NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

A speaker and film screening invitation and participation in a two-day workshop we will be holding on the  Record of Participation – Academic Workshop

On 22 September 2025, a two-day academic workshop titled “What Is ‘Worlding’ in Biocultural Worlding?” was convened. The workshop brought together scholars and researchers from multiple institutions, including Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, King’s College London, and the Max Planck Institute, with the aim of fostering a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to understanding interconnected forms of loss.
The two-day workshop What Is “Worlding” in Biocultural Worlding? brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers, and practitioners, including Ute Meta Bauer, Joshua Gebert, Lisa Onaga, Michael Stanley-Baker, Michael Walsh, Margarida Mendes, Kriti Kapila, Laura Miotto, Franca Cole, Marc Glöde, Jon Wilson, Mei Jia Ng, Angela Hoten, Vivienne Wee, Kenneth Dean, Firdaus Sani, Jonathan Galka, Ina Conradi Chavez, and Zara Arshad. Participants represented a range of institutions and disciplines spanning anthropology, history of science, cultural studies, museum and curatorial practice, climate research, law, media art, and filmmaking, contributing to discussions across the workshop’s four thematic sessions—Methods of Synchronous Knowledge Exchange, Asynchrony and Interdisciplinary Rigidity, Local Stewardship of Knowledge, and Beyond Documentation—as well as the public keynote lectures held on the evening of 22 September 2025.

The workshop focused on drawing critical connections between biodiversity loss, cultural erosion, and the diminishing of traditional knowledge systems, framing these challenges as entangled and mutually reinforcing. Central to the discussions was the introduction and examination of Biocultural Worlding as an emerging research framework, positioned as a means to rethink how knowledge is produced, shared, and sustained across scientific, cultural, and ecological domains.

The workshop was supported by a modest university-funded scheme designed to foster collaboration among academics and researchers, and to strengthen partnerships across institutions and disciplines.

Key thematic areas addressed during the workshop included:

• Methods of Synchronous Exchange of Knowledge Creation
  Examining how legal, ethical, and social frameworks can evolve in tandem with scientific and technological advancements.
• Asynchrony and Interdisciplinary Rigidity
  Investigating strategies to connect siloed modes of knowledge production and to make interdisciplinary research more tangible and accessible to wider publics and communities.
• Local Stewardship of Knowledge
  Exploring alternative models of co-authorship, inclusive stewardship, and worlding practices as responses to biocultural loss.
• Beyond Documentation
  Considering how research dissemination can move beyond conventional documentation toward immersive, spatial, and experiential formats that foster deeper understanding and engagement.

As part of participation in this workshop, Ina Conradi contributed as a respondent in Session IV: Beyond Documentation, drawing on her practice as a filmmaker, multidisciplinary media artist, and interdisciplinary researcher. Her contribution reflected on the case studies presented in the session, with particular attention to how immersive technologies, generative AI, and visual storytelling can be mobilized to interpret complex scientific and abstract concepts. The discussion highlighted artistic practice as a means of moving beyond static documentation toward embodied, participatory, and transformative modes of knowledge engagement.

_{Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
Public Keynote Lectures: “What Is ‘Worlding’ in Biocultural Worlding?”
NTU CCA Singapore, 2025.
Accessed [insert access date if needed].
https://ntu.ccasingapore.org/programme/public-keynote-lectures-what-is-worlding-in-biocultural-worlding/}