Oscar Salguero

I’m thrilled to announce that my newest curatorial project, Journal of Therolinguistics, at Descanso Gardens (@descansogardens ) opens to the public this Saturday. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and other Extracts from The Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, the exhibition explores interspecies communication within tree ecologies, focusing on plants, lichen, beavers, birds, bats, beetles, and more. Featuring works by Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė (@aiste_ambrazeviciute ), Alice Bucknell (@alicebucknell ), Lucio Arese (@lucioarese ), Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (@marianne.hoffmeister ), Nicole Brugger (@nclbrggr ), as well as new commissions by Paige Emery (@paigeemery_ ) and Audax M. Gawler (@audax__audax ) & Pri Bertucci (@pribertucci_o_profeta_queer ) If you’re in LA, please join us for the opening reception this Friday, March 20, from 5–7pm at the Boddy House at Descanso Gardens! More details coming up! Graphics by Darius Ou @darius_ou

Introducing Decentral Intelligence Agency [DIA] Developed since January, it was originally meant to be the title of my exhibition “Decentering Strategies: Books as Portals to More-than-human Worlds” at Design Center Gallery, Pratt Institute (Feb 26 - Mar 8, 2024). Decentral Intelligence Agency stands for: Decentering Strategies [de-anthropocentrism] Intelligences Beyond the Human [plurality of umwelten] Agency of Organisms and Objects [vibrant matter] DIA is not an agency, but a platform for agential realism. [DI / DA / IA] This concept will manifest as printed matter and activations. It was first published in FABS (Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies) Spring 2024 edition, as a chapter in my essay “Notes from Interspecies Library”. Currently, it is being featured as a column for Thriving Planet, one of the themes of the Changing Gears program by 4TU.Design United, the research center for design at TU Delft. Thanks @egekokel for the invitation. I will present some original prints at @singaporeartbookfair this October! Logo design in collaboration with the brilliant Darius Ou @darius_ou and inspired by Physarum polycephalum. Slides 3-4: Process from CIA to DIA

A Therolinguistics Manifesto or How to Approach Nonhuman Languages Poetically By Interspecies Library @interspecieslibrary 2023 Graphic design by @darius_ou #therolinguistics

It was an immense pleasure to meet Theo Downes-Le Guin, son of Ursula K. Le Guin, this past Friday for a private tour of my show Journal of Therolinguistics at Descanso Gardens! The exhibition was inspired by Ursula’s short story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds.” Theo, who is also the literary executor of his mother’s works and leads the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation (@ursulakleguin ), was very moved by the way in which Ursula’s therolinguistics concept continues to resonate amongst artists, inspiring them to push our understanding of language as a phenomenon that manifests in fascinating ways in nature. Theo is receptive of working with artists and new generations that honor and continue to relate to the stories imagined by his mother. Thank you @descansogardens for facilitating this meeting! And to @sydneyhanish for the photos! If you’d like to see the show, it is running until July 5!

Posthuman Press is proud to present a Therolinguistics Workshop co-organised by B. (Posthuman Press), Maria Paula del Portillo-Cure (@revistamicelio ), Oscar Salguero (@interspecieslibrary ) and Audax M. Gawler (@transecologyclub ). Drawing on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, therolinguistics is a speculative artistic practice that attempts to translate nonhuman language, perception, movement and traces, etc. If you've ever wondered what nonhuman literature might look like, or are wanting to discover new methods to incorporate into your own art that considers other-than-human kin and their ontologies and perspectives, or have simply grown tired of the same anthropocentric narratives we're constantly being fed, then this workshop is for you. The session will take place online on Saturday 2nd of May, 2026 @ 4pm CEST (Poland) / 10am EDT (New York) / 9am COT (Colombia), 11am BRT (Brazil). The workshop will take place in English, though, two of us can give extra nuance in Spanish to those joining from e.g. Latin America if something isn't quite clear. Standard tickets are $20AUD or $5AUD for those located in the global south or who are First Nations. We've tried to keep prices as cheaply as possible to provide access to this workshop for those interested in submitting to our Therolinguistics call-out that ends on June 30, but a few sponsorships are also available should you need it. Please contact us if that is the case. Tickets are available from Humanitix at link in bio: /therolinguistics-workshop Special thanks to @audax__audax and @pribertucci_o_profeta_queer for the background artwork, and @b.leideritz for the design. . . #therolinguistics #ursulaleguin #posthumanism #posthumanpress

Today we highlight the panel Representing Multispecies Worlds. This in-person conversation brings together scholars and artists examining how multispecies relations are represented across media, theory, and contemporary art practice, questioning how we make sense of more-than-human worlds through language, image, and form. Moderated by Jane Pirone (Parsons), the panel features: Dominic Pettman (The New School) with Vox Mundi: Straining to Make Sense of the Ecological Voice; Oscar Salguero (Interspecies Library) with Interspecies Library: Matter of Kinship; Abigail Perez Aguilera (Parsons) on multispecies relations within climate pluriverses; and James Trybendis (The New School) on multispecies grief and aesthetic engagement. Together, these talks explore representation as an active process, shaping how multispecies relations are understood, imagined, and communicated across disciplines. Location: Hirshon Suite How do we represent worlds that extend beyond the human, and what remains untranslatable? 🌍

“The Call of the Wild at Descanso Gardens.” Many thanks to Local News Pasadena for their recent review of Journal of Therolinguistics. “Readers of scifi, speculative fiction and fantasy will recognize Ursula K. Le Guin’s name as a groundbreaking novelist in those genres, on a par with Pasadena’s own Octavia E. Butler. Le Guin coined the buzzword therolinguistics in her 1974 short story The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics.” It’s especially meaningful to situate this project within a broader thread of imaginative practices shaped by Le Guin’s influence, highlighted in the article through special contributions of conceptual artist Rodney McMillian, who draws on Le Guin’s nonbinary concept of “kemmering” in “Portal: A State of Kemmering in the Council Era of Corrosion;” and writer Isaac Yuen, author of “The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination” and “Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-Than-Human World.” I love Isaac’s reflections on therolinguistics here: “That’s really at the heart of therolinguistics, I think, to task us to break out and imagine a world where we have normalized communications within the more-than-human world as something on equal standing as our human one. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a future where we get to nerd out on the nuances of penguin poetry and ant speech? Or even better, to live in a time where there is still work to do in deciphering the tongues of lichen and rocks and planets, to seek to understand these experiences of the Other while acknowledging that communication is always set within context, that there will always be something lost in translation, that this is nevertheless a mysterious, awe-inspiring, and very worthwhile venture?” Read more at the link in my bio

Walkthrough of the exhibition Journal of Therolinguistics at Descanso Gardens. The show is conceived as a spiritual sequence to a 1974 short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, which imagined a group of future researchers exploring the languages of nonhumans, in the case of this show: plants, beavers, bats, beetles, birds, lichen and more. The Boddy House, Descanso Gardens’ historical building, is treated as a fictional “therolinguistics” research center. Come check out the works of Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė (@aiste_ambrazeviciute ), Alice Bucknell (@alicebucknell ), Audax M. Gawler (@audax__audax ) & Pri Bertucci (@pribertucci_o_profeta_queer ), Lucio Arese (@lucioarese ), Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (@marianne.hoffmeister ), Nicole Brugger (@nclbrggr ), and Paige Emery (@paigeemery_ ). Graphic design by Studio Darius Ou @darius_ou Copy editing by Gwen Freudenheim @gwen.freudenheim Installation by @chrismhood and @rubenvincentstudio Space design by Bénédicte Thoraval @benedicte.thoraval The show is running until July 5, 2026! Exhibition title used with permission of the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust

Journal of Therolinguistics is now live at @descansogardens This spring, the Boddy House at Descanso Gardens transforms into a living research center exploring the concept of non-human languages in nature through works by eight international artists. Curated by Oscar Salguero, the exhibition Journal of Therolinguistics explores communication across species as acts of ecological kinship and fascination. The exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in the expressive worlds of plants and animals. Experience birdsong as multicolor landscapes, deep listening sessions with plants, lichen bodies as ancient grammar, the worldbuilding narratives of beavers, bat and flower pollination role-play, and hidden messages carried in Amazonian trees or beetle-carved branches from Swiss forests. Therolinguistics, a term coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1974, refers to a fictional field focused on understanding languages beyond the human. Le Guin’s provocation remains urgent: rather than approaching communication in other species through human rules and limitations, the exhibition asks what it means to listen, learn, and encounter their worlds on their own terms. Journal of Therolinguistics features international artists Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė (@aiste_ambrazeviciute ), Alice Bucknell (@alicebucknell ), Audax M. Gawler (@audax__audax ) & Pri Bertucci (@pribertucci_o_profeta_queer ), Lucio Arese (@lucioarese ), Marianne Hoffmeister Castro (@marianne.hoffmeister ), Nicole Brugger (@nclbrggr ), and Paige Emery (@paigeemery_ ). Together, their research explores the moving messages that plants and animals leave for us and how human actions affect their worlds. The exhibition and its programs are generously funded, in part, by Perenchio Foundation and an endowment from Heather Sturt Haaga and Paul G. Haaga, Jr. The title of the exhibition is used with the kind permission of the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust. The exhibition is open at the Boddy House from March 21–July 5, 2026, 10am–4pm daily. Entry to the Boddy House is included in the price of admission or membership. Graphic design by @darius_ou

For our December issue, guest edited by @yeehawcheeseburger , @michellesantiagocortes visited @softcoreny for a look inside the @interspecieslibrary . More at dirt.fyi! 📚🧜‍♀️🪴

Throwback to Symbiofutures (September 25, 2025) , an event for Climate Week organized by @queerbrownvegan & @nowadaysonearth , and hosted at @farm.one . Always fun to collaborate with Isaias and Kalpana, on this occasion as tabling partner along with @takaomakesthings and @futuregenerationstribunal . Follow @symbi0cene to learn more about their projects and future events. Photography: @xjuliiale

Tonight! Please join XE Faculty Mustafa Saifuddin for the final installment of Interspecies Encounters events for the fall 2025 semester. Oscar Salguero, founder of Interspecies Library, will offer a guest talk and lead us through a browsing session featuring highlights from an archive dedicated to the curation and advancement of artistsʼ books focused on alternative interspecies futures. Open to all NYU students. RSVP Required Thanks @mstfa.s and @nyu.xe for the invitation!