Portfolio

Table of Contents:

  • Bio

  • CV

  • Courses

    • Sense/Make

    • Collectively Crafting Mythology

    • The Interspecies Artist’s Way

  • Talks + Panels

    • Cultivating Symbiocracy

    • Interspecies Collaboration

  • Films

    • Confluence

    • Lucid

Shanhuan Manton is a filmmaker and ecological artist exploring methods of collective storytelling to realize the worlds of mutual flourishing we desire. Through experimental facilitation and pedagogy, narrative alchemy and cinematic ritual, they seek to bring beings of all species into meaningful collaborations to make, maintain, and remake deep time relationships of nourishment and thriving. Their work includes co-founding and managing operations at the Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation, co-stewarding LIOS Labs School of Ecological Imagination, developing and teaching "The Interspecies Artist's Way", "Collective Mythmaking: Tools for Navigating Polycrisis" and "Deceptive Pattern Defense Lab" at gatherings including New Moon Mycology Summit, School of the Alternative, DeepMay, and School of Making Thinking. Their genre-fluid films that have screened at festivals worldwide including Busan International Short Film Festival, SFIndies, and NFMLA. You will often find them gathering people in contemplative conversation around a roaming gongfu tea service, a practice they have cultivated for more than a decade - serving tea on busy street corners, contaminated sites, deep in the woods, and soon, hopefully, somewhere meaningful with you.

Courses, Workshops, & Social Practice

My experiments in alternative pedagogy, collective inquiry, interspecies and ecological attunement.

Sense/Make: Microbes and Monsters for Healing

  • Shanhuan in front of a slideshow depicting various large scale puppets.

    Hosted by Fathomers and Centre for Applied Ecological Remediation. An exploration technologies for cultural healing including collective storytelling, mythology, and creating monster narratives. Starting with reflection on how our relationships and ways of living have brought about pollution crises and embedded intergenerational traumas in the soil we depend on for life, we discussed the role of myth and story in these crises, and as potential wayfinding tools to navigate through them.

  • Through found-object assemblage, we collectively created a sculptural manifestation of the monsters we face—and then perform a fungal inoculation to transform and biodegrade these monsters, assuaging them with acts of care.

  • The collective monster sculpture takes form.

  • We fed a bag of waste from the building to the monster beseeching it to help transform our waste streams in an act of healing. Here, the fungi we inoculated the waste with, a native strain of Ganoderma Polychromum, has begun to mushroom.

Collectively Crafting Mythology: Tools for Navigating Polycrises and Summoning Desirable Worlds

Presented at School of the Alternative, 2025

Though the world may seem ever closer to catastrophe, long traditions of resistance and the vitality of the living world are proof of our inherent capacity for making worlds amidst and despite collapse. We are blessed with an abundant inheritance of ancestral technologies and novel paradigms for navigating the polycrisis and continuing to build the worlds of our desires despite supposed apocalypse. In this gathering space, we will explore processes for collaboratively crafting myth as a method for grounding our worldmaking processes in deeptime. We'll collectively generate mythical beings that reflect our worlds, ecologies, and entangled hirstories, then situate them in stories wrought from intuitive processes — resulting in narratives that serve as both question and compass for uncertain and precarious moments. Through nonlinear strategies incorporating practices of divination, collective storytelling games and dream work, we'll explore playful methods for making overwhelming forces confrontable so that they might be dismantled and composted. Let us immerse ourselves in troubling questions, linking our constellations of story in the obscure and thick soil of our entanglements to nourish the roots and spores of our collective might.

The Interspecies Artist’s Way

Interspecies Inquiries

A zine made by students in the School of Making Thinking Spring 2024 cohort of the Interspecies Artist’s Way

Ecosystem Mapping Workshop

Hosted virtually for Chimera's Collective. Click image to view interactive archive

Cultivating Symbiocracy

Presented at Riga RIXC, 2024 - Symbiotic Sense(s)

Interspecies Collaboration Frameworks

Films

Confluence

A meditation on diasporic identity in collaboration with AAPI musicians - an experiment in collective voice storytelling.

Lucid

A protest against the extractive industrialization of dream space. A rumination on heartbreak.