Natureculture Lab
Funded in February 2025, Natureculture Lab is a transdisciplinary platform for developing critical conversations on naturecultures, conservation, and care. Headed by Hanna B. Hölling and coordinated by Juliana Robles de la Pava, Natureculture Lab examines how environmental, institutional and epistemic shifts challenge inherited divisions between nature and culture. Through a series of invited lectures, workshops, and collaborative exchanges, it explores new forms of knowledge and stewardship that respond to the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds.
The Lab has brought together both internationally recognized and junior scholars including Tim Ingold, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Denise Bertschi, Tomas Bertoletti, Njabu Chipangura, Miles Timpe, Munyaradzi Elton Sagyya, Lora Angelova, Juliana Robles de la Pava, Sila Ulug, Josephine Ellis and Yoonha Kim, among others, creating dialogue across the humanities, heritage studies, conservation, and environmental thought.
The Lab originated in an international think tank co-organized by Hanna B. Hölling and Sven Dupre in January 27-29, 2025, at the Bern Academy of the Arts. The think tank brought together in a hybrid format experts of conservation in two domains: on the one hand, art and cultural heritage conservation; and on the other hand, nature conservation. In both domains the “things”, “items”, “objects” or “sites” conservators and conservationists care for are increasingly recognized as natureculture hybrids. While art conservation, especially in its earlier guise of restoration, primarily considered artworks as the outcome of human—and especially the artist’s—intentions, the field has increasingly recognized that the materials of artworks undergo unintentional, and sometimes unexpected, changes and are subject to loss and decay well outside human control. At the other end, while inspired by ideas of pristine wilderness, nature conservation in its earliest instances was primarily geared towards the establishment of national parks and nature reserves fortified against human intervention, conservationists have come to value humans as inherent to the ecosystems they care for. Given that the “things” and “sites” for which (art) conservators and (nature) conservationists hold responsibility are interplays of human and non-human agencies and thus natureculture hybrids, both fields and communities consider ontologically similar objects, and should exchange views.
Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Heritage, Cosmology, and the Colonial Inheritance of Conservation— Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya
READING GROUP RECAP
One of our recent conversations within the Natureculture Lab and Critical Conservation was with Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, an archaeologist, heritage scholar, and lecturer at Bindura University of Science Education in Zimbabwe. With more than a decade of experience as a curator at the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site, Sagiya brings heritage practice into dialogue with questions of conservation, decolonisation, and the enduring separation of natural and cultural heritage.
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CARING FOR NATURECULTURE- AN EXHIBITION CURATED BY Hanna HöLLING AT THE COLLEGIUM HELVETICUM
FELLOW PROJECT
Within her 2025–26 Senior Fellowship at the Collegium Helveticum in Zürich/ETH Zürich, Hanna Hölling conceptualized the exhibition Caring for Naturecultures: Glaciers. The exhibition reconceived conservation as a practice of care extending across natural and cultural environments. Through artistic engagements with Alpine glaciers and polar icebergs, it approached ice as both conservation object and natureculture hybrid: a dynamic archive preserving traces of planetary and human histories. Entangled with scientific inquiry, technological intervention, cultural memory, and climate anxiety, glaciers emerged as complex sites of care where materiality, environmental transformation, and human history converge.
Read the exhibition handout here.
WHEN THE FOREST INHERITS: LIVING IMAGES AND THE POLITICS OF A SHARED HUMANITY
New writing by Juliana Robles de la Pava
Two decades of posthumanist critique have challenged the category of the Human. But what if the problem with “the human” is not that the category exists, but that it has been restricted to one kind of being, in one part of the world, at particular moments in history; while in other cosmologies, humanity circulates as a shared condition among jaguars, trees, spirits and rivers? Juliana Robles de la Pava’s new open-access article is available in the International Journal of Heritage Studies.
Continue reading here.
Between Ice and Memory: Pathways of Care Through the Cryosphere
By Marcello Rechberger
Just a few steps separate the sunny courtyard of the Collegium Helveticum from the chilly underground rooms of the historic Semper Observatory, now host of the Swiss Advanced Studies Institute. In June 2026, this short walk became a journey through different ways of engaging with the cryosphere: from scientific lectures on historical sources and archaeological finds to works of art. Marcello Rechberger takes us on a journey through Caring for Naturecultures, an exhibition and a symposium organized this June at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich.
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RELATIONAL CURATORSHIP AND THE PRAGMATIC MEANINGS OF AFRICAN COLLECTIONS AT MANCHESTER MUSEUM: NJABULO CHIPANGURA
READING GROUP RECAP
On 19 June 2026, the Natureculture Lab Reading Group welcomed Njabulo Chipangura (Maynooth University) for a thought-provoking discussion on museums, colonial legacies, and the ethics of care. Drawing on his research in anthropology, museum studies, and heritage studies, Chipangura explored how ethnographic museums holding African collections are confronting the enduring consequences of colonialism.
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SURFACING TIME: INHERITING THE BURDENS OF HUMAN–SOIL BELONGING:
MARIA PUIG DE LA BELLACASA
HKB FORSCHUNGSMITTWOCH RECAP
On the occassion of Forschungsmittwoch #203 at the HKB Bern, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explored how soils can become a site for rethinking relationships between humans, environments, and the more-than-human world. Titled Surfacing Time: Inheriting the Burdens of Human–Soil Belonging, her talk offered a speculative reading of practices that reclaim and reimagine human–soil relations within the legacies of anthropocentric, productionist, and colonial ecologies.
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LEGAL PERSONHOOD AND THE ONTOLOGIES OF LIVING WATER BODIES: YOONHA KIM
READING GROUP RECAP
On May 8th, the Natureculture Lab Reading Group welcomed Yoonha Kim (inherit.heritage in transformation, Berlin) for a conversation on legal personhood, living water bodies, and the ways communities and activist groups reimagine relationships of care, kinship, and naturocultural entanglement. Drawing from her ongoing research on the Korean tidal flats known as getbol, Yoonha introduced the complex ecological and cultural histories of these coastal environments, which are currently threatened by governmental land reclamation projects and extractivist imaginaries.
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THE PERSONHOOD OF NATURE — MARINA LOSTAL IN CONVERSATION WITH NANCY COULING
ETH ZURICH LECTURE REVIEW
At a lecture held at ETH Zurich on March 30, 2026, Marina Lostal presented a wide-ranging reflection on the emerging field of the Rights of Nature. The talk, part of a broader series Conservation: A Spatial Practice of Repair available on YouTube, situated contemporary legal transformations within a larger philosophical and political critique of extractive capitalism, environmental governance, and the anthropocentric foundations of modern law.
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CONSERVING THE CELESTIAL SPHERES: MILES TIMPE
READING GROUP RECAP
On 11 March, the Natureculture Lab Reading Group welcomed Miles Timpe (ETH Zurich), astrobiologist and space sustainability researcher, for a stimulating discussion on the conservation of celestial spheres. Bringing together perspectives from astrophysics, astrobiology, sustainable spaceflight, artificial intelligence, and environmental humanities, the session explored how the night sky can be understood as both a natural environment and a cultural commons.
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THE RETURN TO NATURE AND CULTURE: TIM INGOLD
COLLEGIUM HELVETICUM LECTURE RECAP
On February 26, 2026, the Collegium Helveticum, Swiss Institute for Advanced Study, welcomed renowned social anthropologist Tim Ingold for a thought-provoking lecture conceived and organized by Hanna Hölling as part of her fellowship project Caring for Naturecultures. The event also formed part of the Natureculture Lab initiative. In his lecture, Tim Ingold called for a renewed humanism centered on the flourishing of life rather than the pursuit of progress.
Continue reading here.