Future Based’s podcast series on ‘more than human relations’, is hosted by Michelle Geraerts. It aims to move beyond the established frameworks of what we consider as knowledge. Michelle is a PhD student at University of Amsterdam's department of Anthropology, and she specialises in natural resources. She is familiar with regular as well as creative approaches to qualitative research, and employs methods such as sensory ethnography. Having collaborated with artists, she supports the idea of research as ‘serious play’ and aims to explore the blurry boundary between the natural and artificial. If you are interested in questioning standard epistemological views, the nature of existence or being as such, and interspecies studies, this is the podcast for you.

In this podcast, Michelle goes into conversation with artist and DJ Vanessa Opoku. What is the relation between our collective and individual memory, and the way we give form to our surroundings? What is fact, and what is fiction? Is there even a strict distinction between these two domains of reality? Questions like the former will be central to their discussion.

Vanessa Opoku is a visual artist, filmmaker and DJ and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. After her studies in Book Art and Graphic Design, she followed her pre-diploma in Maureen Mooren’s class of System Design and in the Expanded Cinema class of Clemens von Wedemeyer at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig. Since 2017, she studies Photography and Moving Image with Tina Bara, after two semesters abroad at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, both in the Fine Art department. In her artistic practice, Vanessa Opoku negotiates the limits and perceptions of reality. She researches how we can radically change the concept of our world, reality and all living beings in it by finding alliances between art, science and technology.