Reflecting on Multispecies and Artistic Practices in Herlev

Article by Olivia Thomassen Harre
The NXT Magazine: Transformations of Care

Many elements and inhabitants that surround me – such as asphalt, crows, pigeons, brick, plants, rocks, and many others – rarely play an active role in my awareness and understanding of my urban surroundings. But what if they did? In this text, I reflect on experiences of meeting and participating in the artistic practices of the Garden Caretakers in Herlev.

The Garden Caretaker is a societal character who introduces artists as stimulators of ecological sensitivity. A figure that invites us to form connections and strengthen ties with our surroundings to foster a sense of belonging to place. The Garden Caretaker served both as a model and a physical site for engaging people in place-based participatory processes that included more than one species. By exploring artistic practices for multispecies futuring (Harre et al., 2025), we might deepen our understanding of the present by engaging with places as sites beyond human activity, where diverse needs and nonhuman agencies are present.

The reflections in this text stem from my experiences of participating in and interviewing Garden Caretakers as part of the Desire project (2022–2024) during my role as Postdoc at Aalborg University, as well as from my recollections after the project had concluded. Moreover, this text builds upon work presented in the article “Framing artistic practices through new materialism to ensure multispecies futuring in the built environment” (Harre et al. (2025) for refrence).

NEW MATERIALISM AND MULTISPECIES PERSPECTIVES
Initiatives that aim for long-term impact on our living spaces must integrate approaches that acknowledge human entanglement and interdependence with nonhumans (Harre et al., 2025; Houston et al., 2018). The term multispecies futuring reflects one way of doing so: by framing artistic practices through a lens of new materialism, such practices deliberately seek to include “the perspectives, needs, and well-being of human and nonhuman entities to create more inclusive urban spaces” in participatory processes, thereby ensuring multispecies perspectives (Harre et al., 2025, p. 2). This was proposed in the field of Futures Studies, following an analysis of artistic practices facilitated and performed by the Garden Caretakers through a case study of urban transformation in Herlev, where participants interacted with the place, each other, and multispecies (Harre et al., 2025).

New materialism emerged in the late 1990s (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). In brief, through this lens, categories between humans and nonhumans are questioned, and it is proposed that nonhumans also possess agency (Rosén & Heitlinger, 2025). Rosiek et al. (2020) importantly remind us that the assumption of nonhuman agency is often recognized within Indigenous worldviews and studies.

By framing artistic practices through new materialism, Harre et al. (2025) found that particularly in fictional writing, such practices can “activate and direct attention towards the unusual in the built environment” and “offer techniques for immersion and for shifting perspectives through anthropomorphism” – which is essential for fostering a sustainable future in the built environment (Harre et al., 2025, p. 1).

When engaging with “beyond-human worlds,” multiple terms can be identified, such as multispecies, nonhumans, and more-than-human perspectives (Price & Chao, 2023, p. 177). Price and Chao (2023, p. 177) suggest that “these terms reveal how incredibly – and generatively – messy beyond-human worlds really are.” With the risk of oversimplifying, I use the term multispecies to reflect on artistic practices as ways of engaging with nonhuman perspectives in places of transformation, such as soil, plants, fungi, and asphalt (Harre et al., 2025). This engagement raises interesting questions about how we can do so when such perspectives differ significantly from human experience (Dörrenbächer et al., 2024; Harre et al., 2025; Nagel, 1974).

INTERACTING WITH PLACE THROUGH ARTISTIC PRACTICE
How does the Garden Caretaker invite us to connect with and interact with our surroundings?

The first Garden Caretaker, poet Helene Johanne Christensen, proposed fictional writing as a method to enhance attention, likening it to a magnifying glass (Harre et al., 2025). Through various writing genres, her practice invited participants to explore, observe, and use their curiosity and senses at the Herlev site, approaching it as a layered place with nonhuman inhabitants. Participants wrote prose about nonhumans and speculated with them through language. The outcomes expanded as the Garden Caretaker facilitated readings of poems and letters and discussed techniques for describing multispecies (Harre et al., 2025).

The third Garden Caretaker, visual artist Arendse Krabbe, facilitated another mode of interaction by attending to and listening to environmental sounds (Harre et al., 2024). This approach provided moments of slowing down and intentionally listening by using items from the Herlev area. Stimulating the sense of hearing, participants were invited to focus on specific and diverse voices of the place.

Often, human-made sounds dominate urban environments – transportation, construction, and daily activity. However, through facilitated listening situations, the sounds of leaves and homemade instruments created a soothing layer, drawing attention to nonhuman elements we seldom pause to hear. As Krabbe explained: “We listen all the time, so it can be easy to forget that we listen.”¹ Krabbe sees a potential in deepening connections to place through listening. Instruments were used to sharpen listening, deepening connections to place through a practice of care: “When you listen to something, you are quietening yourself, and you give attention to what you are listening to. This is a form of caring situation. It is through this situation that I see the potential.”² Through this way of paying attention, to a flower, as an example, we might become aware of how the flower is doing, making us feel more connected to the living world.

Questioning the way we channel our attention, asking us to become conscious about the way we direct our attention, this was explored as a practice of care and a common theme among the different Garden Caretakers. They found ways to guide participants’ focus and actively engage with what was encountered.

The second Garden Caretaker, multidisciplinary artist Georg Jagunov, explored participants’ attention through an integrated approach to storytelling and sculpture-making (Harre et al., 2024). By weaving together stories and practices that combined facts and fiction, he invited participants to wonder about diverse elements, but mostly stones and moss. Stones, for example, occupy space in multiple forms within urban spaces, from sidewalks to driveways, such as concrete and gravel. Through stories, the hardness of stone was softened by appreciation for its durability and long-standing presence on our planet.

The fourth Garden Caretaker, ceramic artist Davide Ronco, focused on the ground and soil. Ronco explaining his role as a channel for opening discussions and connections.³ Participants were invited into collective brickmaking, exploring dynamics between people, place, and its elements. Taking a stance at how static urban spaces can feel. The collaboratively made, temporary art piece was placed where nearby construction workers often walked and paused, sparking a conversation about land use across disciplines.

ENGAGING WITH MULTISPECIES
Suppose an expanded sense of a multispecies community could be the outcome of engaing with different aesthetic practices, that deliberatly prompt participants to consider the multitude of nonhuman perspectives within place. What could this potentially mean for our relationship to the places we engage with on a daily basis?

Encountering artistic practices in Herlev provided ways of interacting with place that encouraged close observation, sensory engagement, and familiarity with nonhumans (Harre et al., 2025). Writing, observing, and deep attentive listening invite humans to blur the lines between ourselves and the nonhuman, offering pathways for deep connection.

The practices described in this article, explore ways of engaging with places, as sites with agency and full of potential for inter-species relationships; while also stimulating a human-to-human connection.

While we can never fully grasp multispecies worlds, we can observe, speculate, and question, becoming familiar with both their and our living environments. This process might be full of awkward and curious moments. For instance, participants guided by performance artist Tora Balslev and sound artist Felia Gram-Hanssen (the fifth and sixth Garden Caretakers), who activated performance and sound as tools for narrating participants’ journies, exploring asphalt through movement and story. Collecting linden seeds, the artists suggested these trees could serve as “elders” of the area and requested that these seeds be handed over to site developers to ensure the trees’ significance was respected as an integral part of the area (Harre et al., 2024), a gesture which the developers were not quite ready for.

In the speculative scenario of Herlev imagined by artist Madeleine Kate McGowan, the frame-setters of the Garden Caretaker project, these practices were projected forward: “The trees in one end of the courtyard are called the elders […] Two children from the place are standing beneath the trees and reading a vow of support aloud to each other, with the promise of eternal friendship. This is the way of things here beneath the linden trees.”

CONCLUSION
The Garden Caretakers’ artistic practices emphasize the inclusion of multispecies perspectives, underscoring the importance of broadening our engagement with the places we inhabit. Their significance for a sustainable future of the built environment may lie in their capacity to suggest new approaches for exploring our surroundings and connecting with multispecies entities – and with each other. In turn, we may become more curious about, and attentive to, their needs.

---

---

---

OLIVIA THOMASSEN HARRE