Anna Ziya Geerling is a Dutch photographer, multimedia artist and researcher within the environmental (post-)humanities and Indigenous studies, who investigates cross-cultural understandings of, and resulting (sustenance) relationships between humans and the world some call ‘nature'. As part of a decolonial examination of the socio-cultural roots of - and philosophical and practical pathways out of - the glocal ecological crises, academically she highlights Indigenous storytelling as a relational form of environmental education. Most recently, as co-coordinator of the Ekologos Global Environmental Humanities project, she conducted fieldwork in Nagaland, North East India, on Indigenous ecological knowledges, folkstories and songs, to collaboratively build a living archive of place-based stories of belonging in the more-than-human world.
As a storyteller herself, she endeavors to re-member ‘Western’ audiences to our fundamental entanglement with the world of ‘nature’, contributing artistically to various political and scientific meetings besides exhibition spaces. Working with photography, video, poetry & text, installations and ceramics, but also participatory improvisation theatre, she conceives of artistic practice as a pedagogical collaborative venture with the world to make its voices heard. Having lived in Arctic Sápmi/Norway the past 4 years, her ever-evolving multi-media exhibition project 'Confluence, The Intertidal Zone’ addresses the climate crisis through an immersive portrait of water between its phases of transformation, as we find ourselves globally facing extremes of both flood and drought. Placing the human back into the hydrological cycle of which we are part, her work reminds us that the ‘ecological crisis’ will be written on our very own bodies and challenges the dualistic border thinking of a human-nature divide that characterizes the Western paradigm.
