By Martine-Nicole Rojina

When I joined Echoes of the Ancient, I made a deliberate decision not to bring recording equipment into the places we visited. In a project concerned with sound, acoustics and natural environments, this might seem like a strange choice. But I wanted to begin somewhere else.

I wanted to meet the places.

I came into Echoes of the Ancient with Relational Intelligence, a framework I had already been developing through my artistic, technological, educational and accessibility practice. At its centre is a simple question: what conditions allow genuine connection across difference?

Echoes gave me a new environment in which to apply these ideas, this time with the places themselves participating in the relationship.

For me, Echoes of the Ancient became an exploration of relationship. What needs to happen for a genuine encounter between different cultures to become possible when some of those cultures are human and some are forests, rocks, water, animals, histories or things we might not even have words for?

I did not want to arrive already knowing what my role was. I did not want the microphone to define my relationship with a place before that relationship had even begun. So I spent a lot of time sitting alone. Listening, but not necessarily listening for sound. Looking, feeling, waiting. Trying to receive the place rather than deciding what it was.

This is what I call unbecoming.

We never arrive anywhere empty. We bring cultural conditioning, expectations, professional roles, sensory habits, knowledge, fears and assumptions about what deserves our attention. None of these are necessarily wrong. They are part of our own culture. But if I enter an encounter without being aware of them, I can easily mistake my perception of another for the other itself.

Unbecoming is an attempt to loosen these filters enough to make relationship possible.

One of the principles I brought into Echoes of the Ancient is that everything is a culture. Not only Finnish, Latvian, Portuguese or German culture. A forest is a culture. A tree is a culture. A rock is a culture. A human within a group of artists is a culture. Each has its own conditions, relations, rhythms, histories and ways of existing.

Echoes allowed me to take this proposition seriously in practice. If the forest and the rock are not metaphors for culture but participating cultures in their own right, then I also have to consider the conditions under which I approach them.

The question is no longer what I can learn about them.

The question becomes: how do we meet?

This changed listening for me. I call it listening through other bodies. I spent long periods alone with places and their elements and tried to connect with them without demanding that they communicate in a way I already understood. I tried to imagine what their stories could be if they had means of expressing themselves to us. I tried to receive.

Of course I cannot become a tree. I cannot know what a rock experiences. But I can notice the limits of my own sensory world. I can try to shift perspective. I can stop assuming that the human way of perceiving is the neutral position from which everything else should be understood.

We all inhabit different sensory worlds. This is true between species, but it is also true between humans. We hear differently, process differently, need different amounts of information, silence, movement, predictability or time. What feels liberating to one person can be overwhelming to another.

This became very visible within our own group.

During our time together, I noticed that some participants needed to know what would happen and when it would happen in order to relax. Others were perfectly comfortable with improvisation and chaos. Some people participated intensely in the activities. Others withdrew. When I stayed behind at times rather than joining the recordings, I had long conversations with people about what they needed, what they had expected and why they had sometimes chosen not to participate.

These conversations became as important to my research as my encounters with the places.

I began looking at what we were doing through another part of Relational Intelligence: curating emotional ecosystems.

An emotional ecosystem is not a mood or a vibe. It is the relational field created by everyone and everything that is present. What are the needs? What are the expectations? What is visible and what remains invisible? Who can participate easily? Who has to adapt? Who feels able to say, “This is too much for me,” without becoming a problem for everyone else?

Safe spaces do not simply happen because everybody has good intentions. Safety is a condition that needs to be architected. It signals who gets to belong.

This does not mean making everything comfortable or removing difficulty. During the discussion after my presentation, someone introduced the idea of courageous spaces. I loved that addition because courage needs somewhere to begin. If someone is already spending all their energy coping with the conditions around them, asking them to be courageous simply means asking them to endure more. But when people know that their needs have been heard, that they are allowed to be vulnerable and that the people around them will respond, there is ground from which they can take a risk.

Relationship needs conditions.

And those conditions are not exclusively human.

A forest has conditions. An animal has conditions. A rock has conditions. A human nervous system has conditions. A culture has conditions. An artificial intelligence has conditions. Genuine encounter begins with taking these differences seriously rather than assuming that everything should meet us on our terms.

This is also where accessibility became inseparable from the work for me. If we create a project around listening to natural environments, we have already made assumptions about the bodies that will participate. What happens to someone who does not hear in the same way? What happens if listening happens through the skin instead? What happens when sound becomes vibration?

My work with tactile sound grew from this question. But the technology is not the point. The point is the relationship. Sensory translation can create another possibility for meeting an experience without demanding that every body perceive it in the same way.

I call this interfacing the invisible.

So much of what determines a relationship is invisible. Sensory difference is invisible. Cultural conditioning is often invisible. Vulnerability can be invisible. History is invisible until someone tells you the story. Mythology can exist inside a landscape without announcing itself.

I heard stories during Echoes of the Ancient that changed the places for me. I learned about Latvian songs in which trees carry meanings that are not visible to someone arriving from another culture. In Finland I encountered mythology in which the separation between human and natural worlds felt much less obvious than the separation I had grown up with.

And then there were the places themselves.

Sometimes I wanted to spend an entire afternoon with one rock. I did not need to see ten things in a day. I needed enough time for all the noise I had brought with me to become quieter. Only then could I become receptive to whatever might happen in the relationship.

Maybe nothing happens.

That possibility has to be allowed as well.

A genuine relationship cannot have a predetermined outcome. Otherwise it is not an encounter. It is an assignment.

This is why I increasingly think about design for time. Not efficiency. Presence. We often design projects around how much can be produced, visited, recorded or achieved within a certain period. But relationship has its own temporality. Some things become accessible only after we stop trying to make them happen.

This was also where the ancient stories became strangely contemporary for me. We moved constantly between past, present and future. Mythology was not simply historical material. It was another way of understanding the relationships that were still around us. The forest was present now, but it had also been present long before us. The rocks had been there on a timescale that made our project almost disappear.

I began to wonder whether what I was describing as making space for new perception was actually new at all.

Maybe it is an old perception that we need to remember.

The idea that humans exist outside nature is a very particular way of organising reality. Sitting in these places, it became increasingly difficult for me to maintain that separation. We breathe what plants produce. We live through microorganisms. Our bodies are ecosystems. The air does not recognize the border between me and the forest.

Your care is your air.

For me this became another part of Relational Intelligence. We cannot care for something deeply while continuously positioning it as external to ourselves. Nature is not backdrop. It is not the scenery around the human story. It participates.

And participation changes responsibility.

If I understand the rock, the forest, another human, another culture or another intelligence as a participant rather than an object of my experience, I have to ask different questions. What am I bringing into this relationship? What conditions am I creating? What am I assuming? What might the other need in order to be present? What do I need? Where are those needs compatible, and where are they not?

Not every need can always be met. That became another important learning within the project and in the conversations afterwards. Sometimes needs contradict each other. One person needs silence while another regulates themselves through sound. One person needs structure while another feels restricted by it. Inclusion cannot mean pretending these differences disappear.

It means relating to them.

Sometimes that means changing the environment. Sometimes it means giving people different amounts of time. Sometimes it means creating different groups or different ways of participating. The aim is not to make everybody the same. The aim is to create conditions in which difference does not automatically mean exclusion.

Since Echoes of the Ancient I have continued to apply Relational Intelligence in other contexts, and the methodology keeps expanding. One of the newer elements came through a project concerned with humor across cultures.

At first, humor might seem far away from sitting silently with a rock. For me it is not.

A joke is an incredibly compressed cultural object. It can contain history, class, language, trauma, taboo, stereotypes, collective memory and assumptions about what everybody supposedly knows. When a joke travels successfully across a cultural border, two worlds briefly share enough context for something to resonate. When it does not, the gap becomes visible.

Both are interesting.

Humor therefore became another way of mapping relationship. Not “How can we all laugh at the same thing?” but: what needs to be understood about each other’s worlds for us to laugh together rather than at each other? What is invisible inside the joke? Who is carrying the risk? Who gets to belong to the laughter?

Again, the question is about conditions.

This is what Echoes of the Ancient ultimately clarified for me. Relational Intelligence is not about finding a universal language that makes all differences disappear. It is not about agreement. And it is not about imagining that we can fully understand another intelligence.

It is about taking the relationship seriously enough to create the conditions for genuine encounter.

Sometimes that encounter is between people from different countries. Sometimes between different nervous systems. Sometimes between a hearing body and a sound it cannot hear. Sometimes between a human and an artificial intelligence. Sometimes between a person and a forest.

And sometimes it is simply sitting with a rock for an afternoon without needing it to become anything else.

We are all sharing this world through radically different ways of perceiving it. Microbes, plants, animals, humans and all the other organisms around us inhabit sensory realities shaped by their own environments. We can describe these scientifically, but there is also value in allowing playfulness, ritual, mythology and magic back into the relationship.

Not because we need to abandon knowledge. Because knowledge is not the same as encounter.

For me, the most interesting outcome is therefore not resolution. It is not even understanding. It is making space for a perception that could not exist before we met.

Methodologies

Unbecoming is where we begin. Before any genuine encounter is possible, something has to be shed. Conditioning, bias, perceptual filters, the roles we have been assigned or assumed. This is the foundational process that precedes every genuine encounter.

Everything is a culture. Human, natural, artificial, indigenous, scientific. Each intelligence has its own needs, its own logic, its own way of knowing. Identity mapping is a crucial anchor for a healthy environment.

Curating emotional ecosystems. Evaluating spaces where these cultures can genuinely meet and experience each other. Where something new becomes possible between them.

Safe spaces signal who gets to belong. Safety is not a feeling to be encouraged but a condition to be architected. Who gets to belong is a design decision. Embedding safety nurtures trust.

Listening through other bodies. Sensory design and multi-sensory literacy create encounters that land in the body and promote inclusion.

Interfacing the invisible. From sub-frequency compositions felt through the skin, to human voices bounced off the surface of the moon, to sensory bridges between dolphin communication and human experience. Making the imperceptible felt.Your care is your air. Bringing the wisdom of invisible worlds to humans so they can feel itas part of their life, even when they are not close to it. Nature and more-than-human intelligences are not backdrop. They are living partners in the exchange.

Design for time. Not efficiency. Presence. Regenerative environments that give people quality lifetime back while the work and the experience happens.

Prompting is a relational act. Whether the partner is human, artificial, or natural. The quality of contact depends on the quality of invitation.

Make space for new perception. The outcome. Not agreement. Not resolution. A genuine expansion of what becomes possible when intelligences finally meet.

MPATHY STUDIO / Relational Intelligence

Relational Intelligence is a transdisciplinary practice at the intersection of immersive media, systems thinking, and relational design. It explores how connection, perception, and meaning are shaped when human, more-than-human, and artificial intelligences meet. Developed through immersive installations, research-led workshops, sensory environments, and collaborative systems design processes across cultural, institutional, and ecological contexts.

Martine-Nicole Rojina architects Relational Intelligence. A transdisciplinary artist, immersive technologist, diversity and accessibility researcher, educator and adviser for European institutions, she designs and facilitates the conditions where genuine connection across difference becomes possible: between cultures, species, and intelligences. Her work spans marginalised communities, eco-centered frameworks, and creative multinational collaborations. She is based in Mauritius, working internationally.