Wondrous Relations: A Festival of Arts, Education and Ecology. 7-9 September 2026, Orangerie Theater, Cologne, Germany.
For the last two and a half years, the EcoLit project has explored how we might come to learn with and through a world of wondrous relations. For us, to wonder is to consider carefully and to be touched by awe. And to be in relation means to confirm a condition that underlies the history of all life on Earth and one that continues to shape its future. What does this mean for the arts, for education, and for ecological thinking? We believe that the best way to share our findings and enter a conversation with other researchers, artists, educators and citizens is through mutual learning – and through celebration. We want to acknowledge that, much like making a painting or composing a poem or a piece of music, or indeed organising an event, learning and living demand care, trust, attention and resonance.
This is why we invite you to become part of our project’s final event, Wondrous Relations: A Festival of Arts, Education and Ecology, from 7–9 September 2026 at the Orangerie Theater in Cologne, Germany. In addition to invited speakers and artists, talks, performances and workshops, we also invite community organisers, artists, educators, activists, and researchers to share their work and experience. Our hope is to better understand, appreciate, and amplify creative and cultural approaches to socioecological crises and to highlight their importance in how we imagine and co-create more livable futures.
If you are interested in presenting your creative and/or academic work, either in the form of a poster or audio or video pitch, please get in touch. Contributions may include but are not limited to:
- Music- and literature-based practices (poetry, storytelling, performance, improvisation, choir, biosonification) that cultivate ecological attentiveness in everyday life as well as in informal and non-formal educational spaces: festivals, reading groups, after-school programmes, community-led conservation and activist projects.
- Transdisciplinary research that practices or seeks to blur the boundaries between “academic” and “community” knowledge and pedagogies that hold space for creative-critical responses to ecological crises, without reducing these to individual resilience or self-improvement.
If your work lives and thrives in the cracks between categories, we especially welcome it.
Submission details:
Please send us your abstract (max. 250 words), poster or video pitch, along with a short bio (100 words), to info@ecolit.cologne. Deadline for submissions: 31st March 2026. We will get back to you by 1st May 2026.
Registration details coming soon!
