Since I have settled back into my home country, I have dreamt of applying my passion for Biodesign to rural areas. For me, Rural Futures are crucial because this archetypal territory is the interface between the city and the wild. It is the liminal space where research into new ways of making can more adequately be explored because it is more  inclusive of the non-human (other species and actants). Indeed, I believe if we are to design a regenerative future, it has to be done in collaboration with other species. We must design our future as an ecology.

But to design as an ecology: the City is too alienated, the Wild should be left in peace — Rurality is the frontier of regenerative futures exploration.  Rurality is also the space where bioregional characteristics are most visible. Where the impacts of climate change hit the hardest yet where we can design for regeneration at large scales. And in my view, it’s also the space where humans can take a step back, and into new perspectives that are not solely human centric.

This is a tremendous richness that can be harnessed in light of our  society’s new advances and new community ethics in biotechnology. Biodesign as a framework is already helping us evolve new products and business models based on interspecies collaboration, circular systems, and new types of craftsmanships more aligned with regenerative futures. I feel community biolabs, and bioart/biodesign practitioners should have a multiplicity of spaces to work in a multiplicity of regions to scale this research further.

My dream is to open one such space: a residency for Biodesign. It would be a bioregional hub for exploring the opportunities for regeneration in the Mediterranean biome of the South of France/ North of Spain. It would be connected to sister projects across Europe in other bioregions and share learnings in an open source way.In the future,  I want to run several types of programming for various audiences: researchers, designers and artists working in interdisciplinary collaboration, attracting and training local talent, evolving region-specific biocrafts, and intervening in local schools to inspire local students.