Free Radicals is a two-year research project exploring the intersections between plant biodiversity and artistic practice, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme. Through a series of artist residencies and living labs with collaborators in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Hungary, and Armenia, a team of transdisciplinary researchers is gathering evidence and writing an open-source toolkit for individuals and institutions within the creative and cultural sectors designed to shape practices that support plant biodiversity. The final exhibition will take place at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon in autumn 2026.

Rooted in a European context, the project recognises that many of the extractive habits shaping today’s ecological crises have emerged from the continent’s own epistemologies. Therefore, our work begins by acknowledging these legacies and practising forms of unlearning that open space for more relational, accountable, and land-attuned modes of understanding.

Although our work unfolds across diverse European ecologies, it is informed by conversations with Indigenous and local knowledge experts from multiple continents, including colleagues from Australia, whose teachings on eucalyptus ecologies, fire management, and Country have contributed to our methodologies. Drawing on feminist and decolonial frameworks as well as ethnobotanical approaches that situate knowledge within landscapes, plants are approached as sentient beings and agents with communicative capacities that shape more-than-human life.

Developed as a situated response to our ecological present, the research project offers tools and practices for working with plants not as decorative motifs or raw materials, but as living participants in shared worlds. It explores how artistic and design-led practices might contribute to biocultural knowledge exchange through cultivating reciprocity and situated forms of care. Free Radicals seeks to build conditions for ethical, place-aware, and community-grounded learning, where Western-science academic frameworks form solidarities with non-institutionalised, local patterns of knowledge— to shape new models of ecological repair.