Sacred Ecologies: Artists on Land, Spirituality and Climate
Summer Study Club Series 2026
July–September 2026 | Online
Sacred Ecologies: Artists on Land, Spirituality and Climate is a series of conversations and Study Clubs bringing together artists whose practices explore the intersections of ecology, spirituality, memory, ancestry, land, and environmental change.
Across four online sessions taking place between July and September 2026, participants will engage directly with internationally recognised artists whose work challenges extractive ways of seeing and offers alternative perspectives on our relationship with the natural world. Through photography, storytelling, research, ritual, and community-based practices, these artists invite us to consider how creativity can foster connection, responsibility, care, and collective imagination in times of ecological uncertainty.
Each Study Club combines artist presentations, discussion, reflection, and opportunities for participants to engage with the ideas, methods, and processes behind long-term artistic projects.
Accessibility & Support
Most proceeds from ticket sales go directly to the artist.
For every 10 tickets sold, one free place is gifted to someone who may not otherwise have access to the opportunity.
The remaining funds support Planted Journal’s work amplifying culture, environmental awareness, art, community-led initiatives, and under-represented voices worldwide.
Programme
Exploring Land, Ritual, and Care with Fernanda Liberti
Wednesday 15 July 2026 | 18:00 CEST | Online
120 Minutes
About the Artist
Fernanda Liberti is a Brazilian artist working across photography, video, and collage. Raised in Rio de Janeiro between rainforest, ocean, and urban environments, her work explores the relationships between ecology, memory, spirituality, identity, and place.
Through long-term research and collaborative practice, she investigates post-colonial histories and contemporary questions of belonging, with particular attention to Indigenous communities, people of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ experiences. Her work has received international recognition, including the Deloitte Photo Grant (2023), Portrait of Humanity, and the British Journal of Photography International Photo Award. She is also an Associate Lecturer in Photography at the University of the Arts London.
My artistic practice engages with ecological concerns in a way that is both direct and indirect, especially in relation to the environment and postcolonial structures of creating and relating to the land. In my country, working with the land was considered a punishment for many centuries, so it is important for me, and for all of us, to detach ourselves from this idea, as here progress has often been associated with the destruction of nature and the abuse of natural resources. My work exists in tension with that, trying to reframe our relationship to land as something spiritual, relational, and alive.
Fernanda Liberti
Brazilian artist
Selected achievements:
• Winner, British Journal of Photography International Photo Award
• Winner, Portrait of Humanity
• Exhibition: Dust from Home, MUDEC Museo delle Culture, Milan (2024)
• Laureate, Dior Prize
Study Club
Exploring Land, Ritual, and Care focuses on how artistic projects emerge through relationships—with communities, environments, spirituality, memory, and collective forms of engagement.
Drawing from her long-term research and artistic practice, Fernanda will share the process behind developing works created in dialogue with communities around the world, and how these encounters shape image-making, storytelling, and collaboration.
Through presentation, discussion, and reflection on specific projects, participants will explore how ideas evolve into artworks through listening, trust, research, reciprocity, and exchange. The session will also open conversations around spirituality, ecological awareness, ethics, authorship, and the responsibilities involved in creating work connected to lived histories, communities, and environments.
Rather than approaching artistic practice as an isolated act, the Study Club considers creativity as something relational—shaped by intuition, encounter, care, time, and attention.
Explore:
• Community-led artistic research
• Ecology, spirituality and memory in creative practice
• Ethical collaboration and long-term projects
Why Join This Study Club?
This session offers a rare opportunity to learn directly from Fernanda Liberti’s approach to long-term artistic research and community-led practice.
Participants will gain insights into:
- Developing artistic projects through collaboration and relationship-building
- Working ethically with communities and cultural knowledge
- Integrating spirituality, ecology, memory, and lived experience into creative practice
- Building research processes that unfold over months or years
- Navigating questions of care, authorship, representation, and responsibility
- Creating work that responds to environmental and social realities without simplifying their complexity
Inside the Study Group
- A study group exploring themes of the body, identity, diasporas, traditional communities, climate, and the physical and spiritual relationships between our bodies and the landscapes we inhabit.
- A reflection on the past two decades of Fernanda’s practice, tracing her journey from beginning as a teenager to exhibiting and travelling internationally through my work.
- A discussion on practices of care, collaboration, and working alongside diverse communities, considering how these relationships shape artistic practice.
- A group conversation reflecting on experiences of spirituality, art-making, and what it means to grow, connect, and expand presence in the world.
For every 10 tickets sold, one free place is gifted to someone who may not otherwise have access to the opportunity.
Full Series Pass (All 4 Study Clubs) – 15% Discount
To support students, we’re offering 22.22% off all individual Study Club sessions.
The Full Series Pass already includes a 15% saving, and by applying the exclusive student discount code, students receive a total saving of 35% on the full series.
To learn more, email us at hello@plantedjournal.com
Working with Fragments: Myth, Memory and the Construction of Visual Narratives with Alvin Ng
Saturday 1 August 2026 | 18:00 Singapore Time | 12:00 CEST | Online
90 minutes
About the Artist
Alvin Ng is a Singapore-based artist and educator working primarily with photography. His practice moves between mythology, philosophy, personal memory, and contemporary image-making, creating photographs that feel suspended between past and present.
Through the hand-manipulation of photographic prints, Alvin constructs layered visual narratives that resist linear notions of time. His work explores the unseen, the remembered, and the spiritually resonant, inviting slower and more contemplative ways of engaging with the natural world.
His ongoing project Samsara draws upon Hindu and Buddhist understandings of cyclical time, reflecting on renewal, impermanence, and humanity’s place within nature’s continual processes of transformation.
I don’t necessarily see spiritual or spiritual ecology worldviews as separate from scientific thinking. In many ways they are different ways of approaching the same questions about existence and the universe. For example, the teachings of the Heart Sutra explore ideas about emptiness, interconnectedness, and the nature of reality, which can sometimes resonate conceptually with certain scientific explorations of the universe. Where spiritual perspectives may offer something different is in how they situate humanity within much longer cycles of time and existence. Scientific and policy-driven climate narratives often focus on immediate action, measurable data, and governance. Spiritual or cosmological frameworks tend to emphasise impermanence, interconnectedness, and our relatively brief place within a much larger cosmic timeline.
Alvin Ng
Artist and educator
Selected achievements:
• Selected Artist, Foam Talent 2026
• LensCulture Critics’ Choice Awards 2022
• Internationally exhibited photographic practice engaging memory and philosophy in image-making
Study Club
Working with Fragments explores how myths, legends, personal memories, and fragments of history can be translated into photographic ideas and visual language.
Drawing from his artistic practice, Alvin will introduce participants to approaches that prioritise symbolism, atmosphere, intuition, and observation over literal illustration. The session offers a foundation for artists interested in incorporating mythology, antiquity, and memory into their own creative work.
Explore:
• Photography as myth-making and memory
• Symbolism, atmosphere and visual storytelling
• Developing contemplative artistic practice
Why Join This Study Club?
This session offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Alvin Ng’s approach to photography as a form of myth-making, memory, and philosophical inquiry.
Participants will gain insights into:
• Developing photographic and visual narratives through myth, memory, and personal history
• Working with symbolism, atmosphere, intuition, and observation in image-making
• Translating fragments of lived experience into layered visual storytelling
• Engaging with cyclical time, impermanence, and transformation in creative practice
• Incorporating mythology, antiquity, and spiritual resonance into contemporary photography
• Building a contemplative artistic practice grounded in reflection and perception
Inside the Study Group
Activity One: Introduction & Artist Talk
- Introduction to the artist and their practice.
- Presentation of selected works and works-in-progress.
- Discussion on mythology, archaeology, fragments of history, and the natural world as starting points for image-making.
Activity Two: Guided Research Exercise
Participants will select a myth, story, poem, memory, or personal narrative as a point of departure and create a simple colour-coded mind map exploring:
- Emotional resonance
- Physical and material elements
- Observational prompts and visual motifs
Activity Three: Reflection & Group Discussion
- Group discussion on themes, discoveries, and approaches to image-making.
- Closing reflections and Q&A.
For every 10 tickets sold, one free place is gifted to someone who may not otherwise have access to the opportunity.
Full Series Pass (All 4 Study Clubs) – 15% Discount
To support students, we’re offering 22.22% off all individual Study Club sessions.
The Full Series Pass already includes a 15% saving, and by applying the exclusive student discount code, students receive a total saving of 35% on the full series.
To learn more, email us at hello@plantedjournal.com
Ojú Órun: Territory, Body, Cosmoperceptions and Contemporary Photography with Gui Christ
Saturday 29 August 2026 | 15:00 CEST | Online
120–150 minutes
About the Artist
Gui Christ is a São Paulo-based artist whose work moves between documentary photography, anthropology, and spiritual worldviews. Working closely with Afro-diasporic and historically marginalised communities, his practice explores memory, resistance, identity, and the lasting impacts of colonialism in Brazil.
His internationally recognised project M’Kumba centres Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices and cosmologies, examining the relationship between territory, ancestry, belief, and contemporary life. Through his work, Gui proposes a decolonial approach to image-making in which land, body, and spirituality are inseparable.
Within our mythology, the relationship between nature and divinity is intrinsic and inseparable. It is precisely through the balance between human beings and the natural world that these forces remain present. And it is this balance that sustains not only the environment, but also our social, spiritual, and mental well-being.
Gui Christ
Artist
Selected achievements:
• Featured by European Photography Magazine as one of the leading photographers of his generation
• National Geographic Explorer Grant (USA) recipient
• Internationally exhibited practice engaging ecology, spirituality and decolonial visual culture
Study Club
Combining artist talk, visual presentation, guided creative exercises, and collective reflection, Ojú Órun invites participants to think about territory not simply as geography but as a living system shaped by memory, spirituality, ancestral knowledge, and political struggle.
Drawing from Gui’s long-term project M’Kumba, the session explores how contemporary photography can move beyond colonial visual traditions and develop alternative approaches rooted in embodied knowledge, ritual memory, and relationships with land.
Designed for artists, photographers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in Afro-diasporic visual culture, ecology, decolonial thought, and contemporary artistic practice, the workshop offers both critical reflection and practical inspiration.
Explore:
• Decolonial approaches to photography and ecology
• Afro-Brazilian cosmologies and embodied knowledge
• Ritual, ancestry and ecological thinking
Why Join This Study Club?
This session offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Gui Christ’s decolonial approach to photography, ecology, and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies.
Participants will gain insights into:
• Understanding territory as a living system shaped by memory, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge
• Exploring photography beyond colonial visual traditions
• Engaging with ritual, myth, and embodied knowledge in artistic practice
• Working with Afro-diasporic cosmologies as frameworks for ecological thinking
• Developing image-making practices rooted in reciprocity, care, and relationality
• Rethinking climate and ecological crisis through spiritual and community-based perspectives.
Inside the Study Group
Introduction and Context
The lecture will address:
- Introduction to Gui Christ’s artistic practice
- Overview of M’kumba project
- Introduction to Afro-Brazilian cosmoperception
Artist Lecture / Visual Presentation
Presentation of photographic works, field processes, research methodologies, and reflections developed through years of immersion with Afro-Brazilian religious communities and territories.
The lecture will address:
- Coloniality and visual representation
- The relationship between image-making, memory, spirituality, and territory
- Cosmoperception as a way of understanding image, body, land, and spirituality as
interconnected
- Fiction and decolonial worldviews in contemporary photography.
- The tension between visibility and secrecy in sacred spaces
Guided Creative Exercise
Participants will be invited to choose one of the following questions as the starting point for a
visual exercise. Using drawing, collage, AI-generated imagery, photography, digital illustration,
archive materials, or other visual approaches, each participant will develop a small visual
sequence composed of 3 images that collectively respond to the chosen question.
Possible prompts include:
- What kinds of images emerge when the body is understood as a living territory of memory,
transformation, and resistance?
- How can images express relationships between ancestry, ecology, and spiritual memory?
- How might cosmoperceptions transform the way we visually and emotionally relate to everyday
life?• How can images represent nature not as scenery, but as a living archive of time, memory, and
knowledge?
- What would a territory shaped by ancestral presence, ritual, and collective memory look like?
- How can spirituality reshape the visual imagination of ecology and the more-than-human world?
- What kinds of images emerge when humans are imagined as part of an ecosystem rather than
separate from it?
- What might a contemporary cosmological landscape look like?
- How can fiction and speculative image-making create new narratives from colonial archives and
hegemonic notions of truth?
- What kinds of visual narratives can emerge from relationships between spirituality, ecology, and
everyday life?
Collective Reflection and Q&A
Open conversation with participants about:
* Artistic process
* Documentary ethics
* Decolonial image practices
* Ecology and spirituality in contemporary art
* Long-term project development
* Questions related to photography, research, and visual storytelling
For every 10 tickets sold, one free place is gifted to someone who may not otherwise have access to the opportunity.
Full Series Pass (All 4 Study Clubs) – 15% Discount
To support students, we’re offering 22.22% off all individual Study Club sessions.
The Full Series Pass already includes a 15% saving, and by applying the exclusive student discount code, students receive a total saving of 35% on the full series.
To learn more, email us at hello@plantedjournal.com
The Supernal Atlas: Mapping Atlantic Imagination with Lisandro Suriel
Saturday 26 September 2026 | 15:00 CEST | Online
About the Artist
Lisandro Suriel is a Caribbean photographer, visual storyteller, and artistic researcher whose work exists at the intersection of mythology, landscape, ancestry, and memory. Rooted in magical realism and informed by extensive academic research, his practice explores the visible and invisible dimensions of cultural identity.
Drawing on Caribbean folklore and Black Atlantic histories, Suriel’s work investigates how myth, spirituality, and ancestral knowledge continue to shape contemporary understandings of place and belonging. Through photography, research, and visual storytelling, he invites audiences to reconsider the relationships between environment, cosmology, and collective memory.
I seek to root Caribbean historiography and identity beyond the Transatlantic apocalypse. Yet, the scarcity of records left in the wake of colonial violence has led me to attend to the immaterial transmission of our histories through storytelling, spiritual practices, and other embodied forms of knowledge. It has guided me to, in a way, root our identity within a mythical temporality, where the ancestors themselves constitute the Mysteries of Nature. My work primarily departs from the lens and teachings of Ifa, an ancient, earth-centred philosophy, spiritual practice, and divination system originating in Yoruba, West Africa. Within this cosmological view, all aspects of nature and existence house intelligent spirits with whom we might engage, known as the orisha. It is also understood that the ancestors, once deified, are able to become orisha themselves, presiding over their own distinct mysteries of nature.
Lisandro Suriel
Visual storyteller, and artistic researcher
Selected achievements:
• Selected Artist, Foam Talent 2021
• Winner, Ghost Island: Documentary of The Black Imagination, New York Indie Shorts Awards (NY, USA)
• Internationally exhibited practice exploring Black imagination, ecology and mythology
Study Club
The Supernal Atlas: Mapping Atlantic Imagination seeks to introduce the spectres of the Atlantic world by way of storytelling and guide the participants in mapping the imaginal realms by way of archetypes—often rooted in ancient ecological ideals. The goal is to discuss the imagination as an epistemic tool for engaging layered historicity and to understand cultural identities of the Atlantic world, focusing on themes rooted in Afro-Caribbean mysteries and decolonial thought.
Suriel’s masterclass is grounded in the premise that freedom in the Atlantic world is deeply rooted in Afro-Caribbean theologies and philosophies, which are often marginalized by Western paradigms. Also drawing upon thinkers like Abby Warburg and Gayatri Spivak the masterclass utilizes the concept of “aesthetic education” and “the Mnemosyne Atlas” to reimagine knowledge production. The process of constructing this “Atlas of Imagination” subverts traditional institutional structures of power, empowering participants to become nodes of knowledge and possibly reclaim forgotten narratives. In short this is a space for participants to explore the intersections of imagination, ecology, identity, and historical memory.
Explore:
• Myth, ecology and Caribbean visual storytelling
• Ancestral knowledge and collective memory
• Decolonial approaches to image-making
Why Join This Study Club?
This session offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Lisandro Suriel’s practice at the intersection of ecology, mythology, and Caribbean visual storytelling.
Participants will gain insights into:
• Using imagination and storytelling as tools for ecological and cultural understanding
• Mapping memory, myth, and ancestral knowledge through visual practice
• Exploring the Black Atlantic as a space of layered histories and cosmologies
• Engaging with decolonial approaches to photography and knowledge production
• Developing artistic frameworks rooted in folklore, spirituality, and collective memory
• Rethinking ecology through relational, mythological, and ancestral perspectives
For every 10 tickets sold, one free place is gifted to someone who may not otherwise have access to the opportunity.
Full Series Pass (All 4 Study Clubs) – 15% Discount
To support students, we’re offering 22.22% off all individual Study Club sessions.
The Full Series Pass already includes a 15% saving, and by applying the exclusive student discount code, students receive a total saving of 35% on the full series.
To learn more, email us at hello@plantedjournal.com