Field_Notes – Living Methodologies

Bioart Society’s eight Field_Notes field laboratory, Field_Notes – Living Methodologies, will take place in Sápmi during 14–24 September 2025. Half of the working group are invited experts, including theorist, researcher and artist Anastasia (A) Alevtin, artist-researcher Sam Nightingale, practice-led cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, veterinary pathologist and researcher Aleksija Neimanis, and artist and researcher Leena Valkeapää. Other half of the group consists of professionals who applied to the open call we facilitated earlier this Spring, including researcher Ellie Ballantine, research-based multidisciplinary artist Marjolijn Dijkman, visual artist and researcher Hanna Husberg, audio sculptress, sound artist & curator/facilitator Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF), architect Camille Sineau, visual artist Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith, designer/researcher Manuel Díaz Tufinio, and the Zettel & Sivanesan duo.

About Living Methodologies

Field_Notes – Living Methodologies responds to shifts in the field of art and science insisting that how we research matters. Engaging with specific sites via a range of methodological approaches has been vital to previous Field_Notes; building on past iterations, this feral field lab attends to the methodologies themselves.

Methods carry ethical and political weight; methods are not simply instruments to be selected at will, but practices that have consequences for the relationships, bodies, materials and knowledge systems they engage with. They demand attentiveness to context, accountability to the beings and environments involved, and an openness to being shaped by the process itself. Rather than treating methods as extractive or universally applicable, they require a commitment to ongoing negotiation, care, and responsiveness, resisting the tendency to instrumentalise knowledge for convenience or efficiency.

How do fieldwork encounters call us into ethical relationships with the lives—human, more-than-human, material—that they engage? How might we rethink “data” in ways that honor the complexities of lived, entangled field experiences? How do we cultivate methods that emerge through lived, embodied experience rather than imposing external research logics? What kinds of practices, commitments, and collaborations enable research methodologies to be reshaped by plurality rather than merely incorporating it?

During the laboratory a group of 15 participants will work together to examine, exchange and experiment with different methods and approaches towards shaping a future ethics and politics of researching in the field in Kilpisjärvi and beyond. While some activities will be guided, Field_Notes – Living Methodologies embraces a slow pace and gives space for questions, actions and responses to emerge from and with the site and the group.

Field_Notes