Ecologies of Practice: Landscaping with Beavers

An interdisciplinary group of ten researchers including artists, cultural geographers, and anthropologists, led by theatre-maker David Overend and human-geographer Jamie Lorimer, visited the Bamff estate in Perthshire, Scotland for four days to explore “landscaping with beavers” and the possibility of multispecies collaboration. Building on previous experiments in Performing Wild Geographies at the Knepp estate in Sussex in 2017 and 2018, this project hoped to further develop our understanding of wild performatives, exploring the shifts in the local landscape in the wake of the introduction of a keystone species. This paper reflects on what emerged from our transdiscipline experiments and what endeavouring to collaborate with more-than-human actants taught us about developing multispecies ecologies of practice.