Zoönomic Futures is part of a series exploring Multispecies Urbanism, one of the themes of the Dutch contribution to the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. In her presentation, Janna Holmstedt weaves together notes, thoughts, recordings and stories from her evolving research process. The journey takes in listening to dolphins, bonding with maize, becoming an earthworm, thinking with kelp and collaborating with soil. 

Dolphins speak English

Janna Holmstedt's work explores a unique sound archive of recordings from a 1960s interspecies-communication experiment, in which dolphins were taught to speak English with their blowholes. The encounter led to an investigation of the transformative role of sound and listening, and of listening as a form of cohabitation in a fluid and dynamic environment. After her presentation, Holmstedt talks to Anne van Leeuwen (board member at the Embassy of the North Sea) and Het Nieuwe Instituut researcher Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.

Janna Holmstedt

Dr Janna Holmstedt is a member of the Posthumanities Hub, the post-disciplinary and more-than-human humanities research network of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Linköping University, Sweden. Her work explores multispecies relationships, interspecies communication, and the interaction of bodies, environments and technology. It includes sound installations, participatory performances, mixed-media walks, stories, maps, texts and collaborative projects. Holmstedt's doctoral dissertation, Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening (2017), focuses on how sound and listening, in a visually dominated culture, might mediate new relationships in a more-than-human world, and generate a sense of caring and belonging. Holmstedt's current work involves human-soil relationships, soil values, the allotment movement and the cultivation of maize. She has exhibited internationally in the USA, Estonia, and China.