Buzzing Against Collapse

Response-able Storytelling to Care for a Precarious World

Laura Del Vecchio

 

Artist Statement

Buzzing Against Collapse explores the transformative potential of multispecies storytelling and response-ability in the face of planetary precarity. Centered on an affective autoethnographic encounter with Damià Sinfreu, an allergic yet devoted Andorran beekeeper, this research examines how care unfolds between humans and more-than-human beings through distance, vulnerability, and ethical entanglement. Rather than offering prescriptive outcomes, the study reflects on how research itself is reshaped when nonhuman agencies—bees, animals, mountains, and more—are recognized as active participants. Drawing on theories from Haraway, Tsing, and Plumwood, the concept of “buzzing” emerges as both metaphor and method: a way of listening to the unsettling, disruptive signals that challenge anthropocentric knowledge. By foregrounding the human as prey—vulnerable, finite, and embedded—this work resists extractive paradigms and proposes storytelling as a situated, reciprocal act of world-making. In doing so, it seeks alternatives to narratives of inevitable collapse through relational, ethical, and co-created practices of care.

….  humans are constantly exposed to the subjects we encounter. Yet this exposure is rarely acknowledged and is often treated as a resource to be exploited for human knowledge or superficial desires. Rather than denying or instrumentalizing this exposure, I argue that true openness to the unknown—or to what we believe we already know—only occurs when we allow ourselves to be contaminated by the other. This contamination involves becoming vulnerable to the dangers the other might present: to becoming prey, and to allowing the other to appear as a predator threatening our established thoughts or even the materiality of our bodies.

Click here to hear the buzzing sound

 

Laura Del Vecchio (she/her) is a multidisciplinary researcher, artist, musician, editor and translator whose work lies at the intersection of culture, the politics and ethics of care, decolonial thought and the analysis of the links between human and more-than-human worlds. Del Vecchio has developed methodologies, coordinated research groups and published articles, collaborating with UNESCO, the Austrian Chamber of Commerce (WKO), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica, La Directa, Konvent Zero and many others. With a Master’s degree in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the University of Barcelona, Del Vecchio continues to explore the ever-changing planetary landscapes as a predoctoral fellow at the University of the Balearic Islands and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She is part of the project “Cinema and Environment 2: Ways of seeing beyond the Anthropocene” (2024-2027), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the European Union, and member of the consolidated research group British and comparative cultural studies: identities and representation (BRICCS)