At the end of 2025, we gathered for the third and last session of the first weaving stories series, The Being of Relation.

ro heinrich' collaborative research and film project Weaving conversations at the end of the world as we know it—involving Sher Doruff, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Reza Mirabi, and artist initiatives like reschooling-with, among others—serves as a guide and thread through this series.

Unfolding over three practice sharing sessions, participants are invited to engage with this research-film-in-process. The research explores the intersections of ecological collapse and cultural transformation, addressing our present predicament at the end of the world as we know it.

For their third session of weaving stories, the inquiries of ro heinrich and Reza Mirabi, further coalesced. Mirabi, as one of long-term ro’s collaborators, joined during the second gathering, as they are both drawn to ecological modes of perception, dynamically attuning with fundamental shifts in the world—not only politically or environmentally, but at the level of relation itself.

Their collaboration asks: How do we create conditions for moving away from colonial ontologies of separation, and towards paraontological modes of existence that move with and in the logic of the being of relation?

This third and final weaving stories gathering, engaged this question through reading, conversation and practice sharing with a film-screening-performance, including the (live) sounds of artist, composer and collaborator Sher Doruff. Through different layered modes of tuning into the screened film-fragment in progress and its script, participants were invited to listen, read, sound, eat, dance, sound and metabolise the material, resulting in a grounded and nurtured conversation to unfold in the moment, in relation.

A rhythmic relational ecology

Within these present times of unthought of change, Ro and Reza's collaboration is an attempt towards a radical shifting away of our commitment to colonial ontologies -logics of categorisation and separation-  towards potential para-ontologies that refuse to consider apocalypse and believe that other futures are possible. Their research thinks and learns with process philosophy, black study, Sufi mysticism and autistic perception, and weaves with recorded conversation materials with interlocutors including Erin Manning, Brian Massumi (alongside others).

Expanding and proliferating perspectives for languages (embodied, unspoken, spoken), they merge modalities of cinema and performance, listening into the interstices of perception often unnoticed or historically muted. Through the co-composition of attentional techniques—drawn from and between thought, sound, image, and movement—ro and Reza attempt to craft a rhythmic relational ecology. One that foregrounds not the articulation of a centre, but the trembling, flickering edges of experience. A practice of dynamic attuning with the paraontological.

About the series 

weaving stories is a series by ARIAS in which an artist-researcher is invited to share their practice unfolding over several sessions together with participants; all are welcome to join. In these critical times when the scope of exchanges is consistently reduced, we would like to offer spaces for an ecology of practices, where different perspectives and ways of knowing may be engaged relationally towards difference without separability.

Co-creating conditions of possibilities at the end of the world as we know it is co-curated by ro heinrich, fabrice dubosc, and Reza Mirabi, in collaboration with ARIAS, Framer Framed and reschooling-with. This evolving research will also find form in a film work published with THIRDtalks and a performance shared at Frascati.

ro heinrich is an artist-researcher working with fieldings of relationality through spoken and unspoken languages. Through (recorded) conversations and collaborations, their practice is multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on film and book making. At the fertile edges of neurodiversity, process philosophy, black study and artistic research, their research moves with paraontological thinking, addressing our present predicament at the end of the world as we know it.

ro recently began a PhD in artistic research with Erin Manning, at Concordia, Montreal, with Sher Doruff and Shira Avni as co-supervisors, is collaborator with 3Ecologies Project, and reschooling-with, alumni of THIRD, DAS Graduate School Amsterdam, and participates in several engaged study groups.

Reza Mirabiرضا ﻣﯾﺮآﺒﯽ is an artist working across performance, installation, and storytelling. He traces where myth, memory, and socio-politics meet in everyday life contexts across Europe and the SWANA region. Mirabi studied Fine Arts at the University of Mumbai in 2012 and holds a Master in Choreography from DAS Graduate School, University of the Arts Amsterdam, from 2021.

Mirabi’s practice begins from the premise that everything - each place, being, and material - carries a story of its own. Rather than overwriting these stories with new narratives, he is committed to look for diverse techniques of listening that allow these already existing narratives to speak to us.

reschooling-with is a platform for learning, unlearning, and weaving solidarity through art, embodied research, ancestral practices, pedagogical experiments, and eco-social action.

Sher Doruff works and teaches in the material, sonic and performance arts. For the past twenty-five years her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice as an artist, writer, mentor, and supervisor. Her research practice explores fabulative approaches to writing and composition. She is Emeritus Professor of Film and Media at the Research Centre of Stockholm University of the Arts, was head of pre-PhD research programs at DAS Graduate School /Amsterdam University of the Arts and Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She mentors and supervises artistic research doctoral candidates in several European university programs. Her novella Last Year at Betty and Bob’s An Actual Occasion (2021) completes the Betty and Bob trilogy, published by 3Ecologies/Punctum Books. In recent years she began dabbling again in music-making for the fun of it. 

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