Centre for Venetian History and Cultural Heritage will host an international symposium on nature, ecology, and philosophy.

The international symposium Elemental Pathways Through Nature: Beyond Anthropocentrism and Ecocentrism will take place at the Centre for Venetian History and Cultural Heritage of ZRS Koper on 15 and 16 June 2026.

The symposium will be dedicated to contemporary reflections on the relationship between humans and nature, as well as to the search for new ways of understanding the environment beyond traditional anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches.

The event will be opened on behalf of ZRS Koper by Dr Lenart Škof, Head of the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at ZRS Koper, together with his colleague Dr Pier Francesco Corvino. The first day of the symposium will be divided into a morning session on elemental theology and an afternoon session on elemental philosophy. The keynote lecture will be delivered by the renowned ecologist and philosopher Dr David Abram of the University of Oxford, who will present the topic On the Spherical Shape of Time.

The second day of the symposium will focus on environmental imagination and elemental wisdom. Among the speakers will also be Dr Maja Bjelica and Dr Petri Berndtson, collaborators of the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at ZRS Koper. Their announced lecture is entitled Experiencing the Elements: Salt-working as Environmental Wisdom.

A special artistic lecture will be delivered by Marko Pogačnik on the theme Intelligence of Nature and its Elemental Beings.

The symposium is organised by ZRS Koper with the support of the European Union’s Horizon programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – ERA Fellowship Grant No. 101244237  and Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) Grants P6-0279 and J7-70269.

The THuNB project – Temperamental roots of the human-Nature bond (HORIZON-WIDERA-2024-TALENTS-02 – project no. 101244237) is funded by the European Union.