environments where practices can meet, affect, grow and question each other.
Aynslee Sneddon
Aynslee Sneddon is an American-Canadian ceramic artist based in Calgary, Alberta. Her work explores how the body, material, and environment interact through making, with a focus on how sensory perception and attention shape the development of form. Working with clay as both a material and a site of experience, she investigates how touch, repetition, and responsiveness influence how she relates to and moves through her surroundings. Her practice is grounded in process-based making, where forms emerge through ongoing interaction rather than predetermined outcomes. Through hand-building, she works in close relation with the material, allowing shifts in timing, condition, and environment to guide the work. Her research is informed by her lived, neurodivergent experience, where making becomes a way of navigating and responding to sensory and environmental conditions.
Xstine Cook is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates intersectional realms of mask, puppetry, object animation, performance, and film. A visitor to the Treaty 7 area, she was raised along Dog Pound Creek in the foothills of Alberta, where early explorations of forests and waterways informed a sustained engagement with, and deep love of, the natural world. Grounded in the understanding that all humans are art makers, Xstine’s creative practice positions acts of radical creativity as essential to repairing our relationship with the planet, while evolving our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world.
Matt Horseman was born and is based in Winnipeg on Treaty One Territory. His multimedia work blossoms out of questions about desire, relationality, and fate. The project he's currently navigating is a constellation of photography, poetry, sculpture, and audio recordings that tells about the transformative force of desire on a body using the speculative geography of Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus' lives throughout literary history as points of departure.
Katie Reed is a jewellery and ceramic artist originally from Lac La Biche, Alberta (Treaty 6 Territory), and currently based in Calgary, Alberta (Treaty 7 Territory). Her current practice explores themes of ecological hierarchy and anthropocentrism, exploring the complex relations between humans and non-human systems. Creating works heavily inspired by nature, she aims to help the viewer recognize themselves and their connection to the environment, while also challenging human-centred views of the natural world.
Irene Theotokatou
Irene Theotokatou is an actor-director, writer and artist. Born in Kefalonia, she was raised in Zimbabwe and studied theatre in South Africa and the U.K. In Greece, she worked in children's theatre, both for entertainment and in education. She co-founded Sirens, a bilingual theatre company that created and performed work on relevant issues. These included Athol Fugard’s “The Island”, Franca Rama inspired “Medea, Medea” and “Amazons”, a devised work about women and breast cancer. She taught acting, mask-work and voice, focusing on Ancient Greek Tragedy. Her commitment is to a theatre that challenges and empowers both the audience and the practitioners. She writes short fiction and creative non-fiction (and even has a novel in a drawer somewhere, like any ‘sane’ writer should). In recent years she has been writing poetry, almost exclusively. As an artist she works mostly with collage, but has recently rediscovered painting.
Cristina (Hanxing) Wang is a multidisciplinary artist and arts worker based in Calgary, Canada. She holds an MFA from the Alberta University of the Arts. Her practice moves across performance, installation, video, and socially engaged art. Using the body as both material and research site, her work explores identity, cultural frameworks, gender, memory, and the relationship between human and non-human life. Cristina is especially interested in how personal experience connects with larger social, ecological, and political structures. Through walking, material experimentation, and site-responsive actions, she creates works that invite reflection on presence, vulnerability, and ways of being with others.
Chiara Azzollini
Chiara Azzollini is an Italian-based pedagogist and cultural practitioner with a background in theatre, visual arts, and education. Her practice explores the intersections of art, participation, and education, using collaborative and research-based methodologies to investigate space, memory, and collective experience. Her work focuses on how places shape identities and social relationships, engaging with themes of cultural heritage, relationship dynamics, and the transmission of knowledge. She is particularly interested in artistic methodologies as tools for education and in creating projects that foster dialogue, critical thinking, and active participation.
ABOUT:
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 categorised, valued, and governed. It is hosted at the Ionion Centre for the Arts and Culture in Kefalonia, Greece, in partnership with the Geoparks of Kefalonia and Ithaca.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Participants leave with new conceptual tools, expanded ethical vocabularies, and fresh openings for their artistic and research practices.
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While exhibition(s) and presentations will be facilitated, the emphasis is on process, inquiry, and shared learning rather than polished production.
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