As part of the immersive Zoönomic Futures workshop, Swedish cross-media artist and researcher Janna Holmstedt talks about multispecies communication, after which Anna van Leeuwen and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer share their thoughts on the concept. Zoönomic Futures is part of a series exploring 'multispecies urbanism', one of the themes of the Dutch contribution to the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Janna Holmstedt will weave notes, thoughts, recordings, and stories from an evolving research process. The journey involves listening to dolphins, bonding with maize, becoming an earthworm, thinking with kelp, and collaborating with soil. She departs from her encounter with a unique sound archive of recordings from a scientific interspecies communication experiment in which dolphins were expected to learn to speak English with their blowholes. The encounter lead to an exploration of the transformative role of sound and listening and, more explicitly, listening as a form of cohabitation in a fluid and dynamic environment.

Dr Janna Holmstedt is part of the post-disciplinary and more-than-human humanities research network The Posthumanities Hub at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Linköping University, Sweden. Her work looks into entangled issues such as multispecies relations, interspecies communication, and the intra-action of bodies, environs, and technology, creating sound installations, participatory performances, mixed media walks, stories, maps, text, and collaborative projects. Holmstedt's doctoral dissertation, 'Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening' (2017) focused on how sound and listening, in a visually dominated culture, could mediate new relationships in a more-than-human world, and generate a sense of care and belonging. Holmstedt's current work involves human-soil relations, soil value, the allotment movement, and the cultivation of maize. She has exhibited internationally in the USA, Estonia, and China.