This two-hour workshop explores how art, science, and local knowledge can intersect to address environmental challenges through participatory and site-responsive methods.

1. Opening Presentation (30 minutes)
We begin with a 30-minute presentation by Hannelie Coetzee and Tanaya Nair on their transdisciplinary research practices, setting the stage for the workshop’s motivation and aims.
Following this, we open the conversation for participants to reflect on their own research interests and how they perceive the relationship between art and science—whether as separate fields, integrated in their work, or converging as a tool for societal engagement.

2. Participatory Weaving Exercise (60 minutes)
The second half of the workshop is co-produced with a local artist from Mexico, who will share their practice and speak about a specific environmental issue within their community.
Together, we will lead a participatory weaving exercise, drawing from traditional techniques to explore how artistic and scientific approaches can intersect in meaningful ways.
We will then take our weavings outdoors, engaging with the surrounding environment to situate our work in place, reflect on the process, and identify shared themes or geographic connections.

3. Closing and Network Invitation (30 minutes)
To conclude, we’ll share details about our proposed three-year art and science residency and invite those interested in site-specific collaborations to get involved.
We also welcome participants to join Inbetweeners, a growing network of artists, scientists, and researchers who, like us, work between disciplines.
This group emerged organically from connections we made in our previous workshops, bringing together people at different career stages who are eager to exchange ideas, collaborate, and explore new ways of working across art and science.
Through Inbetweeners, we hope to keep these conversations going beyond the workshop, fostering a space for ongoing dialogue and creative partnerships.

Workshop Outputs

Aside from the continued engagement with interested participants, we propose that it is best to keep a specific output open as we would like to develop this with the local artist.
This could look like a series of photographs alongside a write-up of the key ideas developed during the workshop or a display of some of the artworks created with the participants and the curators.
Ideally, it would be great to create a short video of the whole process, but this will depend on if we manage to find appropriate funding to do so.

Biographies of Art/Science Workshop Curators

Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee (she/her)
Hannelie is a Johannesburg-based visual artist and honorary research fellow at the Global Change Institute (University of the Witwatersrand).
Her relational practice regularly centres on public spaces, where she produces interventions that range from ephemeral to permanent.
Originating out of her respect and concern for the environment, Coetzee employs public experiments on nature-based solutions, most often built out of reclaimed industrial waste, to form unlikely partnerships, including with the surrounding land.

Tanaya Nair (she/her)
Tanaya is an ecologist and artist from India interested in biodiversity resilience and nature recovery across scales and biomes.
She is reading a DPhil in Geography and Environment at University of Oxford as a scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development.
She is an early career representative at the British Ecological Society Macroecology group, a member of the Biodiversity Collaborative in India, contributing to assessment reports for policy makers, and a member of the The India Tree Inventory Network (INvenTree), a group of early career researchers in India fostering India wide collaborations on tree data.
She also has a professional and educational background in performing arts and yoga and is actively workshopping how art and science can come together in meaningful, inclusive, and collaborative settings.