In this conversation, philosopher and ecological thinker Patrick Degeorges speaks with artist and researcher Margherita Pevere about the transformative potential of artistic practices in times of ecological crisis. Drawing on her experience in the fields of bioart, grief work and interdisciplinary collaboration, Margherita Pevere reflects on how artists can contribute to shared knowledge, collective mourning, and renewed forms of territorial engagement.
Her recent project Lament engages post-wildfire ecologies and more-than-human mourning. with an installation / performance and a community engagement program . In this conversation Margherita Pevere describes how artistic practice can facilitate processes of community care and long-term resilience. She discusses the conditions needed to support such work, including funding models, the role of local allies, and the importance of time and trust in building meaningful relationships with communities.The dialogue also explores the relationship between art, science and traditional ecological knowledge; the challenge of transmitting situated artistic practices; and the ethical responsibility of artists to act as “good ancestors”. Throughout the exchange, Margherita Pevere and Patrick Degeorges engage with a shared question at the heart of the Transformative Territories programme: how can art contribute to collective transitions in the face of systemic ecological disruption?
Patrick Degeorges: To begin, could you tell us how you became an artist and how your relationship to artistic practice took shape?
Margherita Pevere: I love that question, because although I always had a strong intuition that I was meant to be an artist, I didn’t have the language for it as a child. I grew up in a semi-rural environment where culture was appreciated, but real-life examples of professional artists were missing. I somehow inherited the idea that art was not a viable professional choicey. Still, I was always creating: drawing, exploring, and being captivated by aesthetics, such as the rituals of the church. I was driven by a desire to do something experimental, even if I didn’t yet know what form it would take. Instead, here I am today.
My path was gradual. I first studied political science with a focus on the environment, while remaining close to artistic circles — musicians, festivals, making things. Eventually, I realised I had to listen to what I call the ‘demon’ inside me, and I enrolled in a Master’s programme in art in my twenties. Art follows its own temporalities. I embraced art because I wanted to create something that didn’t exist yet ; something meaningful not only to me, but to others too. I wanted to spark a shift: an emotion, a thought, a memory.
Patrick Degeorges: So it was this desire to shift perception, to affect how others relate to the world, that led you to art, as a means of transformation?
Margherita Pevere: Exactly! But I’d add that art can also be an aesthetic experience that simply stays with you. I don’t see myself as a moralist. People are different, I’m not here to tell them what’s right. Whether at a rave, an opera, or in front of a painting, something might resonate with you — and that resonance, that pulse, stays with you. It’s a subtle but powerful transformation. The audience decides what to do with that.
In terms of practice, I work with a wide range of materials and forms. I begin with materials and life processes. For example, I don’t just work on paper, I work with paper, engaging with its structure and body. I’ve worked with soil, bacterial colonies, even cells extracted from my own body. Some works are technically simple; others involve complex biotechnologies. My formats range from installations and performances to participatory projects. My work is not about my personal story, yet it engages with the world I perceive.
Patrick Degeorges: And how do you engage your audience through these diverse practices?
Margherita Pevere: My audience is quite varied. It includes art enthusiasts, people interested in advanced technologies, philosophy or ecological topics. Each project offers different points of entry. A high-tech biotech installation might draw one kind of public, while a more traditional visual piece draws another. But all my works relate to the same underlying research interests, approached from different perspectives.
Patrick Degeorges: Let’s turn to ecology and territory. How does your work engage with socio-ecological transitions, and the transformation of territories?
Margherita Pevere: Ecology is central to my work. I begin with observation, understanding the relationships between things. Take Lament, for example: I conducted research in the Karst region between Slovenia and Italy, one year after a large wildfire. I observed how the environment was adapting and recovering. These observations led to conversations with local experts. For me, ecology is about coexistence; recognising that humans and non-humans are interconnected in countless ways.
Patrick Degeorges: So your approach is to reveal the interdependencies between people and place – what philosopher Baptiste Morizot might call “milieux” -?
Margherita Pevere: Yes, and I always begin with the non-human. I consider myself – and all of us – as guests in shared ecosystems: forests, lakes, seas. I look first at non-human agents and their behaviours, which often tell me more about the ecology than human narratives do.
For example for the installation and performance I conducted fieldwork in Karst with musician Ivan Penov. I collected biological samples and he did fieldrecording in the burnt woods.. I found moss, and through moss, I learned about post-fire ecological succession, how moss stabilises soil and supports regeneration. That small encounter opened a whole chain of questions about resilience and interspecies collaboration and competition.
Patrick Degeorges: And how did working with moss affect your artistic process?
Margherita Pevere: Moss is fascinating: it’s ancient, resilient, and often overlooked. It’s also stubborn; you can’t just take it from the wild and expect it to thrive in a controlled setting. I had to start from spores, grow them slowly, and negotiate with the organism. My experiments are still in process, which is a good exercise in patience and respect. Whether I’m working with moss, bacteria, or plants, I’ve learned that organisms have their own agency. You can’t control them, you have to co-adapt. If not, they resist. I use the term “recalcitrant”, like a horse that refuses to follow instruction. And this recalcitrance is key when working with living systems.
Patrick Degeorges: So your practice is a form of cooperation — an emergent process shaped by the agency of non-humans. There’s risk, unpredictability. How do you define success or failure in such a context?
Margherita Pevere: How to define success or failure remains a big question. But if we understand process as a mode of learning, then failure becomes generative. It’s not just about outcomes, it’s about insights gained along the way, often unexpected ones. In my experience, art rarely gives you what you expect. You work with forces, materials, gravity, people. A couple of years ago, I curated an exhibition with two artist colleagues. We exhibited artworks but also failed experiments, journals, prototypes. It was important to reveal the backstage of artistic research. What you see in an exhibition is just the crystallisation of a much longer and deeper process.
Patrick Degeorges: In an emergent process, I would say failure is the inability to recognise or welcome what is emerging, a failure of hospitality. Bruno Latour once wrote that we must “love our monsters”¹ — a reference to Frankenstein, of course, but also to the unexpected life forms we bring into being. Do you see your work as helping people cultivate this kind of love?
Margherita Pevere: I’d be happy if this happens..
Patrick Degeorges: Let’s now move to the second part of our conversation, focused more on broader questions related to the Transformative Territories programme. Drawing on your experience, how do you think artists, or art practitioners, can contribute to the development of commons, particularly in ways that help communities engage with ecological issues in their territories? How can artistic practices empower people to become active participants in responding to environmental challenges? Your work on wildfire risks might be a good starting point, though feel free to begin wherever you like.
Margherita Pevere: Complex question: to define what “art can do” is never straightforward. To answer, one might begin with the context. Each situation shapes a different kind of conversation. In a gallery, audiences respond to certain elements; when working on a territory, the concerns are entirely different. This is part of art’s multifaceted nature.
I think that artists have the capacity to perceive the unseen or the unperceivable. We notice and express things that other people may not have the time, tools, or desire to confront. This can be difficult: I’ve been told a couple of times that people are afraid of my work. Yet this sensitivity is also what enables artists to open space for needed conversations.
In Lament, I worked in two different contexts. For the installation and performance I worked in my studio and conducted fieldwork on the Karst Plateau, as I said earlier. The community engagement took place in Santa Comba Dão, Portugal, a municipality that was affected by the devastating wildfires in 2017. I co-designed the latter with Céline Charveriat, founder of the environmental consultancy Prototopia.
We worked with Portuguese researchers to identify a community affected by major wildfires and that was open to engaging in such a process. The local psychologist guided us in approaching people with sensitivity, and trust was built gradually. Once this trust was established, we engaged in walks and conversations before the moment of shared creativity. That’s how we, together, made space for a transformative process. Participants could speak in their own voices and tell their own story.
The whole community was invited to join, and those who did found a safe space to express memories and emotions linked to a collective environmental trauma. Some brought objects: melted bottles from burnt houses, stories of animals that couldn’t escape the blaze like chickens or dogs. Others recounted how the firefighters acted with great courage and effectiveness. These recollections covered grief, loss, but also resilience and gratitude. We created a canvas together that overlaps satellite images of the scar left by the wildfire with local geography and annotations of individual and collective memories and statements. The result was a shared narrative that previously had no place to emerge. We didn’t stage an individual artistic intervention. Rather, we facilitated a co-creative process where participants shared their own stories and memories. Eventually we presented my artwork and the canvas together at the premiere: a dialogue between different voices. After the show, my artwork returned to my studio, the canvas to Santa Comba Dão.
Patrick Degeorges: So in this case, the artistic process supported the emergence of a form of mourning that had not been possible before. As you said, material reconstruction often takes priority – homes, crops, infrastructure – but environmental grief tends to remain unaddressed. That’s a space where artistic practices can intervene in ways other professions cannot. Would you agree?
Margherita Pevere: Yes, because art acts through different channels. Material reconstruction is urgent for the local livelihood, and the psychologists, researchers, and firefighters did vital work in the aftermath of the fires. Our contribution came later, when some forms of grief still hadn’t found space to be expressed. Research and public discussion about environmental grief, or eco-grief, is still an emerging field². It’s often overlooked in favour of more immediate material concerns, which is understandable, but mourning is essential too. What art can do is open up space for this grief to be shared, not through diagnostic or therapeutic methods, but through co-creative, symbolic, and collective processes.
Patrick Degeorges: What you’re describing is a form of legitimacy rooted in collaboration: as an artist, you don’t act alone, but in concert with a network of researchers, psychologists, and local actors. This enables you to connect with dimensions of reality that are hard to confront otherwise. You don’t impose meaning; you help it emerge. Would you say that’s accurate?
Margherita Pevere: Yes, in such a context dialogue and respect are crucial. I would never approach a community on my own saying, “I’m an artist and I want to work on your environmental trauma.” That would be inappropriate. The trust we were able to build came from the groundwork laid with Céline and the broader team. My role was clearly defined within a respectful and trusted framework.
Patrick Degeorges: Let’s now turn to the role of science. How do scientific and ecological knowledge, particularly from researchers, contribute to your artistic practice? Are they necessary collaborators when engaging with territorial or environmental issues?
Margherita Pevere: It depends on the project, so I wouldn’t say scientific collaboration is always necessary. Most of my work is inspired by biology and ecology, many of my works were realized in dialogue with scientists, but not all of them. In my experience, transdisciplinary dialogue can reveal aspects of reality that lie between disciplinary boundaries. What I find particularly meaningful is the dialogue between scientific knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge³. While Indigenous knowledge is a term that doesn’t always apply in European contexts, there are forms of long-standing, experience-based local knowledge. For example, people may know how a river behaves under certain conditions, or how specific species react to drought, not because they’ve studied it formally, but because they’ve lived it.
Patrick Degeorges: So you’re speaking of the importance of situated knowledge, which complements more generalised expert knowledge. And as an artist, you can act as a connector between these ways of knowing.
Margherita Pevere: Exactly. I can give you a concrete example. While conducting research in the Karst region of Slovenia, I met firefighters of the local brigade, who are also hunters and landowners. One of them told me that after the fires, they brought water to specific places in the forest that they knew, from their experience as a hunter, where animals gather. That’s traditional ecological knowledge. They also explained how urban firefighters who came to help struggled with the terrain because their vehicles were too large for the narrow village roads. Again, a very practical form of situated knowledge. This kind of knowledge is among the references and inspirations in my artistic practice.
Patrick Degeorges: That makes sense. You’re describing a practice that is deeply contextual, collaborative, and capable of revealing invisible dimensions of ecological experience—whether through memory, emotion, or local knowledge. These are things that technical experts or policymakers might not access on their own. And in that sense, your work as an artist contributes to a collective capacity to confront complex, emerging realities.
Margherita Pevere: I hope so! Artists perceive things differently – that’s what we do – and that difference has value. Whether it’s a pop star, an experimental artist or a traditional one, , we process and communicate what we sense and offer it to the audience. That is a space where complex realities can be addressed. And that, I believe, is the essential role of the artist in society.
Patrick Degeorges: I’d like to turn now to a more structural dimension of transformative work: its economic model. As we’ve discussed, building trust with a community, understanding its needs, and immersing oneself in a territory all take time. And while time isn’t money, one does need financial support in order to take time. This process, diagnosis, engagement, artistic intervention, and especially follow-up, cannot be reduced to a single event. If the aim is transformation, then the effects must be accompanied and sustained over time. Based on your experience, what kind of economic model is needed to support this kind of long-term engagement?
Margherita Pevere: That’s an important point. Securing funding is a regular part of the work as an independent artist. There’s often a discourse of scarcity: that there’s no money for culture, for healthcare… And yet vast sums are mobilised instantly for war or other priorities. Funding is always a political issue.
Artists, like everyone else, need time and resources. That doesn’t necessarily mean working with expensive materials—many things can be done simply. European and public funding has been crucial for innovative art practice through a range of programs, large and small. I think that there is space for new models of philanthropy to support the wellbeing of their territories, including the cultural and ecological dimensions. In the absence of this, most artists rely on foundations and public grants, so it is very important that public funding continue to support culture in its diversity.
Lament was funded by the SciArt Resonances programme of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The community engagement received support also from the School of Agriculture (ISA) – University of Lisbon, CoLAB ForestWISE and FIRE RES, who are working on forest restoration and wildfire mitigation.
Patrick Degeorges: What you’re saying is that artistic work on ecological issues—such as your Lament project—could be seen as a form of public service, especially when it contributes to collective learning and resilience. Could such work be integrated into public programmes on risk prevention or environmental preparedness?
Margherita Pevere: For me art has an important role for society, as long as it remains diverse. So, it can also help address relevant or complex topics. I think there is a fine line between pushing a certain agenda and addressing relevant topics that otherwise receive less attention.
Patrick Degeorges: Before we conclude, I’d like to return to a point you mentioned earlier—community building. Could you expand on that? What does it mean for you, and why is it important?
Margherita Pevere: I’m glad you asked. I would never claim to build a community myself. Rather, I engage with people who already do this work. In Santa Comba Dão and in the Karst region, I met and collaborated with local actors. They acted as bridges. They could speak the language of the community, both literally and culturally, and also understand the needs and intentions of an artist. Without them, it would be impossible to enter into meaningful dialogue. As an artist coming from elsewhere, one misses part of the landscape of reference or local fabric, so one needs help and allies that can create that bridge.
Patrick Degeorges: One final question, perhaps a difficult one. How can an artist act as a good territorial ancestor? That is, how can artistic practice help leave behind healthy territories for future generations?
Margherita Pevere: I think it can be quite simple. By observing and representing the territory differently – by creating other ways of telling its story – artists can make people see what surrounds them in a new light. If this is done with respect, I believe it can be already a valuable contribution.
Patrick Degeorges: Earlier you mentioned the transformative potential of Lament. Could you say more about what changed as a result of the project?
Margherita Pevere: One of the most meaningful outcomes, for me, was the way our collaborators – scientists working on fire mitigation and forest restoration -began to take environmental grief more seriously after the community engagement phase. It’s a process, but they’ve started to integrate this emotional dimension into their work. That’s a real transformation, one that could influence future research and even public policy.
Patrick Degeorges: That’s very important. It suggests that artistic engagement can bring new dimensions into scientific and political agendas. Do you see Lament as a model that could be shared or replicated elsewhere?
Margherita Pevere: I hope so. The installation and performance are currently touring, and each new audience encounters not only the artistic work but also the story of the community engagement behind it. Céline and I are also exploring the possibility of replicating this kind of engagement in other places. Importantly, we’ve written a toolkit that can be adapted by artists, activists or researchers. It offers guidance for creating similar projects in different contexts, tailored to local needs. The toolkit will be published soon in open access on Prototopia’s website.
Patrick Degeorges: That’s excellent. The toolkit allows for transmission; not just of your individual work, but of a broader practice that others can adopt and adapt. It shows that transformative artistic work can be shared, even without the original artist present.
Margherita Pevere: Yes, ideally with the presence of an artist, but not necessarily the same one. It can be a local artist, or someone else who understands the context. The idea of the toolkit came from Céline, whose background in environmental policy helped identify the need for a resource that others could use.
Patrick Degeorges: Let me share a quick example before we close. I’ve been working with artists on wolf predation in the Creuse region of France, another emerging ecological risk, much like wildfire. Over several years, we developed an inquiry and a performance involving local institutions. Eventually, we created a practice of reenactment that could be transmitted to other communities facing similar issues. What struck me was that other communities were less interested in encountering an “artist’s work” than in participating in a shared practice that had emerged from another community. They engaged not because the artist came from outside, but because the practice was meaningful and transmissible.
Margherita Pevere: That makes perfect sense. It sounds like a splendid and fascinating project.
Patrick Degeorges: So, in that sense, is your toolkit a way to share the practice of addressing environmental grief with other territories and contexts?
Margherita Pevere: Yes. While the toolkit is based on the context of extreme wildfires, it’s designed to be adaptable. It can be applied wherever environmental grief needs to be addressed.
Patrick Degeorges: That’s wonderful.
¹ Bruno Latour here adopts a phrase originally coined by David Guston and Daniel Sarewitz, who, in their 2002 article “Real-time Technology Assessment,” drew on the Frankenstein metaphor to argue that we must “love our monsters” — that is, take responsibility for the technologies we create, rather than abandon them to themselves. Latour popularised this expression in a 2011 article for Nature, entitled: “Love your monsters: Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children.”
²Eco-grief: “Grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaning-full landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change”. in Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281.
³ Traditional ecological knowledge ‘other ways of knowing’, modelled on the ecosystem but often not theorised. These ways of knowing include ‘interpretations and information that help societies interact with the natural environment for survival [..] as well as […] environmental changes’. In Hosen, N, H Nakamura. 2020. Local Knowledge for Global Actions: The role of traditional ecological knowledge in climate change adaptation. Environment-Behaviour Proceedings Journal, 5(13): 37.
