Over the last couple of years, I have been developing the idea of entanglement as part of a book I am currently writing, appropriately called Entanglement. The book develops entanglement as a mechanistic concept for understanding complexity and draws heavily on my visual arts practice as a way of exploring and explaining what entanglement is, how it works and what it looks like.
As I have started using the concept more widely in my scientific and artistic work, and lecturing and presenting on it internationally, people have increasingly asked me if there is something they can read, share and cite. The book is still being written, but my recent public lecture at Nelson Mandela University gave me an opportunity to bring many of these ideas together and work through them in a more developed form. So, rather than wait for the book, I decided to write up the lecture as a first introduction to some of the central ideas.
CLICK HERE FOR A PDF OF THE PROCEEDINGS AND CITE AS FOLLOWS:
Castellani, B. (2026). Entangled: How might we reshape our entanglement with theenvironment? ISCIA Public Lecture Proceedings, Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa, 16 September 2026.
I want to begin by thanking Professor Andrea Hurst, Harsheila Riga and Professor Pamela Maseko, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, for the opportunity to give the ISCIA Public Lecture at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa, on 16 September 2026. The lecture was hosted through the SARChI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa (ISCIA), led by Andrea, and forms part of a much wider collaboration I have developed with colleagues at Nelson Mandela University over the last several years. In terms of Durham University, where I work, I also want to thank the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing and the Durham Research Methods Centre, for supporting my work and for Jonathan Wistow for traveling with me on this trip.
So, what do I mean by entanglement?
Entanglement is the process through which things become interconnected and interdependent through repeated interweaving over time. The important point is that entanglement is not simply another way of saying that everything is connected. Things can interact without becoming deeply entangled. Entanglement develops when repeated interactions progressively bind elements together such that they cannot simply be separated or extracted without consequences for the wider configuration. As an entanglement develops, it can also widen across other elements, domains and scales, while deepening as those elements become increasingly embedded in and dependent upon one another.
For complexity science, this provides one material explanation for how some forms of emergence occur: repeated interactions can become sufficiently entangled that a new level of organisation develops with properties, capacities and constraints that cannot be reduced to the individual elements. Entanglement also helps distinguish emergence from self-organisation. Self-organisation concerns the development of patterns or order through interaction without central control; entanglement concerns how repeated interactions become interwoven, persistent and difficult to disentangle. Importantly, entanglements can emerge through bottom-up self-organisation, but they can also be deliberately engineered, governed, institutionally maintained or strategically reinforced. Most real-world social systems involve combinations of these processes.
The Proceedings
‘Entangled: How might we reshape our entanglement with the environment?’
So, what is in the proceedings? Rather than give too much away here, the lecture takes the idea of entanglement and puts it to work on environmental health, urban sustainability and just transitions. It asks why some of our most serious environmental problems remain so difficult to change, even when we know a great deal about what needs to be done.
Along the way, I move from fungal mycelium and marine debris to smartphones, coal and South Africa’s just transition to explore how entanglements form, widen, deepen and persist. I look at their relationship to emergence and self-organisation, why some entanglements become resilient or locked in, and how affordances, perception, imagination and creativity can open up possibilities for doing things differently. Visual complexity and my own artwork run throughout, including my speculative moving-image work When the Tangles Arrived.
The second half turns the question around: if we become entangled, how do we become entangled differently? I develop the idea of dis(re)entanglement — Loosen → Reimagine → Redirect → Reweave — and use examples from South Africa to explore what changing established environmental and social entanglements might actually involve.
I will leave the rest for the proceedings. If you are interested in complexity, environmental health, just transitions, or simply why some things become so difficult to change, have a read.
CLICK HERE FOR A COPY OF THE PROCEEDINGS
The proceedings can be cited as:
Castellani, B. (2026). Entangled: How might we reshape our entanglement with theenvironment? ISCIA Public Lecture Proceedings, Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa, 16 September 2026.
