What happens when water shifts from being perceived as some(thing) to being encountered as some(one)? Perhaps some(body). A presence with its own rhythms, histories, and ways of communicating. Through this shift, Samantha Pellarini explores the human as a multibodied being whose identity is adaptable, interconnected, and continuously transforming through relationships with landscapes.
Pellarini’s artistic practice begins with a fascination for belonging: how bodies, cultures, and ecosystems find ways to exist within constantly changing conditions. Through embodied field research, speculative ecology, ritual, performance, installation, moving image, and ecosystem-building, she investigates how relationships between water, landscapes, and bodies generate new forms of perception, learning and artistic expression.
Born in Venezuela with Italian heritage and based in the Netherlands, Pellarini’s practice grows from experiences of migration, hybridity, and the search for connection across changing territories. Her exploration of belonging beyond human perspectives began with the creation of The Non-Human Institute for Humanity in 2020: an ongoing experiment in imagining alternative forms of identity, collective imagination, and relationships beyond human-centred worldviews.
Over time, water became the central collaborator in this research. Through her self-developed Rhizoaquatic Methodology, Pellarini seeks relationships with landscapes through long-term site-expeditions, listening, returning, and allowing places to reveal their own rhythms and cycles. Emerging from years of embodied research, this methodology allows water, environments and encounters to shape the form the works take.
The resulting works unfold as temporary ecosystems: spaces where performance, sculpture, sound, scent, moving image, textiles, and natural materials come together. These environments explore the possibilities of a water-centred existence.
Pellarini’s site specific practice moves between sensory knowledge, ecological research, fables, memory of place, and intuition. Through speculative environments and collaborations with artists, researchers, ecologists, communities, and landscapes themselves, she creates spaces where new rituals, languages, and forms of being ncan emerge.
photograph courtesy of Into Nature, by Hanna Stienstra 2024.
The human and non-human net agents
(RECURRING COLLABORATORS)
CAN DEMREN (8000.A.C-Present)
Sound-organism, and resonance-shaper. Can breathes through invisible gills, translating vibrations and moods into music, tunes, and atmospheres that surround the non-human net's work. With lens and ear, he records and produces sounds, documents happenings into both still and moving image pieces. Can is a frequency, a loyal limb, close and attuned. Within the Net Can has recently began exploring embodiment, making him not only an audible aspect of the non-human net's work but also a visual one.
ZJUUL WIERSEMA (1.3 BILLION YEARS- ∞)
Better known as "Papizjuulo" is the tentacular engineer, mechanic-dreamer, and co-axis of the Net. Zjuul builds time traveling capsules, exoskeletons for impossible missions and helps them to transform and dissolve again. His hands function like intelligent appendages, constructing and deconstructing with equal ease. A central node to the Net, the machinic brain who ensures feasibility of installations, safety and construction. It is well known by the Net that if we can imagine it, there is a high chance Zjuul can build it.
AGENT I.D.FERREIRA (Time in Foreign Currency.*77.06.100)
Mud-creature, Oystress Oracle member, and wild advisor. Agent I.D.Ferreira moves through estuaries and marshes with an amphibious grace, embodying the unruly intelligence of wetlands. She is both spark and shadow: a cricket-voice whispering unexpected turns, a collective brain that questions, re-roots, and redirects. Agent I.D.Ferreira carries hidden reservoirs of power from another realm, yet within the Net she chooses to unleash her feral self: slippery, untamable, and indispensable.
AGENT IVY.ROVER (Life measured in Yew tree rings)
Made of stone and bark IVY.ROVER comes into the landscape with the strength of a 4x4 yet with the softness of blankets. With knowledge of fibers, capacity to see an large scale of greens, she tests fields, weaves mantles and withstands storms. She is not scared of the weather, she sways her branches both indoor and outdoors. Within the net Agent IVY.ROVER is a kickstarter of movements wether that is in water or land, she would not stand on the side and she wants to dive right in. Poisonous when bitten.