The Invasive Species Study Group (Hwa Young Jung, Yi Zhang, and Monika Gabriela Dorniak) warmly invites you to an interactive two-day-programme (26-27 September 2026), to reflect critically on “invasiveness” as biological and social concepts constructed to “other” and exclude particular agencies of democratic systems.

How does political control over more-than-humans or other-than-humans (Marisol de la Cadena) mirror political and social hierarchies? On 26-27 September, we will explore this and other pressing questions through a multisensorial and interactive approach that makes space for participation and critical discourse. The programme begins on Saturday with the “Invasive Species Unconference” led by Hwa Young Jung inviting everyone to share their knowledge, urgencies and desires to reimagine ecological and cultural belonging through multispecies relationships rather than borders or categories. The unconference applies a participant-driven method in which attendees are encouraged to collaboratively propose topics, and gather around shared questions of belonging entered through the scientific categorisations of ‘invasive’ ‘alien’ ‘native’ of plants and animals that also seep into political discourse and policy making.

On the second day of the programme we will dive into a more practice-based approach as a shared activity in the Constant garden between Yi Zhang and Monika Gabriela Dorniak. Yi Zhang invites you to a foraging walk and workshop, to get to know your more-than-human neighbours by learning their stories of migration, followed by a hands-on session to explore healing practices as mutual aid using plants often labeled as ‘invasive’. Together, we will recreate 2-3 recipes, by making tinctures, ferments, balm/salves, and discuss safe foraging techniques. Through these gestures of transforming “unwanted” plants into ’healer’ kin, we will turn narratives of exclusion into gestures of care.

As part of the foraging walk, the score-based performance walk “Mediator of Estrangement” by Monika Gabriela Dorniak proposes a human-decentred approach of “being with” the environment. Participants are invited to activate ecosomatic, poetic scores that make us think with plants, breathe with bugs, and immerse oneself in the experience with a local “invasive” adaptation of nerve-strengthening Hildegard von Bingen cookies that may act as temporary causae et curae for politically destabilising times.

– > Places are limited. Please register for the unconference, walk, and workshop by sending an e-mail to: info(at)constantvzw.org