On 6 and 20 August at 6.30 pm, LABoral Centre for Art and Industrial Creation and the Gijón Port Authority are organising free guided tours of the exhibition Between Species: Ways of Being Together, led by María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde (uh513), artists featured in the exhibition. The tours will take place in the Exhibition Hall of the Antigua Rula.

Between Species. Ways of Being Together creates a speculative fiction to imagine technologies for interspecies mediation in today’s ports. These infrastructures concentrate material, economic and biological flows where, in addition to the constant transit of goods and people, the unintentional transfer of organisms to distant ecosystems is facilitated.

This artistic research analyses not only the organisms themselves but also the infrastructures that facilitate their transfer, in order to answer the question: how does a species become invasive? In ports, transport systems intervene in the circulation of species and alter the links between ecosystems that had been isolated for millennia. The installation questions whether what we call an invasive species is, in reality, the result of our own models of mobility.

The research ties in with Lynn Margulis’s theories on symbiogenesis and evolutionary cooperation; with Donna Haraway’s approach to coexisting in multi-species worlds transformed by humans; and with Anna Tsing’s studies on the ecologies that emerge in environments altered by global networks. Building on these premises, the installation concludes with a question: if we design infrastructure that transforms life cycles, could we also create technologies designed to foster coexistence between species?