Nayari Castillo’s Sensing Cohabitation in the Forest

Nayarí Castillo’s artistic research project focuses on creating experiments in and around the urban forests in Graz, Austria. Important part of her research consists of developing an Asynchronous Cohabitation Pod (ACP) in order to explore the idea of multispecies cohabitation at different times or rhythms, and to activate asynchronous forms of togetherness. The pod is a recording field station that is capable of gathering data about different cohabitants, their movements, and their different rhythms, and translating them into aesthetic forms (e.g. sound).

Part of Castillo’s forest exploration is also her work in pedagogy; during the summer semester of 2023, she led two classes at the university level: with students of art education (University College of Teacher Education Styria) on a series of artist’s books on the topic of the forest and with architecture students (TU Graz) on making an elemental architecture – a tugurium – in the forest and reflecting on the writings of Henry David Thoreau.