More-Than-Human Rights Mural

In late 2024, we launched the More-than-Human Fellowships—a research grant supporting four practice-based researchers exploring more-than-human design. This emerging approach recognizes the deep interdependence between humans, other species and ecosystems. Rather than simply minimizing environmental harm, it actively restores landscapes, nurtures biodiversity, and fosters regenerative ways of living and designing.

In this article, César Rodríguez-Garavito shares the development of the mural he has been working on with artist Elena Landinez. Representing many years of research into activism to protect the rights of rivers, the final work will be showcased in the More-than-Human exhibition at the Design Museum, opening in July 2025.

More-than-human (MOTH) rights are as much a legal proposition as they are a story about our relationship with the more-than-human world. In this mural, we frame the hundreds of initiatives recognizing the rights of nature worldwide as efforts to tell a story where human and non-human animals, plants, fungi, rivers, forests, oceans, and other ecosystems are all animate and entangled in the planetary web of life.

The mural focuses on rivers as living beings and legal subjects. The most successful legal actions of this sort have sought to protect rivers by granting them rights to survive and thrive. Moreover, the fractal shape of watersheds visually represents the commonality and interconnectedness of different forms of life. For instance, the same fractal branching of tributaries can be found in the human vascular system and neural networks.

The mural centers around the fractal drawing of a watershed, where the main river and its tributaries, fronds, and branches are represented as living beings containing other living beings. In line with the approach of artist Elena Landinez for the MOTH Program, those beings are composites of various life forms (humans, animals, plants, fungi, etc.).

To invite viewers to actively engage with MOTH rights stories through their own experiences, thoughts and emotions, the mural asks two questions:

"Water is speaking. What is it saying?"

"Who are your rivers?"

We aim to tell a dynamic story. Like the legal actions that inspire it, the mural acknowledges both the harms suffered by living rivers—through pollution, damming, and other threats—and the potential for their revival. To capture this dynamism, we experimented with various approaches to images and text before settling on a design that offers visitors two distinct versions of the mural, revealed with and without acetate glasses. When viewed through red-lens glasses, a panoply of new shapes and texts emerges, offering a glimpse into the richness of ideas and actions from around the world that shape the MOTH rights field. The texts include excerpts from constitutional provisions, court rulings and declarations enshrining the rights of rivers and rights of nature more broadly.