Pooja Kishinani and Satakshi Gupta
An interview with Yuri Tuma, a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist, researcher, and co-founder of the Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) a Madrid-based institute working at the intersection of art, culture, and ecology. The IPS uses artistic methodologies to question dominant narratives about nature, technology, and culture, opening new spaces for political imagination. In this conversation, Tuma introduces the concept of ‘postnature’ as an invitation to move beyond western, scientific framings of nature. He shares the Institute’s academic and editorial work and reflects on why listening, as an artistic practice and political act, may be one of the most revitalising forms of resistance and world-building.
Satakshi Gupta: Hi Yuri. Thank you for joining us. To start, we would love for you to introduce yourself and share with us the work you do at the Institute for Postnatural Studies.
Yuri Tuma: Sure. It’s lovely to be in conversation with people from different territories and perspectives. So thank you.
My name is Yuri Tuma. I am a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Right now, I’m focusing on sound ecology and studies entangled with queer thinking and listening methodologies. Recently, I’ve been calling myself a listening artist to explore what listening can be within artistic practice. Obviously, that has a lot to do with how I’ve been engaging with environmental and ecological conversations.
The Institute for Postnatural Studies is a research platform that connects different people — researchers, artists, curators, designers, architects, cultural workers, professors, teachers, mediators— who are exploring culture and pedagogy. We are a network of amazing people with different ways of thinking and being in the world. We have short-term academic programs, similar to online seminars, where we focus on exploring specific themes or frameworks in a concise period of time, usually between four and six weeks. These themes range from queer ecologies, hydro futures, water ecologies, and sound ecologies.
Then we also have the Postnatural Independent Program, a six-month program to explore postnature in an in-depth way where we not only offer and produce content, but also invite amazing guests to participate and share their expertise. For example, Helen Hester offered a session a few weeks ago, sharing her concept of bronatalism, that is, how technological advancements or “tech bros” and heteropatriarchal men are investing money in artificial wombs to increase population in a specific region of the world, to create a specific type of human through DNA manipulation. We invite thinkers like Helen to open up different ideas within the program.
This year we have also launched our new one-year postgraduate program, Alternative Ecologies which will focus on artistic practices of today. What does it mean to exhibit today? What does artistic production mean today? In addition to these academic programs, we are invited by institutions to create cultural programs on postnature or contemporary ecology. We get commissioned to host programs at symposiums, conferences, and musical events. Finally we have our editorial, Cthulhu Books, where we publish our own books, inviting different ways of thinking about postnature through xenofiction (becoming a non-human in order to narrate a story). We are keen to explore what it means to be a “we” today.
Pooja Kishinani: Thank you for giving us an overview of the incredible programs and work happening at the Institute, Yuri. We’re curious about the term ‘postnature’. Can you share a little more about what you mean by ‘postnature’ and how postnatural thinking can shape how we understand and navigate the ecological crises?
Yuri: Thank you for this question. More than a concept in itself, postnature is an invitation to question what we have been calling “nature” from a Western academic and scientific perspective. It is an attempt to break the boundary between the binaries of what is artificial and natural, what is alive and not alive, what is human and not human.
Nature is basically infinite, in the sense that the way I understand nature is different from the way you understand nature — not only at an individual level, but also on a familial, cultural, and societal level. The invitation of postnatural thinking is to break the static image that some Western thinkers and artists of the past have shared with us, that nature is this frozen landscape in a painting. This static image, in a sense, allows for massive extraction, distancing, and separation; nature becomes easier to colonize, extract, and utilise when we see it as something that is not part of ourselves, or that is not ourselves.
Postnature questions and breaks from this Western scientific understanding of life where everything is a category. What happens when we understand that categories sometimes cohabit and coexist? Then those categories no longer work. It’s an invitation to question this binomial, these categories, but also an invitation to think of nature as a cultural concept and construction.
Satakshi: Thank you so much, Yuri. As you said, the way we understand nature is informed by where we grow up and live. As someone who has lived and studied in India, I recognise that my understanding of nature has been moulded by institutional education which still is steeped in colonial-era policies and framings of nature.
The Institute, and your work especially, engages with postnature through artistic practice. How do you view the relationship between art and ecology? Do you see art as being integral to studying ecology or imagining alternatives?
Yuri: That’s a lovely question. I think my response is always mutating and transforming. Art is definitely at the core of what we do; ecology and art are the beating heart of the Institute for Postnatural Studies. We’ve been trying to engage with what artistic practice means nowadays. What comes to mind is Filipa Ramos’ book The Artist as Ecologist. The artist is starting to be asked a lot from, no? Artists are expected to write, to research, to situate their practice, to care about production and measure the impact of their art. There are several things being asked of the artist.
I think the contemporary artistic movement is engaging with ecological thought. Donna Haraway, for example, is the philosopher of our times, and her work is focused on an ecological way of being or reinterpreting the human body, or human-nonhuman relations. I think that is the collective unconscious where philosophical thoughts are happening. It’s always trying to break away from what is happening with the environment today.
I can speak from something that has been happening in this edition of the Postnatural Independent Program. We’ve been engaging with world-making practices. We’re trying not to romanticize the world-making practice, because we ask what does it mean to ‘world’ today? Who has the privilege to world today? Why are we not unworlding instead of worlding?
We truly believe that this world-making practice or imagination practice is just as important as scientific research. I think there’s a paralysis — sometimes it’s a collective paralysis — of the imagination of how things could be. Who are we listening to? Who inspires our imagination? I think an artistic space is prone to open up practices for caring for imagination, creativity, for inner desires and visions. So I think that’s where arts intersect with ecological thought today. I think mediation is also important work. In artistic and academic practices, how do you mediate a space where everyone can be felt, heard, and value their imagination.
Pooja: Yeah, that is beautiful, Yuri. It also made me think back to when I was an undergraduate student, I felt frustrated that the university and classroom focused on academic theory, without much time being devoted to the imagination and exploring alternatives. I think we need more such spaces to create containers for speculative futures.
Recently we published an article on Radical Ecological Democracy where the writer noted that the climate crisis is a listening crisis because we’ve lost the capacity to listen to the web of life in the places that we live in. In your work, you’re exploring what it means to be a listening artist, and to have a listening practice as a form of resistance and radical ecological care. We would love to hear a little more about your listening practice and why you think listening is important, especially in a time when it feels like we’re both drowning in noise and simultaneously unable to listen deeply with care and attention.
Yuri: Amazing. I’ll do my best to answer this.
If I can just add a little bit on the previous question, inspired by what you said, Pooja, about your academic experience. At the Institute, it’s important not only to explore imagination, but also feeling, as a valid academic practice. We try to generate spaces where we can feel together and share how a theory might have moved us, how a guest speaker might have touched upon things that might have made us feel something. I think sometimes the delivering strokes are very theoretical, and then you just listen, make notes, and that’s it. But then, how do you sit with those notes if they touch you and transform knowledge into emotion? I think that’s such an important way to embody the knowledge that you’re learning, therefore, it’s been important for us to entangle theory with emotion and imagination, and create networks of sharing academic spaces. We’re still learning as we’re going, we’re still practicing, exploring, experimenting, but it’s at the core of what we’re thinking about.
To move towards listening, I feel a lot of people take listening for granted. How can listening be political when it is seen as a passive thing? I think listening is so important right now and it is becoming a movement. We can go back to Pauline Oliveira’s practice of deep listening that started in the 70s and 80s. Pauline’s work is huge and it’s growing, so that listening activism started back then. I see a lot of listening practices and philosophy growing these days.
For me, listening is a way of being that resists the temporality of this capitalist environment that we live in, which forces us to consume more, watch more, and become more. Even healing and spiritual practices are becoming fast consumption products. There’s a constant bombardment of images— it is schizophrenic and prejudicial to our mental health, because you see things that are completely on opposite spectrums of the emotional level. One moment you’re seeing something super cute, like a cat playing the piano, and in the next moment you’re seeing footage of the genocide in Gaza. Suddenly we’re being neutralized because we can’t physically hold all of those inputs. I wish I could quote who I’ve read this from about how our body has not evolved to interact with so much emotional input.
Listening is a way to resist this normativeness of the senses. Capitalist, neoliberal and colonial societies have been built through the image. When we listen, we need more time, we need to stop, we need to change the attention economy from one that you Pay attention to, towards one that you Give your attention to. What happens when we switch the language around attention? To not pay attention as an act of exchange, but rather offer attention as an act of free will. This is something that Vinciane Despret explores in her book, Living as a Bird.
I think listening invites attention as an act of care when you practice listening actively in contrast to the passivity of hearing. That’s the basis of the listening methodology or artistic practice. I think listening is actually a performative and collective art form. So how do you engage knowing that hearing and listening are two different things? From there, you can build on this practice of more than one way to listen.
Satakshi: I recall one of the Institute’s projects, What the Land Remembers When We Cannot, involved a listening practice. I found this quite interesting because land has such a rich history, especially in the Global South, where colonialism and subsequent phases of capitalism has exploited and extracted land. Discourse on wealth is often also framed in the context of owning land as an asset or commodity, rather than something more. Can you share more about that project— what kind of questions did you explore and how does listening come in then?
Yuri: Yeah, thank you for bringing up this amazing project.
To offer some context, Tender Radio began with an intuition or desire to include oral practices in academic structures and collective creation. If we leave the publication method— like producing books or something material— how else can we share knowledge within an academic structure? We love books and we’re still gonna make and publish them, but we wanted to try something that requires a different type of sharing and perhaps a different engagement between listener and knowledge sharer. As a reader, you have a different interaction with the knowledge versus when you hear it, especially through a person’s voice.
This intuition led to facilitating moments within our academic structure of collective creation, which is such an important part of the Postnatural Independent Program. The cohort can exchange, entangle, and contaminate—in the best way possible— each other’s practice and generate ideas, thoughts, and visions that perhaps would have never risen if they weren’t together. It’s so amazing and valuable, the space that it’s created within these programs. For us, it’s even just as valuable as the knowledge that is shared. Tender Radio was born from that inquiry.
What the Land Remembers When We Cannot specifically emerged from a provocation around the concept of healing, which is very complex because it’s one of those words that activates a lot of conversation and means different things to different people. We were primarily thinking of ecological, environmental healing. What does it mean to heal today? What does it mean to have healing conversations, or conversations around healing in academic structures? How can we create collective practices around that? It was deep because once again, we always have to question the privileges of healing; who is allowed to heal? What kind of healing justice is there around the world? For anyone who wants to go deep into these questions, I’d like to recommend the work of Prentis Hemphill, a healing justice activist in the United States.
What the Land Remembers When We Cannot became a collaborative project between seven artist-researchers— Jess Zamora-Turner, Valerie Prinz, Kutlwano Ramphele, Irina-Anca Bobei, Tamara Kalo, Abri de Swardt— who come from different contexts, expertise, and practices. From my experience of listening to them, it became clear that their familial lineage, how their culture engaged with a specific territory, where they are important considerations while thinking of healing. Healing is also transgenerational and intergenerational; you carry a lot of the healing from your family lineage, and that can also transport into the landscape as well. A landscape can be triggering, it can be healing, and it can bring up history that needs healing itself. I would invite the reader to listen to the episode because it’s really moving. They were so vulnerable in their sharings and we were grateful that they allowed that vulnerability to come through them.
Pooja: Thank you, Yuri. What you shared about oral practices made me think about communities in India, such as the Idu Mishmi, who pass on their ecological knowledge through oral histories rather than the written word. When histories are passed down orally, listening becomes an act of survival and continued assertion of a set of relationships with the more-than-human world. Moreover, there are also several communities in India today who are experiencing the dispossession and displacement from their territories. Despite state and corporate violence, they still assert that they would rather die than be evicted from their land, their homes.
Satakshi: On the Radical Ecological Democracy website, the connecting thread across the stories and articles is an attempt at creating alternatives. As you mentioned, listening as a practice creates alternative forms of interacting with each other, with our ecologies, and so on. I know this can be a little abstract, but I wonder if you or the Institute is trying to build an idea of what an alternative looks like? How does sound or listening facilitate alternative imaginations?
Yuri: What came to my mind immediately was that I think we are in the act of doing it by actively experimenting with academic spaces and by creating spaces to imagine together. I don’t know if I have an alternative ready to be shared or envisioned, but I think we are doing that through the programs, exhibitions, and the publications at the Institute. We open up spaces where we can find alternatives together or create sparks of inspiration, like What The Land Remembers. I think it’s about generating a movement of alternatives by thinking, feeling and imagining together through being together in Madrid and connecting with others in different places through Tender Radio, the publications, and our other online programs.
Pooja: What you just shared, Yuri, made me also think about how I see the institute almost like a playground because you’re constantly experimenting, trying, and bridging theory and praxis. I’m grateful that such an institute exists, and I’m hoping that more of such sparks and spaces come up in different parts of the world.
Yuri: I love the idea of a playground, thank you. I think that’s gonna inspire something, for sure. To see the Institute or the academic program as a playground, and it made me think of something that one of our special guests, Chus Martinez, a Spanish curator, said within the Postnatural Independent Program. Last time she was speaking with us, she was talking about the childlike way of being as a form of artistic resistance as well.
So maybe these alternatives or imaginations, what if they come from the childlike wanting to belong, and wanting to relate to others? What kind of alternatives can arise from here instead of a very serious, parliamentary, scientific structure? What happens if it’s more of a childlike space? Thank you for your time, and for writing to us, and for these really lovely questions. I will keep them with me.
Pooja: Thank you so much, Yuri! Take care, and have a nice day. We appreciate you for offering your time to yarn with us. It’s just been a delight.
Yuri: You too. Ciao.
This interview took place on 23 April, 2026. It was recorded, transcribed and edited by Pooja Kishinani and Satakshi Sharma. The final version was revised and validated by Yuri Tuma.
—-
Yuri Tuma is a Brazilian artist, researcher and curator living in Madrid, where he co-founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies and practices as its Academic and Artistic Co-Director. Yuri’s work focuses on the investigation of contemporary narratives related to sonic and queer ecologies through collective practice, active listening, sound art, installation, and performance.
Pooja Kishinani curates and edits Radical Ecological Democracy (RED) web journal. She is programme coordinator at The Emergence Network and is a member of centre for spiritual ecology.
Satakshi Gupta is an intern with Kalpavriksh and has been supporting the Radical Ecological Democracy (RED) web journal.