fungi | lichens | mosses | slime molds
There is a remarkable world within woodlands, mountains, fields - the biocrust - where fungi, lichens, mosses, slime molds, and micro-organisms comprise living layers across the Earth’s surfaces. Life here quietly reshapes the world around it into complex interdependent architectures. This diverse assemblage of organisms belongs to the cryptogamic community (reproducing via spores; not flowers or seeds) and thrives in habitats from soils, to rocks, to the barks of trees. In this year’s call the biocrust is poetically framed as the ‘Understories’ - stories unfolding within a living eco-laboratory of renewal, transformation, and coexistence.
Long grouped with plants, fungi are now recognized as a distinct kingdom of life, separate from both plants and animals. Ancient relationships with fungi helped plants establish themselves on land and most plants continue to depend on mycorrhizal associations for nutrients. Alongside lichens, mosses, slime molds, and microbial communities, fungi are fundamental participants in a largely hidden process that sustains terrestrial ecosystems.
The understory and woodland floor are a fundamental ecological infrastructure. Through applied, field-based investigations into symbiosis, microbial communities, decomposition, and invisible networks, participants are invited to reconsider how humans, materials, habitats, and more-than-human lives are entangled. Here, life emerges through interdependence: fungi transform organic matter into new possibilities for life and form mycorrhizal networks with plant roots, where hidden exchanges unfold beneath the surface; lichens embody collaboration across species; mosses create habitats and retain moisture and minerals in biomes from rocky outcrops to wooded glades; slime molds reveal remarkable capacities for self-organization and distributed problem-solving; and microorganisms shape soils and ecosystems. The collapsed and rotting plant life becomes a creative process, while networks hidden from view sustain ecological resilience. Together, these interwoven systems form an architecture of coexistence—one built through exchange, dependency, adaptation, and continuous transformation.
For its 2027–2028 thematic cycle, Nature, Art & Habitat Residency (NAHR) opens a two-year inquiry. Located in two different valleys: Val Taleggio in Lombardy’s Orobie Prealps and California’s Santa Ynez Valley, NAHR invites participants to search for the understories as living systems where fungi, mosses, microorganisms, diverse landscapes, and human practices shape one another. In Val Taleggio, these relationships extend beyond the woodlands and pastures into rural architecture and food culture, connecting local materials, fermentation, food, and traditions of making. In Santa Ynez, they unfold beneath oak woodlands and within the fungal and microbial communities of vineyards, orchards, and cultivated soils. Both valleys carry layers of ecological and cultural memory from hidden microbial processes to new fungal materials, offering exciting possibilities for reimagining how we build, cultivate, create, and nourish with/in worlds.
We encourage proposals that draw inspiration from these ecological principles:
Transformation rather than waste
Relationships and connections rather than isolation
Reciprocity and care rather than extraction
Adaptation rather than control
Applicants are invited to investigate the understories using these principles as points of departure. The themes are intentionally open-ended and may be approached through artistic practices, scientific research, architectural experimentation, material exploration, ecological studies, or practice-led forms of research in a range of disciplines (e.g. design, technology, writing, performance, film, sound, food etc.)
Participants are encouraged to adhere to principles of care in the Valleys in accordance with the safety and ethical guidelines outlined below.*
Applicants may consider fungi and the micro-wonders through, across, or beyond the following areas:
Transformation and Regeneration
Decomposition is understood as an ecological process through which matter is transformed, redistributed, and made available for new forms of life. Life cycles, succession, composting, repair, climate resilience, mycoremediation, ecological restoration, and biodiversity offer ways of thinking about fungi as agents of conservation and regeneration —and about waste, decay, and renewal as generative intelligence. These processes may also inspire artistic practice, design, storytelling, performance, and new forms of making in defiance of generative AI.
Symbiosis and Coexistence
Fungi and microorganisms reveal complex relationships of collaboration, dependency, competition, and exchange among different forms of life. Applicants may explore composite organisms and multispecies communities, as well as shifting relationships among host, partner, parasite, and environment. These relationships can open questions about coexistence across biological and societal systems, extending from forests (woods) and soils to food cultures and agriculture. These associations may inspire multispecies design, co-creation, and new models of collective living.
Hidden ecologies & Living Infrastructures
Much of the life that sustains ecosystems remains hidden from direct perception. This area invites attention to microbial communities and soil microbiomes as living infrastructures connecting soil systems, ecological networks, and urban ecologies, alongside fermentation and other microscopic processes that support visible worlds. Projects might explore ways to sense, represent, translate, decrypt, or interpret what cannot readily be seen, using artistic, scientific, technological, sensory, or performative approaches. The invisible may become a space for new forms of storytelling, visualization, sound, data, movement, or embodied experience. This provocation may also be taken as a call for a feminist reading of the cryptogamic, those hidden or unnoticed lifeforces which lay the structures for future generations of flora and fauna.
Networks and Distributed Intelligence
Fungal, microbial systems, and collective behaviour of slime molds challenge conventional ideas of hierarchy, individuality, and intelligence. Their branching structures, decentralized networks, ecological relationships, forms of communication, and responsiveness to changing environments offer alternative ways of thinking about organization, memory, sensing, resilience, and collective intelligence. Applicants may explore these systems through computer sciences, data management, digital systems, architecture, social structures, choreography, writing, sound, or other practices that investigate distributed forms of agency and knowledge.
Materials, Architecture, and Making
Fungi and microorganisms can open new ways of thinking about material culture, spatial organization, fabrication, and the built environment. This area may consider mycelium- derived and other biogenic materials, biofabrication, biodesign, experimental material systems, textiles, craft, construction, and emerging forms of making. It invites questions around architecture and design beyond extraction, while exploring relationships among local materials, landscapes, makers, communities, and living systems. Material transformation itself may become a medium, a process, or a form of research - opening possibilities for speculative design and emerging technologies that imagine different ways of making, building, and inhabiting.
Food, Fermentation, and Culinary Cultures*
Fungi and other microorganisms occupy an extraordinary place within human food cultures, where nutrition, fermentation, and composting connect mushrooms, bread, cheese, beverages, agriculture, preservation, and decay. Through these processes, microorganisms transform ingredients and create new flavors, textures, and nutritional qualities. This area invites gastronomic and culinary research alongside questions of agriculture, food sovereignty, preservation, nutrition, cultural traditions, and the relationships between humans and microbial life. Food becomes a creative medium through which ecology, cultures, sensory experiences, and material transformation intersect.
Healing, Ritual, and Consciousness*
Fungi have long been connected to healing, medicine, ritual, altered states of consciousness, and cultural practices of wellbeing. Psychedelics, consciousness, therapy, and ritual, all open questions about the relationships among fungi, bodies, perception, cultural histories, and environments. One may approach these subjects through scientific research, artistic inquiry, anthropology, storytelling, performance, sensory experience, or critical investigation, while considering the complex relationships between fungi, bodies, consciousness, and the natural world.
Ecological Memory, Place & Futures
Forests, soils, and living landscapes hold layers of biological and cultural memory. Applicants may explore landscapes as living archives, considering traces of growth, disturbance, adaptation, decay, and regeneration, as well as traditional and local ecological knowledge/s. Fungi and microorganisms can become guides for investigating how places remember and transform, connecting ecological processes with agriculture, planning, food, craft, ritual, cultural practices, storytelling, and possible futures.
Sensing, Perception, and More-than-Human Worlds
Fungi, mosses, slime molds, and microorganisms invite us to reconsider how life perceives, communicates, and experiences its surroundings. Their responses to light, moisture, nutrients, chemicals, touch, and other environmental conditions can open questions about perception and intelligence beyond the human. They may also become creative mediums for bio-art, visual culture and languages, and the performing arts, inspiring work through sound, film, literature, technology, scientific observation, and sensory practices. These encounters ask how we might perceive, interpret, and represent worlds that operate at scales—and through senses—different from our own.
The understory highlights that no life exists alone. Join NAHR to explore the hidden networks, transformations, and forms of intelligence through which fungi and other micro-wonders weave an architecture of coexistence within these living Valleys.
We particularly encourage applications from First Nations peoples with Indigenous cultural perspectives.
*DISCLAIMER: Research involving any and all living matter may carry risks and it is done at one's own risk. All activities carried out while at NAHR must respect applicable laws of the residency location, conservation requirements, and safety protocols, while protecting participants, collaborators, local communities, and the environment. References to psychedelics are intended solely as subjects of historical, cultural, scientific, or artistic inquiry—not as an invitation to personal use or on-site experimentation. For research applicants, please ensure you have also received ‘Ethics Approval’ from your sponsoring institution, partner organisation, or supporting university for practice-led research on site. NAHR does not encourage, or facilitate, or approve the possession, cultivation, distribution, or consumption of psychoactive substances during the residency.
OUR EXPANDED INTERESTS: Residencies-in-place
NAHR believes that human perceptions of the world are enhanced by exploring it from below, from within, via the medium from which most life emerges. We believe there is insight to be gained from exploring the mechanisms other species have developed for sensing, mapping, and moving through the same territories as humans. As all senses are engaged in an exploration of the living eco-laboratory of each Valley, one starts to perceive the world differently. The residencies are premised on the notion that a shift in perception is the key for creative resilience, and will be the mechanism that allows ecosystems to create a sustainable life through adaptation and cooperation.
NAHR welcomes work that cultivates an empathic view of our environments and explores how empathy can inspire urgent, collective responses to the climate crisis. Fellows are encouraged to embrace sustainable practices that extend care toward non-human beings and the natural world, embedding sustainability in both their creative processes and outcomes. Collaborative and inventive work can translate empathy into meaningful, sustainable action, inspiring more attentive ways of living, making, and engaging with the environment while empowering Fellows to respond resiliently to interconnected social and ecological crises.
PROPOSALS
NAHR encourages experimental explorations based on globally relevant concepts, theories or methodologies concerning Understories and the interconnected worlds of the “biocrust” including fungi, mosses, slime molds, and/or other microorganisms. Collaboration across disciplines, with other NAHR Fellows, is particularly encouraged and supported. These explorations can be done using a variety of media, and will be shared at the conclusion of NAHR in expressive forms including, but not limited to: readings, dance performances, poetry recitations, promenade theater, art installations, site-specific activations, workshops, and other creative endeavors.
Given the immersive, site-specific context for NAHR, when drafting submissions applicants must demonstrate the ways in which their projects will seek to engage with Val Taleggio as a shifting, multi-dimensional space in which local characteristics intersect with a global dynamic. Applicants should show how they intend to examine elements and ecosystems within the undergrowth of the Val Taleggio, while scaling or linking their subjects to globally relevant concepts.
In accordance with this year’s theme, NAHR encourages applications that propose an inter- or trans-disciplinary approach across a range of creative forms and modes of expression, which might take the form of designs, actions, events, and so forth, in which the use of the ‘understories’ will remain a key element of the proposal.
While the California set up enables a more reflective, retreat-like residency, in Italy, together with the NAHW (June Workshop) and other programs throughout the summer (see Events page), NAHR (Residency) participants will visit woodland and pastures, walk across the mountains, attend dedicated lectures by specialists in the area, and be guided across the surrounding landscapes (natural and built), in order to explore local interconnections and contrast these with those in the neighboring valleys of Brembilla, Brembana, Seriana, and Imagna. By offering the opportunity for site-specific investigations, NAHR encourages participants to explore interactions and relationships within the Valley’s ecosystems. We seek to offer a fertile environment for a range of cross-disciplinary research and, in return for offering these opportunities, we expect NAHR Fellows to complete culminating presentations (designs, actions, events, so forth) at the conclusion of their time at NAHR.
OUR HABITATS: THE VALLEYS
TALEGGIO, ITALY
The Taleggio Valley landscape in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy, with its dramatic scenery and secluded physical environment, is a rich source of inspiration for bio-inspired projects, particularly given its distinction for nature conservation (Natura, 2000)
The Valley’s geomorphological characteristics support a local climate and provide a rich habitat for hundreds of species, both wild and domesticated, who thrive in the water, soil, woods, pastures and air. The landscape has distinct and varied features at different elevations, from the bottom of ravines to the mountain pastures of the Parco delle Orobie, from high mountain open air to heavily covered woodlands and valleys. Recent climate events such as drought and floodings are affecting the plants, animals, and human activities in the region and the impacts on various habitats are yet to be documented. The exposed understory invites respectful curiosity and sustainable collaborations through gentle acts of inquiry.
The Valley’s villages and towns, all in close proximity, offer many opportunities to observe and study diverse environments. Fellows-in-residence can wander between villages, noting shifts in the undergrowth, observing how fungi and other micro-wonders are entangled with that of human beings in situ. It provides a rich venue for studying the changes over the years of human and non-human strategies of habitation as these have shifted to adapt to ever-changing environmental, economic, and social factors.
SANTA YNEZ, CALIFORNIA
The Santa Ynez Valley is north of Santa Barbara in an inland valley, with rolling California mountains rimming heavily cultivated farmland. The Santa Ynez Mountains are on the south, the San Rafael Mountains on the north, with the Santa Ynez River running from east to west.
The geologies that define the biocrust are consolidated rocks of the Tertiary age compose the surrounding hills. These consolidated rocks are marine in origin and consist of relatively impermeable fine-grained deposits. In addition, there are unconsolidated deposits of Pliocene and younger aged material, made chiefly of sand, gravel, silt, and clay.
The Santa Barbara coast has a mediterranean climate and a complex topography. It regularly succumbs to wildfire as it is prone to downslope windstorms. The abruptly rising Santa Ynez mountains which separate the ocean from the valley create spatiotemporally variable wind patterns. The large variability in land readings tells of the intricacy of the weather and wind patterns in this region (Signer & Katelyn 2022).
Ecologically, the river provides a rich habitat for various endangered birds. The lower Santa Ynez River supports a large and little-known population of Southwestern Willow Flycatchers (Empidonax traillii extimus). Golden Eagles are always sighted in the summer, and the oak savannah supports grassland birds, including wintering raptors (Buteo regalis).
The vegetation consists mainly of brush interspersed with chaparral, live oak woodlands, and grassland. The native flora of the Valley is understood to be naturally renewed by fire, such as Adenostoma fasciculatum which produces a specialized lignotuber underground that allows it to resprout after fire has burned off its stems. In recent years this region has been managed and treated by the increased frequency and intensity of fires caused by different agents.
The farmland is mostly planted with wine grapes and the Valley is known for its wineries, as the soil in the Valley is well suited to the cultivation of certain grapes. This well-established viticulture economy has resulted in extensive research on the soil. The agriculture also includes significant groves of olive trees and fruit trees. The farms are typically small to medium sized. There is also a notable community of horse owners and equine-serving businesses. The Valley attracts visitors who come to experience a typical California viticulture landscape, taste and purchase wine, visit the small towns, and enjoy the temperate climate.
As such, the Valley offers a particularly rich context for exploring the many species of the biocrust and reflecting on the ‘’understories’’ through their ecological challenges and regenerative capacities.
APPLY (all details at this link - no application fees!) -
Calls open
Settings and Accommodation see here
REFERENCES and Further Readings
Websites:
Podcast:
Books:
Luisetti, F (2023) Nonhuman Subjects: An Ecology of Earth-Beings (Elements in Environmental Humanities). Cambridge University Press.
Articles/films:
Suggested global topics
//
APPLY (all details at this link - no application fees!)
Settings and Accommodation see here
There is a remarkable world within woodlands, mountains, fields - the biocrust - where fungi, lichens, mosses, slime molds, and micro-organisms comprise living layers across the Earth’s surfaces. Life here quietly reshapes the world around it into complex interdependent architectures. This diverse assemblage of organisms belongs to the cryptogamic community (reproducing via spores; not flowers or seeds) and thrives in habitats from soils, to rocks, to the barks of trees. In this year’s call the biocrust is poetically framed as the ‘Understories’ - stories unfolding within a living eco-laboratory of renewal, transformation, and coexistence.
Long grouped with plants, fungi are now recognized as a distinct kingdom of life, separate from both plants and animals. Ancient relationships with fungi helped plants establish themselves on land and most plants continue to depend on mycorrhizal associations for nutrients. Alongside lichens, mosses, slime molds, and microbial communities, fungi are fundamental participants in a largely hidden process that sustains terrestrial ecosystems.
The understory and woodland floor are a fundamental ecological infrastructure. Through applied, field-based investigations into symbiosis, microbial communities, decomposition, and invisible networks, participants are invited to reconsider how humans, materials, habitats, and more-than-human lives are entangled. Here, life emerges through interdependence: fungi transform organic matter into new possibilities for life and form mycorrhizal networks with plant roots, where hidden exchanges unfold beneath the surface; lichens embody collaboration across species; mosses create habitats and retain moisture and minerals in biomes from rocky outcrops to wooded glades; slime molds reveal remarkable capacities for self-organization and distributed problem-solving; and microorganisms shape soils and ecosystems. The collapsed and rotting plant life becomes a creative process, while networks hidden from view sustain ecological resilience. Together, these interwoven systems form an architecture of coexistence—one built through exchange, dependency, adaptation, and continuous transformation.
For its 2027–2028 thematic cycle, Nature, Art & Habitat Residency (NAHR) opens a two-year inquiry. Located in two different valleys: Val Taleggio in Lombardy’s Orobie Prealps and California’s Santa Ynez Valley, NAHR invites participants to search for the understories as living systems where fungi, mosses, microorganisms, diverse landscapes, and human practices shape one another. In Val Taleggio, these relationships extend beyond the woodlands and pastures into rural architecture and food culture, connecting local materials, fermentation, food, and traditions of making. In Santa Ynez, they unfold beneath oak woodlands and within the fungal and microbial communities of vineyards, orchards, and cultivated soils. Both valleys carry layers of ecological and cultural memory from hidden microbial processes to new fungal materials, offering exciting possibilities for reimagining how we build, cultivate, create, and nourish with/in worlds.
We encourage proposals that draw inspiration from these ecological principles:
Transformation rather than waste
Relationships and connections rather than isolation
Reciprocity and care rather than extraction
Adaptation rather than control
Applicants are invited to investigate the understories using these principles as points of departure. The themes are intentionally open-ended and may be approached through artistic practices, scientific research, architectural experimentation, material exploration, ecological studies, or practice-led forms of research in a range of disciplines (e.g. design, technology, writing, performance, film, sound, food etc.)
Participants are encouraged to adhere to principles of care in the Valleys in accordance with the safety and ethical guidelines outlined below.*
Applicants may consider fungi and the micro-wonders through, across, or beyond the following areas:
Transformation and Regeneration
Decomposition is understood as an ecological process through which matter is transformed, redistributed, and made available for new forms of life. Life cycles, succession, composting, repair, climate resilience, mycoremediation, ecological restoration, and biodiversity offer ways of thinking about fungi as agents of conservation and regeneration —and about waste, decay, and renewal as generative intelligence. These processes may also inspire artistic practice, design, storytelling, performance, and new forms of making in defiance of generative AI.
Symbiosis and Coexistence
Fungi and microorganisms reveal complex relationships of collaboration, dependency, competition, and exchange among different forms of life. Applicants may explore composite organisms and multispecies communities, as well as shifting relationships among host, partner, parasite, and environment. These relationships can open questions about coexistence across biological and societal systems, extending from forests (woods) and soils to food cultures and agriculture. These associations may inspire multispecies design, co-creation, and new models of collective living.
Hidden ecologies & Living Infrastructures
Much of the life that sustains ecosystems remains hidden from direct perception. This area invites attention to microbial communities and soil microbiomes as living infrastructures connecting soil systems, ecological networks, and urban ecologies, alongside fermentation and other microscopic processes that support visible worlds. Projects might explore ways to sense, represent, translate, decrypt, or interpret what cannot readily be seen, using artistic, scientific, technological, sensory, or performative approaches. The invisible may become a space for new forms of storytelling, visualization, sound, data, movement, or embodied experience. This provocation may also be taken as a call for a feminist reading of the cryptogamic, those hidden or unnoticed lifeforces which lay the structures for future generations of flora and fauna.
Networks and Distributed Intelligence
Fungal, microbial systems, and collective behaviour of slime molds challenge conventional ideas of hierarchy, individuality, and intelligence. Their branching structures, decentralized networks, ecological relationships, forms of communication, and responsiveness to changing environments offer alternative ways of thinking about organization, memory, sensing, resilience, and collective intelligence. Applicants may explore these systems through computer sciences, data management, digital systems, architecture, social structures, choreography, writing, sound, or other practices that investigate distributed forms of agency and knowledge.
Materials, Architecture, and Making
Fungi and microorganisms can open new ways of thinking about material culture, spatial organization, fabrication, and the built environment. This area may consider mycelium- derived and other biogenic materials, biofabrication, biodesign, experimental material systems, textiles, craft, construction, and emerging forms of making. It invites questions around architecture and design beyond extraction, while exploring relationships among local materials, landscapes, makers, communities, and living systems. Material transformation itself may become a medium, a process, or a form of research - opening possibilities for speculative design and emerging technologies that imagine different ways of making, building, and inhabiting.
Food, Fermentation, and Culinary Cultures*
Fungi and other microorganisms occupy an extraordinary place within human food cultures, where nutrition, fermentation, and composting connect mushrooms, bread, cheese, beverages, agriculture, preservation, and decay. Through these processes, microorganisms transform ingredients and create new flavors, textures, and nutritional qualities. This area invites gastronomic and culinary research alongside questions of agriculture, food sovereignty, preservation, nutrition, cultural traditions, and the relationships between humans and microbial life. Food becomes a creative medium through which ecology, cultures, sensory experiences, and material transformation intersect.
Healing, Ritual, and Consciousness*
Fungi have long been connected to healing, medicine, ritual, altered states of consciousness, and cultural practices of wellbeing. Psychedelics, consciousness, therapy, and ritual, all open questions about the relationships among fungi, bodies, perception, cultural histories, and environments. One may approach these subjects through scientific research, artistic inquiry, anthropology, storytelling, performance, sensory experience, or critical investigation, while considering the complex relationships between fungi, bodies, consciousness, and the natural world.
Ecological Memory, Place & Futures
Forests, soils, and living landscapes hold layers of biological and cultural memory. Applicants may explore landscapes as living archives, considering traces of growth, disturbance, adaptation, decay, and regeneration, as well as traditional and local ecological knowledge/s. Fungi and microorganisms can become guides for investigating how places remember and transform, connecting ecological processes with agriculture, planning, food, craft, ritual, cultural practices, storytelling, and possible futures.
Sensing, Perception, and More-than-Human Worlds
Fungi, mosses, slime molds, and microorganisms invite us to reconsider how life perceives, communicates, and experiences its surroundings. Their responses to light, moisture, nutrients, chemicals, touch, and other environmental conditions can open questions about perception and intelligence beyond the human. They may also become creative mediums for bio-art, visual culture and languages, and the performing arts, inspiring work through sound, film, literature, technology, scientific observation, and sensory practices. These encounters ask how we might perceive, interpret, and represent worlds that operate at scales—and through senses—different from our own.
The understory highlights that no life exists alone. Join NAHR to explore the hidden networks, transformations, and forms of intelligence through which fungi and other micro-wonders weave an architecture of coexistence within these living Valleys.
We particularly encourage applications from First Nations peoples with Indigenous cultural perspectives.
*DISCLAIMER: Research involving any and all living matter may carry risks and it is done at one's own risk. All activities carried out while at NAHR must respect applicable laws of the residency location, conservation requirements, and safety protocols, while protecting participants, collaborators, local communities, and the environment. References to psychedelics are intended solely as subjects of historical, cultural, scientific, or artistic inquiry—not as an invitation to personal use or on-site experimentation. For research applicants, please ensure you have also received ‘Ethics Approval’ from your sponsoring institution, partner organisation, or supporting university for practice-led research on site. NAHR does not encourage, or facilitate, or approve the possession, cultivation, distribution, or consumption of psychoactive substances during the residency.
OUR EXPANDED INTERESTS: Residencies-in-place
NAHR believes that human perceptions of the world are enhanced by exploring it from below, from within, via the medium from which most life emerges. We believe there is insight to be gained from exploring the mechanisms other species have developed for sensing, mapping, and moving through the same territories as humans. As all senses are engaged in an exploration of the living eco-laboratory of each Valley, one starts to perceive the world differently. The residencies are premised on the notion that a shift in perception is the key for creative resilience, and will be the mechanism that allows ecosystems to create a sustainable life through adaptation and cooperation.
NAHR welcomes work that cultivates an empathic view of our environments and explores how empathy can inspire urgent, collective responses to the climate crisis. Fellows are encouraged to embrace sustainable practices that extend care toward non-human beings and the natural world, embedding sustainability in both their creative processes and outcomes. Collaborative and inventive work can translate empathy into meaningful, sustainable action, inspiring more attentive ways of living, making, and engaging with the environment while empowering Fellows to respond resiliently to interconnected social and ecological crises.
PROPOSALS
NAHR encourages experimental explorations based on globally relevant concepts, theories or methodologies concerning Understories and the interconnected worlds of the “biocrust” including fungi, mosses, slime molds, and/or other microorganisms. Collaboration across disciplines, with other NAHR Fellows, is particularly encouraged and supported. These explorations can be done using a variety of media, and will be shared at the conclusion of NAHR in expressive forms including, but not limited to: readings, dance performances, poetry recitations, promenade theater, art installations, site-specific activations, workshops, and other creative endeavors.
Given the immersive, site-specific context for NAHR, when drafting submissions applicants must demonstrate the ways in which their projects will seek to engage with Val Taleggio as a shifting, multi-dimensional space in which local characteristics intersect with a global dynamic. Applicants should show how they intend to examine elements and ecosystems within the undergrowth of the Val Taleggio, while scaling or linking their subjects to globally relevant concepts.
In accordance with this year’s theme, NAHR encourages applications that propose an inter- or trans-disciplinary approach across a range of creative forms and modes of expression, which might take the form of designs, actions, events, and so forth, in which the use of the ‘understories’ will remain a key element of the proposal.
While the California set up enables a more reflective, retreat-like residency, in Italy, together with the NAHW (June Workshop) and other programs throughout the summer (see Events page), NAHR (Residency) participants will visit woodland and pastures, walk across the mountains, attend dedicated lectures by specialists in the area, and be guided across the surrounding landscapes (natural and built), in order to explore local interconnections and contrast these with those in the neighboring valleys of Brembilla, Brembana, Seriana, and Imagna. By offering the opportunity for site-specific investigations, NAHR encourages participants to explore interactions and relationships within the Valley’s ecosystems. We seek to offer a fertile environment for a range of cross-disciplinary research and, in return for offering these opportunities, we expect NAHR Fellows to complete culminating presentations (designs, actions, events, so forth) at the conclusion of their time at NAHR.
OUR HABITATS: THE VALLEYS
TALEGGIO, ITALY
The Taleggio Valley landscape in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy, with its dramatic scenery and secluded physical environment, is a rich source of inspiration for bio-inspired projects, particularly given its distinction for nature conservation (Natura, 2000)
The Valley’s geomorphological characteristics support a local climate and provide a rich habitat for hundreds of species, both wild and domesticated, who thrive in the water, soil, woods, pastures and air. The landscape has distinct and varied features at different elevations, from the bottom of ravines to the mountain pastures of the Parco delle Orobie, from high mountain open air to heavily covered woodlands and valleys. Recent climate events such as drought and floodings are affecting the plants, animals, and human activities in the region and the impacts on various habitats are yet to be documented. The exposed understory invites respectful curiosity and sustainable collaborations through gentle acts of inquiry.
The Valley’s villages and towns, all in close proximity, offer many opportunities to observe and study diverse environments. Fellows-in-residence can wander between villages, noting shifts in the undergrowth, observing how fungi and other micro-wonders are entangled with that of human beings in situ. It provides a rich venue for studying the changes over the years of human and non-human strategies of habitation as these have shifted to adapt to ever-changing environmental, economic, and social factors.
SANTA YNEZ, CALIFORNIA
The Santa Ynez Valley is north of Santa Barbara in an inland valley, with rolling California mountains rimming heavily cultivated farmland. The Santa Ynez Mountains are on the south, the San Rafael Mountains on the north, with the Santa Ynez River running from east to west.
The geologies that define the biocrust are consolidated rocks of the Tertiary age compose the surrounding hills. These consolidated rocks are marine in origin and consist of relatively impermeable fine-grained deposits. In addition, there are unconsolidated deposits of Pliocene and younger aged material, made chiefly of sand, gravel, silt, and clay.
The Santa Barbara coast has a mediterranean climate and a complex topography. It regularly succumbs to wildfire as it is prone to downslope windstorms. The abruptly rising Santa Ynez mountains which separate the ocean from the valley create spatiotemporally variable wind patterns. The large variability in land readings tells of the intricacy of the weather and wind patterns in this region (Signer & Katelyn 2022).
Ecologically, the river provides a rich habitat for various endangered birds. The lower Santa Ynez River supports a large and little-known population of Southwestern Willow Flycatchers (Empidonax traillii extimus). Golden Eagles are always sighted in the summer, and the oak savannah supports grassland birds, including wintering raptors (Buteo regalis).
The vegetation consists mainly of brush interspersed with chaparral, live oak woodlands, and grassland. The native flora of the Valley is understood to be naturally renewed by fire, such as Adenostoma fasciculatum which produces a specialized lignotuber underground that allows it to resprout after fire has burned off its stems. In recent years this region has been managed and treated by the increased frequency and intensity of fires caused by different agents.
The farmland is mostly planted with wine grapes and the Valley is known for its wineries, as the soil in the Valley is well suited to the cultivation of certain grapes. This well-established viticulture economy has resulted in extensive research on the soil. The agriculture also includes significant groves of olive trees and fruit trees. The farms are typically small to medium sized. There is also a notable community of horse owners and equine-serving businesses. The Valley attracts visitors who come to experience a typical California viticulture landscape, taste and purchase wine, visit the small towns, and enjoy the temperate climate.
As such, the Valley offers a particularly rich context for exploring the many species of the biocrust and reflecting on the ‘’understories’’ through their ecological challenges and regenerative capacities.
APPLY (all details at this link - no application fees!) -
Calls open
Settings and Accommodation see here
REFERENCES and Further Readings
Websites:
Podcast:
Books:
Luisetti, F (2023) Nonhuman Subjects: An Ecology of Earth-Beings (Elements in Environmental Humanities). Cambridge University Press.
Articles/films:
Suggested global topics
//
APPLY (all details at this link - no application fees!)
Settings and Accommodation see here
Testo 2027 Bando - vedasi testo in inglese completo.
La coesistenza nel sottobosco: Funghi e altre microscopiche meraviglie è la tematica al centro dei programmi di NAHR 2026. I Fellows di quest’anno esploreranno la funzione critica delle micro vite nel sottobosco da una serie di prospettive naturali, ecologiche, sociali, politiche ed ecosistemiche, riflettendo su suoi impatti.
NAHR e’ interessata a ricevere proposte che riflettano approcci creativi e critici allo studio del sottobosco quale luogo dinamico, resiliente e critico, in grado di fornire uno sguardo ambientale innovativo per il futuro. L’obiettivo è quello di sviluppare dei percorsi che possano trasformare le azioni di sfruttamento sviluppate nell’Antropocene in un simposio di vita.
ISCRIVITI - bando aperto
La coesistenza nel sottobosco: Funghi e altre microscopiche meraviglie è la tematica al centro dei programmi di NAHR 2026. I Fellows di quest’anno esploreranno la funzione critica delle micro vite nel sottobosco da una serie di prospettive naturali, ecologiche, sociali, politiche ed ecosistemiche, riflettendo su suoi impatti.
NAHR e’ interessata a ricevere proposte che riflettano approcci creativi e critici allo studio del sottobosco quale luogo dinamico, resiliente e critico, in grado di fornire uno sguardo ambientale innovativo per il futuro. L’obiettivo è quello di sviluppare dei percorsi che possano trasformare le azioni di sfruttamento sviluppate nell’Antropocene in un simposio di vita.
ISCRIVITI - bando aperto