The event Murmuring Matter rehearsed ways to be attentive, responsive, and empathic to the material murmurings and presences within and around us. The on-going environmental breakdown has made evident the agency of viral, vegetal, animal, atmospheric, and other material manifestations, which have evaded human control and reclaimed an active role in the unfolding of earthly narratives. These conditions urge for a reassessment of human’s relation to the environment, not only from a techno-scientific perspective but also as from an ontological and epistemological one. One that requires a disentanglement from structures inherited from millennia of epistemological violence inflicted against cosmologies rooted in an interconnection with forms of earthly agency. And one that requires special attention to cosmopolitical proposal such as that of Isabelle Stengers who invites us to slow down and listen to the multiple and divergent murmurings of those who do not have, cannot have, or do not want to have a voice in political arenas.

Throughout four-days, Murmuring Matter gathered diverse knowledges and practices, in walks, talks, performances, workshops, screenings, dinners and other somatic explorations, which nurtured processes of (un)learning, exchanging, and relating to and through the matters and environments in and around us. Bridging the analytical and sensorial, the verbal and non-verbal, the cognitive and affective, this collective inquiry traversered multiple scales of materials, bodies, river-, forest- and cityscapes of Maastricht and beyond, as gateways to access wider planetary stories and cosmopolitics.