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, workshop or both days by sending an e-mail to: info(at)constantvzw.org

PROGRAM

Saturday:
Invasive Species Unconference by Hwa Young Jung (10:00-16:30h)

Sunday:
"Invasive Remedy" workshop by Yi Zhang and “Mediator of Estrangement” by Monika Gabriela Dorniak (14:00-17:00)

Location:
Chausse de Jette 388, 1081 Koekelberg

BIOGRAPHIES

Hwa Young Jung is a socially engaged artist working in the arts, cultural and sciences, facilitating collaborative projects and workshops. She works with people to co-create projects, often using games and play to explore social issues. Based in the Northwest of England, she has been producing work with a range of people (care workers, microbiologists, young people excluded from mainstream education, men on probation) in England and internationally for almost ten years.

Yi Zhang (they/she) is an anti-disciplinary artist-researcher based in Eindhoven, who works across drawing, video, performance, installation, and workshops. Grounded in migration ecology and feminist ecology, their work traces the movements of human and non-human, material afterlives, and the border rejection towards these movements, through the modern history of invasive plants, the global war against rats, and the human hair trade. Their research focuses on how systems of categorization alienate, commodify, discard, and what rejects these frameworks. Alongside artistic practice, they are a fermenter and forager.

In her anti-disciplinary practice, Monika Gabriela Dorniak traverses the fluid boundaries between bodies, objects, and environments, seamlessly weaving together performance, (textile) sculpture, workshops, and multimedia interventions. With a background spanning fine art, choreography, psychology, and design, Dorniak’s work often unfolds within collaborative frameworks as a living map—charting the shifting terrains of the self amidst the entanglements of inherited and embodied memories, as well as belonging. Dorniak holds a Master’s Degree in Art and Science (Department of Fine Art) from Central Saint Martins in London (2017). In 2024, Dorniak embarked on a practice-based PhD at HfK Bremen and HDK Valand in Gothenburg, where she continues to explore the ongoing impact of the Second World War through auto-ethnographical, agricultural and interspecies positions. Dorniak has presented her works, performances and workshops at international institutions such as DAS MINSK (2026), Kesselhaus at Kindl Berlin (48 Stunden Neukölln, 2024), Nationalgalerie Vilnius (2023), Drugo Mare in Rijeka (2022), Uferstudios Berlin (2021), Kommunale Galerie Bärenzwinger in Berlin (2019), Tate Exchange at Tate Modern London (2017 & 2018), Arts Catalyst in London (2016), and Foreign Affairs Festival at Berliner Festspiele (2014). She has also been a guest lecturer at HfK Bremen (2025-2026), SOAS University of London (2022), Garage Museum in Moscow (2019), Al-Quds Bard College in Palestine (2018), and Chelsea College in London (2017).