Marta Kucza

Research 

The EARTH fellowship fell on a crucial moment in my PhD research, when, after a long and solitary process of designing my methodology, I sought dialogue with other researchers who think through artistic practice. 

My research addresses two problems so far considered unrelated: the climate crisis, and the exclusion of people labelled as having learning disabilities from knowledge production. Baptiste Morizot links climate crisis to the impoverishment of the ways in which we imagine, perceive and relate to other living beings (2022). As Timo Maran, ecosemiotician and supervisor of my PhD, proposes, excessive self-referentiality and decontextualisation disconnects humans from their environment and from other living beings (Maran 2020). Abstract explanations do not necessarily equip us with tools for interaction. It is crucial, I argue, to produce models of cultivating curiosity and creating attachments towards nonhumans that “go beyond affect, symbolism and abstraction” (Gibson 2023).  

Human public knowledges are built on a foundation of neurotypicality. People with variations of neurocognitive functioning, especially those associated with low intellectual ability such as Down syndrome, have never been considered legitimate knowledge-makers. The theory of autistic mind blindness fuels false conclusions, such as autistic people’s lack of empathy or even inability to hold any perspective at all, resulting in an impossibility to access what reality is (Yergeau 2018).  

While neurodivergent expressions are considered pathology or automatism, I conceptualise them as ways of coming to knowledge and propose that they are ecologically embedded. I speculate, in a theoretical and artistic manner, on how neurodivergent modes of enquiry could multiply our knowledges about more-than-human ecosystems.  

The research is based on my long-term engagement as experimental film workshop facilitator in Maarja küla, a supported living facility for neurodivergent adults located in the south Estonian forest.  

Our shared art practices include Foley – recording sound to go with previously recorded moving images, in this case creating sound for nature documentaries using everyday objects and our bodies. We have also been working on a science-fiction film, set at the institution and inspired by the forest ecosystem of Maarja küla, the sensory worlds of the local plant, animal and fungal species, and the perceptive universes of residents and staff members.  

The participants’ taste in repetition and noise, the variations of attention and temporality that underscore our explorations, and the importance of traces, indexicality, touch and friction, make up the position from which we learn together about nonhuman living beings.  

The main premise of my methodology is shared analytical work, a situated research setup in which the researcher and the research collaborators “generate objects of interest and modes of analysis together” (Brichet and Hastrup in Swanson 2020: 21). Through the ecosemiotic perspective that focuses on signification and communication in living systems, I refer to Charles S. Peirce’s non-symbolic sign processes, to Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt, the ecological dimension of Fernand Deligny’s thought, and especially to Arachnean evoking non-symbolic orders.  

I found environmental humanities and arts in Scotland particularly inventive because of their use of participatory methods and creative practice in addressing the climate crisis. My research project aligned with the main topics at Gray’s School of Art, where my research placement took place, namely Socially Engaged Art Practice, Creative and Cultural Ecologies, and Energy, Environment and Sustainability. I have previously collaborated with my mentor, Dr Jen Clarke, who curated excerpts of my ongoing research project at the online Field/Works II: Generating Ecologies of Trust exhibition.  

The aim of my fellowship with SGSAH was to complete the ecosemiotic perspective that has been developed in my home department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu with this longstanding expertise in participatory research. I wanted to understand better how environmental knowledge based on abstraction can be bridged with experiential, non-linguistic engagements that are place-specific. Can we imagine collaborative enquiry between scientists and people labelled as having learning disabilities? How do we draw on the sensory and the nonsymbolic in our research? Is the sensory and the nonsymbolic translatable and reducible to the orders of representation proper to academia and public education?  

The community-based model of science 

The first thing that struck me as a distinct feature of the research culture in Scotland was the community-based character of the projects I got to know through the cohort-building programme and during my further stay in Aberdeen, in contrast to other academic contexts I have known in Poland, France, Belgium and Estonia. While fieldwork is no longer limited to anthropology or archaeology and appears in disciplines considered more abstract, such as philosophy, the translation of the fieldwork experience into research findings takes place through singular perspectives made accessible to a very narrow community of peers. Knowledge produced in such a way very rarely reaches a non-academic audience, and makes us ask the same question repeatedly: how many people will eventually read our publications?  

Present-day research project schemes are designed to make up for the researcher’s estrangement from ‘society’ and insist on formalist requirements to transform scientific knowledge into messages understandable by a wider audience. The inevitable failure of such translations results in unceasing tension, with scientists accused of elitist practices and a mistrusting ‘society’ blamed for its lack of critical thinking and the increasing incompetence in understanding science.  

Through my research I have tried to address the separation between professional and non-professional knowledge-making and propose that the common could take place not at the stage of communicating research findings, or even gathering data, but in the process of formulating questions and shared learning. 

During a walk in the Morone Birkwood in Braemar led by the local branch of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, an organisation consisting of both professional and amateur members, I asked the guide about the origin of the strong tradition of non-professional knowledge-making in Britain, supposing that it is the longstanding interest in natural history, fuelled by the colonial enterprise, that spread with time from university-educated naturalists to other social classes. The guide pointed to a different aspect, the popularity of hobby clubs in Britain, which brings a slightly different articulation of the problem. What matters for the inclusivity of knowledge-making is not the capacity to make knowledge universally understandable, but the existence of communities of practice within which knowledge is produced. 

In one of our many conversations, Jen Clarke accentuated what rarely comes across in the discussions on the rationale of our academic activities: research is much more than methods, findings and publications, it is the whole body of relations that we weave beyond academia throughout the lives of our research projects.  

Panel and roundtable at the SIEF conference in Aberdeen: reflecting on the translatability of the sensory 

During my stay in Aberdeen, I participated in the Unwriting Art Ethnography: Translating, Decoding, and Interpreting Sensory, Embodied, and Participatory Practices panel at the SIEF 2025 congress, which consisted in three sessions and a roundtable, and gathered researchers in critical disability studies, anthropology and design. I presented there our shared film and sound practices from Maarja küla, including Foley workshops and individual sessions of sound recording with nonspeaking participants. With this I was trying to reflect on the problems of commensurability and the reversibility of symbolic and non-symbolic orders, as well as on the reducibility of sensory practices to any forms of representation.  

I referred to Terrence Deacon’s and Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (see Deacon1998, Rączaszek-Leonardi et al. 2018) views on the emergence of symbolic reference, as happening through the process of ungrounding. We don’t need physical referents to make sense of the world, as our understanding and communication is based on nested levels of abstraction. While these intricate, recursive processes allow for the exponential expansion of knowledge, the sophistication of its structure and the generating power of its shortcuts do not make it universally transmissible and translatable. We struggle to break down scientific knowledge into ‘simpler’ forms.  

I believe that the habits of generating symbolic meanings reduce our capacities of noticing nonsymbolic semiotic processes and understanding more-than-human interactions. What matters is not only the importance of nonsymbolic meaning making, but the multiple ways in which our relations with other living beings trouble the expectations of the symbolic orders.   

Work on the paper, as well as conversations with the participating researchers, made me understand that language-centred notions such as decoding, translation and interpretation cannot fully attend to embodied processes of meaning-making.  

Mapping the Other’s points of reference 

Having acknowledged the need to go beyond language-centred metaphors, I was looking for mapping and notation techniques that could allow me to trace the modes of enquiry of nonverbal and nonspeaking participants, and that would account for my own sensory fieldwork experience. I needed visualisation techniques that allow me to see the research participants’ points of reference: what matters to them within our shared territory?  

During a workshop in mapping led by Dr Inge Panneels at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, I adapted the mapping techniques of Fernand Deligny to my own practice. I came up with carbon paper maps added to the background map of Maarja küla, transcribing my own auditory experience during the fieldwork activities, as well as movements, sounds and other events important for the workshop participants.  

Exploring art practices of contact and contiguity 

Since my research project focuses on nonsymbolic meaning-making, I have been working specifically on practices that imply bodily iconicity, contact and contiguity, such as performance, imitation of animal and bird sounds, anthotype photography, and the use of contact microphones and embodied cameras as prosthetic tools to explore plant and animal modes of existence. I was looking into other embodied art practices during my stay in Scotland and found a lot of inspiration and resonance in work and discussions with the fellow programme participants.  

The Grounding Truths: Alternative Landscapes for Agroforestry Futures exhibition at the Sill, curated by Jen Clarke, delved into questions vital for my practice, i.e. the possibility of bridging scientifically produced knowledge and phenomenologically accessible experience through artistic practice. The exhibition allowed me to understand how intricate and specific to every type of practice are the processes of transforming data into an aesthetic experience. 

Among many other art shows that I have seen during the fellowship, I was particularly marked by the Flow exhibition at the University of Dundee, presenting artworks engaging with the theme of water along with environmental records from the University Archives and artefacts from the Museum Collections. The dialogue between the artworks and the apparatus of environmental science made me think of a new dispositive that I could use in my fieldwork, using simple, historical measuring devices used in environmental science which mediate perceptual experience. I thought of re-appropriating them in our shared enquiry with Maarja küla residents.  

Lastly, I was delighted to discover Steve Hollingsworth’s work inspired by his long-term, immersive collaboration with people with complex developmental disabilities.  

Tacit knowing 

I dedicated some time to researching Michael Polanyi’s work and interpreting our Foley practice through his notion of tacit knowing. According to Polanyi, all thought is incarnate, and the difference between observing something and attending to it from the body is that through the latter mode we can see not only the object but also its meaning (Polanyi 1969). Most importantly, Polanyi proposes that it is tacit knowing that deepens our knowledge of living things (1975: 45). 

As a fruitful coincidence, while working on Polanyi’s theory, I took part in Sue Fairburn’s workshop on body as a weather station at Gray’s School of Art, which explored bodily knowledge, similar to the notion of tacit knowing, in the context of sensing and interpreting the changing climate.  

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Research during the EARTH scholarship allowed me to further my ongoing project in the kind and generous company of wonderful researchers and artists, helping me to refresh my methodologies and refine my conceptual framework. For this, I am indebted to the fellow international and Scotland-based EARTH scholars, to the Gray’s School of Art staff, and most of all to my mentor Jen Clarke. It was truly an unforgettable experience.