Free Radicals: 3rd Landscape Dialogue

Invited to Join Free Radicals programme, LIOS Labs arrived at Floating University with a dusty carrier bag of seed-learnings from the Desert Transformation Lab in Poland’s Błędowska Desert. For one week we initiated a third-landscape dialogue between two refuge-ecologies—one sandy and wind-shaped, the other aquatic and urban—asking how these borderland habitats can teach us new forms of coexistence, queer kinship, and regenerative culture.

Inspired by Gilles Clément’s notion of the “Third Landscape,” we understand these uncultivated, interstitial and self-willed zones as reservoirs of biodiversity and imagination. Places often overlooked—ruins, edges, fallow grounds—become living laboratories for new forms of relation. Floating University, like the desert, is such a place.

Our research opened into multispecies relations, expanded homemaking, and soft-body cultivation: practices that help us loosen the city’s hard exoskeleton and tune into the sensory, somatic and relational intelligence of the more-than-human world. We worked through our five thematic labs, adapting them to the specific textures and ecologies of Floating University.