Abstract

“Molecular Fabulations: From Ashes to Algorithms” proposes molecular fabulations as a speculative framework for rethinking death and decay in the fragility of the Anthropocene. Building on Marietta Radomska’s techno-ecological landscape (2018: 380; 2024), I situate this notion alongside Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminism (2021), which unsettles Western binaries of human/animal, self/other, and nature/technology, affirming instead a perspective that embraces ‘zoe/geo/technobodies’ (Braidotti 2021: 12). Haraway’s “speculative fabulation” (2016: 31) grounds fabulation as a narrative practice that blurs fact and fiction, conjuring alternative presents and futures, while Jacques Derrida’s hauntology (1993) complements this approach, framing death as a spectral recurrence, a revenant presence that unsettles ontological security. Together, fabulation and hauntology provide the conditions for molecular fabulations: narratives of becoming that are material, affective, and ghosted by the trace. Methodologically, this research is situated within Practice-led Research (Barrett & Bolt 2007), where theory and practice entangle in mutual becoming, interacting with the environment as suggested by Enactivism (Varela et al. 1991). This research is additionally framed as “art as speculative science” (SciArt), which operates in a new liminal space. It functions as a performative laboratory for speculative thought (Barad, 2012), producing knowledge that is inseparable from material, affective, and techno-ecological processes.

Nestled

Wednesday, 15 April 2026
15:00
STIAS, Boardroom

One such gesture is the installation Nestled (2025). Ceramic pods containing human ashes and fungal spawn are nestled among the exposed roots of a Ficus — a living “Mother Tree.” As Suzanne Simard (n.d.) demonstrates, such trees serve as ecological hubs, distributing nutrients and sustaining a networked vitality. In Nestled, the tree becomes a collaborator: its roots cradle the pods, enfolding molecular traces of human remains within the futures of fungal mycelial networks (Sheldrake 2020). This entanglement extends into an electronic dimension, where a microcontroller coded for sound activates speakers through motion. The work oscillates between stillness and resonance, silence and machinic hum, as ash and mycelium, ceramic and root, algorithm and code converge. Fabulation here is written in both matter and code: a generated sound that carries life-like affect yet remains machinic and programmable — a poetic machine haunted by the trace of the once-living/still-living body. Nestled thus stages a hauntological fabulation, a speculative poiesis that unsettles boundaries between human and more-than-human, organic and machinic.

The once-living/still-living body in molecular fabulations intersects with Braidotti’s becoming-imperceptible (2006; 2013), Ferrando’s bio-me (biome) (2023: 55), Morton’s hyperobjects and dark ecology (2016), Barad’s performativity (2012), and Bennett’s agency of matter (2010). Death emerges not as an endpoint but as an immanent transformation – what Lykke (2021: 128) terms “molecular mourning,” where grief coexists with the transition of the dead into ‘zoe’. By advancing molecular fabulations through Practice-led Research, this paper contributes to posthumanist debates on mortality, affect, and ecology, offering a speculative poiesis attuned to the fragile entanglements of the Anthropocene
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