Learning Session 4: Cuerpo Enjambre (Body Swarm) - Interspecies Activations
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
🎧 Prefer listening? Open the link in the Substack app and tap Play, or paste it into e.g. Paper2Audio (a free text-to-speech player) to turn it into an audio version
This 4th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in June 2025 explored emerging insights from the 10-month Cuerpo Enjambre (Body Swarm) program (November 2024 – August 2025) on Interspecies Activations with Isabel Cavelier, the founder of mundo común, a speculative practice of the future in the present.
Drawing inspiration from the collective intelligence of bees—particularly how they sense, decide, and relocate when a hive is under threat—the program combined virtual dialogues, an immersion in the Amazon, and a process of collectively creating “devices for deep listening.” The aim is not only to include more-than-human perspectives conceptually, but to activate different human faculties to engage with them in practice.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
Complementary note from mundo común: At the time of this dialogue (June 2025) Cuerpo Enjambre was in the midst of its creation phase. Swarms of participants were in the process of creating deep listening devices.
At the time of publishing this synthesis (March 2026), most of the swarms finalized their devices. After the intricacies of collective creation, the deep listening devices are being deployed and inviting others, beyond the program, to activate their own agency in entering into conversation with the more-than-human. Three of those creations are:
The book “The Fall of the Tree River”
The exhibition: “Invisible Worlds”, currently open in Bogotá and about to open for a month in London
The short film: “Cuerpo Enjambre”, available on YouTube.
🌿Learning Session 4 (June 2025) — Synthesis
Cuerpo Enjambre (Body Swarm): Interspecies Activations, with Isabel Cavelier (mundo común)
What does it actually take to move from representing the more-than-human to relating with it directly—and what kinds of practices, capacities, and conditions does that require?
1. What is Cuerpo Enjambre trying to do in practice?
A shift from representation to activation
Rather than working through representation (as in legal or design approaches), Cuerpo Enjambre focuses on activating the capacity of participants to enter into forms of relationship with more-than-human beings. This is not positioned as symbolic inclusion, but as an attempt to engage more directly with living systems.
Designed as a long-duration process, not a one-off intervention
The 10-month structure reflects the understanding that this kind of engagement cannot be achieved through short workshops or isolated sessions. It requires time for participants to develop sensitivity, trust, and new ways of perceiving.
Bio-inspired structuring of the program
The program draws on the intelligence of bees—not metaphorically, but structurally—using their collective sensing and decision-making processes as a reference point for how humans might organise themselves differently in moments of uncertainty or transition.
🌱 Seed:
Cuerpo Enjambre is not about including the more-than-human in our processes—it is about transforming the human capacities required to relate to it.
2. How was the program developed, and what does it require from participants?
Activation of different human faculties
A central focus is on expanding beyond purely cognitive ways of knowing. Participants are invited to work with perception, attention, and forms of listening that are not typically engaged in professional or institutional contexts.
Combination of modalities
The program blends online dialogues, immersive experiences (including time in the Amazon), and collective creation practices, recognising that no single format is sufficient to support this kind of engagement.
Uncertainty as part of the process
There is no fixed “method” that guarantees outcomes. The process itself evolves, and participants are required to engage without knowing exactly what will emerge.
📌 Practitioner takeaway:
This work cannot be reduced to a toolkit—it requires sustained engagement and a willingness to operate without predefined outcomes.
3. What does embodiment make possible in this work?
The body as a site of knowing
In Cuerpo Enjambre, the body is not treated as a passive receiver of information, but as an active site of perception and intelligence. Through movement, attention, and sensory engagement, participants begin to access forms of knowing that are not available through analysis alone—forms that emerge through feeling, rhythm, and attunement to the environment.
Collective sensing beyond the individual
When practiced in a group, this embodied awareness extends beyond the individual into a shared field of perception. Participants begin to sense together—responding not only to their own experience, but to subtle shifts in others, in the space, and in the more-than-human environment. This creates a form of distributed intelligence that cannot be located in any single person.
Reconfiguring how knowledge emerges
Rather than knowledge being produced through discussion or interpretation after the fact, it begins to arise within the practice itself—through interaction, improvisation, and shared attention. This challenges dominant models of knowledge production that prioritise abstraction over experience.
🌱 Seed:
Embodiment does not simply deepen experience—it changes where knowledge comes from, shifting it from the mind alone into a relational field where sensing, responding, and meaning-making happen together in real time.
4. What has worked—and what has proven difficult?
Time and continuity enable depth
The extended duration of the program allows participants to move beyond initial curiosity or novelty into more grounded, embodied forms of engagement. Over time, patterns begin to repeat, attention deepens, and participants start to notice subtler shifts in perception and relation. This kind of depth is difficult—if not impossible—to reach in shorter, workshop-based formats where the experience remains at the level of introduction rather than integration.
Not all participants engage in the same way
Participants enter the process with different levels of openness, prior experience, and comfort with non-linear or embodied practices. Some are able to drop in relatively quickly, while others need more time to acclimatise or may remain more at the edge of the experience. This unevenness is not a flaw of the process, but it does shape what becomes possible within the group and how far different individuals are able to go.
Difficulty in translating experience into shared language
A recurring challenge is articulating what is being experienced in ways that can be meaningfully communicated to others. Much of the work operates in a pre-verbal or non-conceptual space, making it difficult to translate into language without simplifying or distorting it. This creates friction when trying to share insights, document outcomes, or connect the experience to other contexts such as organisations or institutions.
🌱 Seed:
What works in the practice does not easily translate into words—and the more transformative the experience, the harder it becomes to communicate without reducing what actually happened.
5. What are participants struggling with?
Letting go of familiar modes of knowing
Participants often default to analytical, interpretive, or sense-making frameworks that prioritise explanation over experience. These habits are deeply ingrained and can make it difficult to fully engage with practices that ask for sensing, presence, and not-knowing. Letting go of these familiar modes is not a single moment, but an ongoing process of noticing and loosening.
Trusting what is being perceived
Even when participants begin to experience shifts—whether in perception, attention, or relational awareness—there is often hesitation in trusting these experiences. Doubt can arise around whether what is being sensed is “real,” valid, or meaningful, especially in the absence of familiar forms of verification or shared language.
Sustaining engagement over time
The depth of the work requires sustained attention and commitment over several months, which can be challenging alongside other demands and responsibilities. Staying with the process—especially when outcomes are not immediately clear or measurable—requires a different kind of motivation than goal-oriented learning.
🌱 Seed:
The challenge is not only to learn something new, but to unlearn the reflex to explain, validate, and control experience—and to remain with what is sensed even when it cannot yet be fully understood.
6. What has been learned so far?
This work is not universally accessible in the same way
Participants with prior exposure to embodied practices, ecological work, or relational ways of knowing may find it easier to enter into the process, while others require more time, guidance, or support. This highlights that the work does not land evenly across all contexts, and that accessibility is not just about invitation, but about readiness and resonance.
Collective processes matter
The group dynamic plays a significant role in enabling or constraining what becomes possible. Trust, openness, and the willingness of participants to engage influence the depth of the shared experience. In this sense, the process reflects its bio-inspired foundations: intelligence and insight emerge not from individuals alone, but from the quality of relationships within the group.
There are limits to how far this can be standardised
Attempts to formalise or replicate the process too rigidly risk stripping away the conditions that make it effective—namely responsiveness, emergence, and sensitivity to context. While certain principles can be carried across, the practice itself resists being turned into a fixed methodology without losing its depth.
🌱 Seed:
What makes this work powerful is precisely what resists standardisation—it depends on context, relationship, and emergence, which cannot be fully captured in a repeatable format without losing what makes it work.
7. How does this translate into climate action or biodiversity work?
Indirect rather than immediate application
The program does not produce ready-to-use solutions or interventions; instead, it aims to shift how participants relate to ecological systems, which may then influence their work in other contexts.
Embodiment as knowledge
Cuerpo Enjambre emphasizes the body not as an object, but as a site of perception and knowing. Movement, sensation, and collective presence become ways of accessing relational intelligence that cannot be reached through cognition alone. This challenges dominant knowledge systems that favour abstraction over lived experience.
The body does not just experience the world—it knows it, in ways that thinking alone cannot access.
Challenges of integration into existing systems
There is a gap between the kinds of experiences and insights generated through the program and the structures within which climate and biodiversity work typically operates.
Beyond individual cognition
Rather than replacing existing approaches, this kind of work may function as a deeper layer that informs how decisions, designs, or policies are approached. Working in groups for examples amplifies this capacity for embodied knowing, creating shared fields of perception where insights arise through interaction rather than individual analysis. This shifts the focus from isolated thinking to relational awareness, where meaning is generated collectively and dynamically.
🌱 Seed:
The impact is not in immediate outputs, but in changing the basis from which action is taken.
8. How replicable is this approach?
Context matters significantly
The program is deeply shaped by its specific context—ecologically, culturally, and relationally—including its grounding in territories such as the Amazon. These conditions are not incidental; they actively shape how participants perceive, relate, and learn, meaning that the outcomes are inseparable from the environment in which the process unfolds.
Replication is not straightforward
While certain elements of the approach—such as practices of attention, embodiment, and collective sensing—can be adapted, the process as a whole cannot simply be copied and transferred. Each new context requires a careful translation that takes into account local ecologies, cultures, and relational histories, rather than assuming universality.
Tension between scaling and integrity
Efforts to scale or replicate the approach introduce a real risk of simplification—reducing nuanced, relational practices into formats that are easier to distribute but less effective. Maintaining the depth and integrity of the work requires resisting the pressure to standardize what is inherently context-sensitive and emergent.
📌 Practitioner takeaway
Replication is not about reproducing the format, but about understanding and recreating the conditions—relational, ecological, and temporal—that make this kind of learning possible in the first place.
9. What does it take to bring this into other contexts?
From immersive practice to everyday settings
One of the core challenges is that Cuerpo Enjambre relies on conditions—time, space, attention, and facilitation—that are difficult to replicate in more constrained environments. Translating these practices into organisational or institutional contexts requires careful adaptation without losing their depth.
Translation without dilution
As practices move into new contexts, there is a risk that they become simplified, aestheticised, or instrumentalised—reduced to techniques rather than held as relational processes. Maintaining integrity means preserving not just the form, but the underlying orientation toward listening, reciprocity, and emergence.
Holding depth under pressure
In contexts that prioritise outcomes, efficiency, or clarity, practices that work with ambiguity, emergence, and not-knowing can be difficult to sustain. This creates ongoing tension between staying true to the work and making it legible or acceptable within dominant systems.
🌱 Seed:
What makes these practices powerful is also what makes them fragile—because they depend on conditions of attention, care, and openness that are easily lost when translated into systems that do not value them.
Cross-cutting insight threads
Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.
Representation → Direct relational engagement
Where other approaches focus on representing the more-than-human, this work attempts to engage with it more directly, requiring different human capacities.
Method → Process
Rather than offering a defined method, the approach unfolds as a process that evolves over time and resists standardisation.
Output → Transformation of the participant
The primary site of change is not the external outcome, but the participant’s way of perceiving and relating—which may then influence action elsewhere.
Accessibility → Depth (unresolved)
While the approach opens new possibilities, it also raises questions about who can meaningfully engage with it and under what conditions.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.
To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.
We donate our time and energy to this sandbox. If you value this space, consider co-funding this work by leaving us a tip.