Alexis Williams, Ottawa, Canada
Director of the Biophilium

Alexis Williams is a spore spreader, silk moth protector and the director of the Biophilium. She specializes in the liminal spaces between forest and field. As an eco art teacher inspired by research biologists and ecologists, she is devoted to directing the attention of her students to the intricacies of ecology through wildlife appreciation in an attempt to develop ways to describe and celebrate the value of life. Her courses shed light on the boundaries between wild and domestic to show that there is none and aim to encourage people to notice their roles in ecology.

Alexis is an enthusiastic believer in the Symbioscene, the epoch after the Anthropocene, when humans develop practices to cohabitate the Earth and to live in reciprocity with all non-human life. She believes that humans are hyperkeystone species. We influence every habitat, ecosystem, species and have the ability to initiate complex cascading eccological interactions. That this achievement will grant us both the privilege and the responsibility to design and maintain Earth’s ecosystems, and therefore climates, intentionally. And so, we must develop a goal, agree on a set of values, plan the world we want to express, and then bring it to life. We are in a time of frightening dissonance, when our cultural practices contradict our values, but a growing appreciation for the complexities of ecology and a clear human desire for clean air & water and policies that support biodiversity is emerging and our behaviors are following. Alexis’s ecological optimism does not deny the urgency of conservation, but is a call to action.

Bedia Ekiz, Turkey

Bedia Ekiz was born in the rich ecological and biological landscape of Çukurova, characterized by its volcanic cones and leached soils. She establishes a deep connection with her personal roots shaped by the mystical historical texture of this region—ancient Anatolia, mythologies, and a nomadic-pastoral lifestyle. The region’s archaeological mounds, ancient stories, bird sanctuaries, and ecological richness form the foundation of her profound explorations into human nature and existential traces.

Drawing from her personal witness and the expression of primal pain, Ekiz approaches urban habitats and the rewilding of the “three hills” through a philosophical, psychoanalytic, sociological, ecological, and spiritual perspective. Her artistic practice is centered on examining the existential relationships of human beings and the notion of psychogeography. She documents these experiences through performance videos, sound collages, interactive objects, sketches, and scents. In her studio, she immerses herself in these sources, engaging deeply with their technical and research-based dimensions. Alongside primitive materials such as paper, ink, and charcoal, she adopts a multidisciplinary language that
allows her research to resonate with intuitive human perception.

Raised in a nomadic (Yörük) and agricultural lifestyle, Ekiz aims to raise awareness through her art around themes such as ecology, biology, psychoanalysis, psychogeography, and Anatolian narratives. She continues her work in her studio in Kadıköy, Istanbul, and in the open-air setting of her home in Üçtepe, Çukurova, where she also documents her personal
witnessing.

Jennifer R. Myhre, Sedona, Arizona, US

I was a scholar before I was an artist, and reading and research is a core part of my artistic practice. My art journey began with documentary filmmaking. This foundation has shaped my current practice in collage–setting images and ideas side by side to provoke new responses. Through layering and juxtaposition, covering and revealing, collage allows visualization of how I wrestle with my own denial and accountability in the human systems that produce large scale suffering. I consider the desert my heartland. I love using the tools of art and art-making for education and community building around complex issues and I believe in the power of these tools to address the urgency of climate change, ecological devastation and ongoing threats to public lands. I was born in Tucson and spent my teenage years there, but I only returned to Arizona to live in 2024. Since returning, I have prioritized belonging to this land, understanding it and taking responsibility for loving and listening to it and protecting it. This has included taking foraging classes, reading about the land, learning about indigenous history and of course hiking. As a white person in a place still shaped by settler-colonialism, I have been studying and thinking about what it might mean to live in solidarity and in kinship with both indigenous communities and the earth.

Mary Hegedus, Toronto, ON

I am a doctoral student at York University researching fungi, science, and visual culture. My interests centre around the knowledge we can gain from fungi. What can fungi teach us about film and media?

            For my master’s thesis at the University of Toronto I explored the parallels of the precarity and resilience of mushrooms and survivors in post-apocalyptic film. Fungi are the focus of my studies as I am interested in the fact that they represent things that exist in complex systems that humans don’t usually see.

            I am currently working on media representations of fungi and film specifically with respect to timelapse photography, Uexkull’s Umwelt theory and AI GAN modelling.

Franci Duran,

My artwork looks at history, memory and violence through the aperture of the archive: assembled and accidental. I create films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works. Born in Santiago, Chile in 1967, I came to Canada as a refugee following the 1973 military coup that ousted elected president Salvador Allende. This event – the experience of exile and its reckoning – is integral to my artistic practice.

I am interested in traces and lost, irretrievable things. I take images and audio apart, and reassemble them to reveal the tactile qualities of media that are often thought of as ephemeral. Using a variety of digital and analogue media, processes and methodologies — photographs, film and digital video, hand drawing and digital illustration, analogue and digital found footage, downloaded images, texts and type, animation — I seek to make visible, to give a graphical representation and physicality to what is usually perceived as invisible and intangible, for instance, light, sound and memory. I strive to locate and follow circuitous paths produced by the intersections of the body, language and translation, popular culture, new technologies, old technologies, lost and abandoned technologies, humans and other-than-humans, archival films and recordings, personal stories, news stories, historical documents, politics, and works of art.

I am interested in the acts of looking and documenting and in the results, both pleasurable and painful. These formal and material experimentations act as metaphor for memory.

Cindi Stillwell, Bozeman, Montana, USA

My approach to making films is to capture images and sounds as a collector, sifting and arranging them as I try to come to an understanding about my place within a landscape and within a time. I am drawn to boundaries in landscapes: where ‘town’ gives way to the ‘edge of town,’ in thinking: where the line between what is scientific versus informal knowledge, and in filmmaking, along the edges of photographic reality and images that reveal the hand of the maker. I started growing a developer’s garden during the pandemic. These are flowers and herbs that I could harvest and use to create plant-based developers for my 16mm black and white film stock. This led me to begin shooting black and white images of my garden, closely examining these backyard beauties and wondering at their intricate natural designs. Which led to more thinking about domestic flowers, or cultivated backyard varieties and how they mix and mingle across the neighborhood and then how they compare to the wildflowers found in meadows across my part of Montana and beyond. I also started thinking about the time and care it takes to grow plants in our backyard gardens and how it invites me to slow down and tend to them each day, and how there is joy in just taking that time, similar to handmade, processed-based art making—the process of tending and caring becomes the joy as much as any outcome.

Shawn Solus-Edrington, Pocatello, ID

My work investigates the ecological, cultural, and sociopolitical practices that intervene and reshape the form of contemporary landscapes. Subject of both art and the sciences, landscape operates both as mirror and lens, reflecting the spaces we occupy and ourselves within them. Through trace, transposition, and re-interpretation, my work engages in an open-ended
investigation, transferring the physical experience, associations, histories, and mythologies of a place away from their original source wherein its uncanniness can come into focus, allowing for revaluation and reconception. By means of installation, I employ print, sculpture, video, and sound in formalizing and disrupting spatial environments while problematizing certainties about the stability and causation of what is being seen or encountered within.

My approach to making art is intertwined with sense of place. Raised in the West, my particular relationship to the idea of place is entangled with both myths of sublime wilderness and monument, and the marring impacts of industry, climate change, and sprawl. My work is borne
out of an interest in the intersections of land use, extraction, infrastructure, consumption, and ecology. In considering my own involvement in these systems; knowingly and unknowingly, directly and indirectly, I seek to localize my investigative impulse, to reference issues that have a closeness or proximity, that is to consider how we are always already wrapped up in those things that we try to examine as if existing somehow “outside”. Documenting my experiences in and of these spaces, synthesizing that with other sources of experience, local knowledges, and scientific findings inevitably leads to a feeling of being implicated in some way, inexorably enmeshed. It is this kind of response that I try to rouse, confront, and explore in my work.

Recently I have developed work investigating the sonic and architectural ecologies of both insects and the proverbial “engines” of human enterprise. I am interested in the aural and morphological features of our human noise juxtaposed by the soundscapes of the insect
kingdom; drones whirs, buzz, clicks, and hiss. Through field recordings, found objects, video and print, this works explores the influence that these often overlooked, even vilified critters have on us as humans and in turn our influence on them.

Catherine Euale, Canada, Mexico
Biophilium Research Leader

Catherine Euale is a textile artist, social justice and environmental activist, costume designer and storyteller. In her practice, she challenges the need to use materials and methods that are noncompatible with living systems. She believes deepening and shifting our relationships with the material can raise awareness of our forgotten relationships within more than human worlds, planting seeds for a “good Anthropocene”. Designing systems for interspecies worlds can ignite tremendous political, social, and philosophical implications that we must consider for a resilient and harmonious future.

Milena Vasquez, Calgary AB

I am a Bolivian-Canadian visual artist whose practice integrates nature exploration, botanical research, and the creation of deep connections between people and the natural world.

As the daughter of renowned botanist Roberto Vásquez, I am inspired by a lifetime spent following in my father’s footsteps as an explorer, illustrator, and photographer. Searching for orchids was my way of connecting with him while he lived separately from my family. From these journeys, I learned to see nature as a sanctuary for both biological and human connection, a place of belonging.

Through Cyanotype, I create blueprints that bring my botanical archives into dialogue with my contemporary imagery and research. Using ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) photography and digital collage, I capture the unseen energy of the plants I encounter. By blending these alternative processes, I explore the materiality of memory and the interplay of light and time. My work integrates family heirlooms with organic materials gathered from forest walks, transforming this shared history into poetic meditations on ancestry, motherhood, and fi lial love.
Orchids are the central metaphor for my work, thriving through the "wisdom of decay" and interdependence. While my father’s life’s work focused on the visible beauty of orchids, I am driven to explore the invisible fungal networks that sustain them, a hidden world his research rarely touched. By moving into BioArt, I seek to expand our family legacy and bring new scientifi c perspectives back to him. My practice now aims to integrate mycology to reveal the deep biological connections that allow these species to survive and transform.

My practice also extends into community work, where I facilitate workshops and nature exploration activities. I use art and nature as portals for refl ection, curiosity, and resilience. For me, human connectivity mirrors the invisible fungal systems that support life in the forest; just as mycelium sustains the woods, our collective well-being thrives through the same care, interdependence, and renewal.

Renée Magaña, Kallnach, Switzerland

“Renée Magañas oeuvre resembles a virtual cemetery. But a cemetery that one visits with pleasure. Death and transience are indeed woven into all her art. Her work is colorful and cheerful, combining the child's casual curiosity with the adult's experience of loss, sensitive remembrance with subtle cheerfulness.” As a half-Mexican living in Switzerland for several decades, my artistic work deals with the different ideas and significances of death in different cultures. In Mexico, death is not a taboo, but often the subject of an ironic debate that is reflected in the light-hearted representation and form of skeletons, among other things. Death has a high value in various Mexican traditions.

My artistic practice does not distinguish between my daily life and my artistic interests. I am inspired by memories, triggered by different incidents: a smell, a photograph, an environment, a sound, the light, a film. I have been collecting, researching and preserving things dead or relating to death – as an artist and as a private person – for several decades. I collect the overlooked, the left behind, the lost or forgotten. It is a fascination for discovery in the old and the used and how I can transform them in order to present hidden stories they might have to tell.