Murmuring Voices 

19.12.2024
Doctoral seminar, Campus Ter Beken, Ghent. 

The seminar Murmuring Voices was a public sharing day of the Fluid Futures research cluster at the LUCA Ter Beken Campus, where we collectively explored decolonial, embodied, and environmental histories through presentations, cooking, and interactive sessions. During the day we engaged with the often-silenced presences of Ter Beken: the hidden currents beneath the soil, the forgotten plants, and reacted and worked with the ‘archive of research gestures’ built over the past year with Fluid Futures.

In the morning we welcomed guest speaker Maria José Murillo, sharing her work with the Noqanchis collective through a decolonial lens, focused on community-driven histories and embodied narratives.
Maria José Murillo is a fiber artist, researcher, and cultural worker dedicated to cultivating and reclaiming her Andean textile heritage, historically excluded from Peruvian art schools. Murillo bridges ancestral traditions with modern techniques to explore her heterogeneous cultural identity and enter into a relation with her ancestors. 

In the afternoon, Sophie Krier led an interactive workshop session with an introductory talk, an online live conversation with facilitator Natasha Lythgoe on sensory grounding techniques, and a mutual listening exercise exploring “affirming aliveness” using an (audio) talk between Aslı Hatipoğlu and Pascale Gatzen. The session was closed with a sharing circle, inviting reflections and personal insights.
Sophie Krier is a relational artist, editor and researcher. Through her collaborative works she interweaves biographies of beings and places.
 
The Fluid Futures members led sensory embodied sessions around Ter Beken’s green spaces: an environmental dialogue in the old landscape park guided by Breg Horemans, an intervention in the dye garden around the alkanet and St John's wort by Annelotte Lammertse and Anna Püschel, and a lunch performance around the collective oven by Lara Bongard.