Dr Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the spiritual, ecological, medicinal and cultural dimensions of more-than-human life, and the unexpected places where these emerge and collide. Their practice is about collaboratively exploring how we as humans share buildings, landscapes and ecosystems with animals, plants, microbes, and crucially, other humans. They use a variety of methods, including creative citizen science and sensing activities as a way to invite the stories of communities whose ways of knowing the world might be different to the ones we’re used to hearing about. By doing so, they believe we might learn from and be inspired by these stories to build futures in which all kinds of humans, animals and ecosystems can coexist well together, in what Potawatomi ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls ‘mutual thriving’.
Past projects have included: listening to and recording polluted waterways with neurodiverse young musicians to create eco-soundscapes; fermenting in the kitchen with PoC women to reduce food waste, through which they developed adaptable recipes, poetry that used food as metaphor, and a multispecies 'fermented' soundscape that used the concept of polyphonic assemblage to tell collaborators’ (human and otherwise) stories of culture, home and migration; foraging plants with different communities across the British Islands in order to explore and develop our knowledge about the relationships between plants and people as food, medicine and spiritual practice, and many other projects that are developed through collaboration with the communities engaged on topics to do with nature, culture, science, spirituality, land, water and air.
Kaajal is presently Teaching Fellow in Digital Media Practice at the University of Leeds, an affiliated researcher at the Heritage for Global Challenges Centre at the University of York, and has been a (re)Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes at the University of Helsinki in Finland since 2023.