EMERGENT NARRATIVES: STORYTELLING BEYOND THE HUMAN

Delivered as a workshop for students at the University of Bergen Digital Narratives Masters program, this workshop explored storytelling otherwise - asking how human makers might de-center themselves and craft stories beyond the human.

The workshop was an invitation to observe, attune to, and experiment with the narrative methods of more-than-human worlds, imagining how creative practices might better acknowledge, include, and even be led by them.

Drawing from Donna Haraway’s statement, “It matters what stories tell stories,” it invites participants to play at storytelling otherwise—refiguring narrative practices to foreground the diverse, more-than-human storytellers that co-create our world. Through this process, participants will explore visioning and creating stories that might populate the Symbiocene—a future epoch defined by the reintegration of human life into natural systems and characterised by mutual care, collaboration, and flourishing between species.

Across the afternoon participants moved from discussion and experiential exercises into hands-on practice, experimenting with storytelling strategies that emerge from more-than-human bodies, systems, and relations. How do the stories we tell change in content and form when led by lifeways beyond the human? What happens when stories flock, flow, stampede or sporulate?