Relational Ecologies: Perception, Mobility, and Collective Form symposium

Relational Ecologies: Perception, Mobility, and Collective Form brings together artists, designers, curators, and researchers to examine how creative practice responds to increasingly interconnected social, cultural, and institutional conditions. At a moment marked by technological mediation, intensified migration, and rapidly shifting cultural infrastructures, the symposium considers how contemporary creative practitioners are developing alternative modes of inquiry capable of engaging the complexity of the present.

The symposium approaches relational ecologies as a framework for understanding how perception, memory, cultural meaning, and lived experience emerge through relations between bodies, materials, histories, infrastructures, and systems of exchange. Rather than treating artistic production as secondary to theory or representation, Relational Ecologies positions creative practice itself as a form of critical and situated inquiry grounded in embodied experience, material experimentation, collaborative processes, archival engagement, and curatorial practice.

Across multiple sessions, presenters examine collaborative research structures, perception and cultural interpretation, and the movement of archives, narratives, and identities across diasporic contexts. Spanning art, design, documentary practice, curatorial research, participatory media, and interdisciplinary inquiry, the symposium explores how creative practitioners are rethinking inherited models of authorship, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural production through collective and process-oriented forms of practice.

The symposium is part of the VCUarts Qatar’s Collateral Event, Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception, at the 61st International Art Exhibition—the Venice Biennale.

Thresholds of Perception: Rethinking How We Know
10am–12:20pm
This session brings together presentations on relational artistic practice, curatorial research, textile-based design inquiry, and the transformation of industrial space into cultural infrastructure. Speakers examine how creative work shapes the ways memory, perception, and cultural experience are documented, interpreted, and shared. Topics include ethical collaboration in contemporary art practice, curating as a form of knowledge production, object-making as a record of presence, and the role of museums and cultural institutions in constructing collective narratives. The session ultimately considers how artists and curators shape the interpretation and circulation of cultural memory and lived experience.

Translocal Knowledge: Archives, Diasporas, and Circulations
2–4:20pm
This session explores how artists and researchers use archives, documentary practices, participatory media, and embodied forms of storytelling to examine migration, displacement, and cultural memory across diasporic contexts. Presentations address family photo albums, VR-based emotional archives, dislocated documentary practices, and material histories carried through dress, gesture, and everyday objects. Across these projects, speakers consider how memory is reconstructed through translation, reenactment, fragmentation, and acts of repair. Together, the session examines how archives function not as fixed records of the past, but as living spaces through which histories, identities, and forms of belonging are continually interpreted, carried forward, and reimagined.

Location
The Home of The Human Safety Net at the Procuratie, 105 Piazza S. Marco, Venice

About us
Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar) is the international branch campus of Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, a top-ranked art and design school based in Richmond, Virginia. Established in 1998 through a partnership with Qatar Foundation, VCUarts Qatar offers a Bachelor of Arts in Art History, Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees, and a Master of Fine Arts in Design. 

Located in Education City in the heart of Doha, Qatar, the campus provides a research-driven environment where creative practice intersects with global perspectives, cultural dialogue and innovation. Through partnerships, exhibitions, and public programs, VCUarts Qatar serves as a hub for contemporary art and design in the Middle East.