By Martina Denegri
m.d.denegri@rug.nl
In the summer of 2024, the Utrecht-based foundation Creative Coding Utrecht (CCU) hosted the art exhibition “Composting Computers”. For two weeks, the headquarters of the organisation, the “Tree Tower”, was the backdrop of artworks and a series of workshops exploring relationships between human, nature and technology through the creative repurposing of e-waste and its encounters with organic materials. The final day of the exhibition marked a moment of transformation: CCU became a Zoöp. In the contract that formalised this shift, the signature of a plant appears among the signatures of human members of the organisation. This symbolic yet legally binding gesture demonstrates the commitment at the core of this pioneering model: organising as a multispecies collaboration aimed at ecological regeneration.
The Tree Tower. Photograph by author, March 2025.
Unlike modern approaches to organising and sustainability, the Zoöp Model grounds the human and its institutions in the web of life, working alongside non-humans for the flourishing of the ecosystems they share. The term is short for Zoöperation, a combination of the Greek word for life, zoe, and cooperation. The concept first appeared in 2018 in the context of the research project “Terraforming Earth” at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), which became the first Zoöp in the world in 2022. At the time of writing, there are six Zoöps –HNI, Bodemzicht Foundation, De Ceuvel, Kunstfort Vijfhuizen and Creative Coding Utrecht, Waag Futurelab– but more Dutch and international organisations are expected to adopt the model in the upcoming period. Drawing from posthuman relational ontologies (in particular Rosi Braidotti), Indigenous cosmologies, the Rights of Nature movement and ecological economics, the Zoöp Model foregrounds the potential –and responsibility– of organisations to participate in the creation of shared, more-than-human worlds.
In my thesis titled “Organising as Attuning” I studied CCU’s implementation of the Zoöp Model as an ecologically attuned mode of organising, a potential site of worldmaking where more-than-human forms of knowing, caring and working together can emerge. The concept of attunement was developed as a dialogue between organisation scholar Frank J. Barrett and ecological philosopher Timothy Morton. Attunement was thus defined as both an organisational capacity –cultivated through an aesthetic sensibility and practices of attention and surrender– and an ethico-political commitment to inviting more-than-human others in the processes of organising. The Zoöp model provided an interesting case to explore how such multispecies attunement could take shape in practice.
Attunement diagram.
My findings, built on ethnographic research as well as the analysis of technological and artistic interventions, showed that being a Zoöp not only opens up new relational possibilities –or spaces of attunement– but also stimulates practices for sensing and making decisions amidst complex ecological relations. As a governance framework, it includes more-than-human voices and needs in decision-making, harbouring the potential to expand the organisation’s space of attunement. As a method, it takes organisations through a learning journey to become better participants in more-than-human ecologies, a process that requires attuning to situated bodies and rhythms.
Nonetheless, the work of attuning is not much about harmony as it is about navigating frictions and continuous negotiations amidst uncertainty and complexity. Moreover, structural and institutional limitations often hinder this relational work. Cultural, economic, and political systems grounded in anthropocentric and extractivist paradigms not only fail to support more-than- human attunement but actively resist it. Yet, the difficult encounters with such constraints open spaces to question dominant logics. It is in the cracks opened by moments of friction and hesitation that alternatives can be imagined, and, however slowly, enacted. Rather than aiming for rapid or large-scale change, the attunement work of the Zoöp Model unfolds in these narrow spaces through small, situated interactions: the choice to listen before acting, to attune rather than ignore, to care rather than control.
Read the full thesis here.
Bio
Martina Denegri is a researcher, writer and curator. A graduate from the ReMa in Cultural Leadership at the University of Groningen, her research focuses on digital archival practices, the role of non-human agents in artistic production, and cultural policy. She currently holds a teaching position in the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. She is also the co-founder of WILLOW Online Art Space, a non-profit organisation creating spaces for autonomous art on the web, and critically investigating the digital and its infrastructure.