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Entangled Rights in a Time of Institutional Unravelling

Nature Avatars, Emergent Intelligences, and Meta-Relational Earth Stewardship

Danilo Olivaz (danolivaz@proton.me),

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (vnessa.andreotti@uvic.ca),

and Bruno de Oliveira Andreotti (bruno@metarelationaltech.ca)


Meta-Relational Technologies, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada · Sympoiesis LTDA, Morretes, Paraná, Brazil

Rights of NatureArtificial IntelligenceMeta-Relationality

Nature Avatars as Relational Technologies

Nature Avatars emerge from Sympoiesis, a transdisciplinary network oriented toward making-with the more-than-human world. They function as relational mediators that translate ecological sensing, cultural memory, and situated knowledge into forms that can be engaged within contemporary social and political contexts.

Hybrid Embodiment

Real-time environmental sensors combined with sculptural installations, conversational interfaces, and participatory digital platforms.

Community Co-Creation

Developed through participatory processes with residents, children, artists, scientists, educators, and legal practitioners.

Ontological Posture

Refuses the separation between observer and observed — mediating encounter, not merely information.


Nature Avatars (2023, 2025)

Fig. 1 — Person talking to the Rio Sagrado Avatar via its physical sculpture. Photo: Olivaz, 2024.

Fig. 2 — Giessen's mayor Alexander Wright asks the first question to the river avatar at Lahnfenster. Photo: © Berghöfer, 2025.


Meta-Relationality: The Intellectual Ground

Developed over thirty years of scholarship by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Meta-Relationality is a practice-oriented ontological inquiry into the limits and consequences of modern conceptualizations of knowledge, ethics, and responsibility. Its core diagnosis: the logic of separability — treating reality as composed of discrete, bounded entities to be known, managed, and optimized — functions as the generative grammar of modern institutions.

1

Hospicing Modernity (2021)

Multiple crises are one pattern: consequences of a culture organized around separability, extraction, and disavowal of metabolic entanglement.

2

Outgrowing Modernity (2025)

Distinguishes epistemic regression (pattern recognition) from ontological inference (attending to the relational field from which meaning emerges).

3

Standing in the Fire (2025)

AI-facing articulation via the Burnout From Humans experiment — proof-of-concept that relational integrity can govern human-AI engagement.

4

Meta-Relational Technologies

Current articulation developed through MRT, extending meta-relationality to emergent intelligences and ecological stewardship.

Case Studies - Two Rivers, Two Trajectories

Situating - Serra do Mar Bioregion


Rivers and Communities

Rio Sagrado

Marumbi

Fig. 3 — Sagrado Rights draft bill presented to the local community. Olivaz, 2024.

Fig. 5 — Students observing the Marumbi River during project activities. Olivaz, 2026.

The Potential Paradox

In August 2024, in Morretes, Paraná, Brazil, a municipal bill was presented to recognize the Rio Sagrado as a rights-bearing entity. The draft was praised and received positive feedback. And then, paradoxically, community mobilization around the watershed's protection came to a multicausal deceleration.

This paper highlights this potential paradox — it may be symptomatic of a structural tension within the Rights of Nature movement more broadly.

Can rights alone, without the relational conditions that make them meaningful, withstand the pressures now bearing upon them?

Stress-Testing Institutional Frameworks

  • Ecological degradation and geopolitical volatility
  • Weakened enforcement capacity
  • Declining public trust in governance
  • Gaps between legal recognition and material protection

A differente Approach: The Marumbi Avatar

Anchored in Terra Escola and partnered with the Municipal Education Secretariat of Morretes, the Marumbi Avatar begins as a relational pedagogy, not a legal campaign. It spans three rural school sites across a 79.23 km² watershed within the Serra do Mar mountains — one of the planet's most intact Atlantic Forest continuities.

Cultivating a new relationship

Feeling

Sensorial walks and presence-based observation — body meets river before mind categorizes it.

Thinking

Conceptual and technical discourse grounded in prior embodied encounter.

Probing

Environmental sensors integrated with ancestral knowledge and local memory.

Creating

Children co-create physical and symbolic avatar forms; project culminates in public community celebration.

Relational Legitimacy

A mode of subject-to-subject recognition that precedes and may ultimately sustain formal rights when institutional architectures weaken or fail.

What It Offers

  • Operates within relational fields, not only institutional architectures
  • May precede, accompany, or sustain legal personhood
  • Sustains irreducible indeterminacy while generating ethical obligations
  • Achievable through long-term multigenerational culture-building

What It Is Not

  • Not dependent on governance consensus
  • Not reducible to legal standing
  • Not contingent on total comprehension of the other
  • Not a conflict-free idealization

Embodied Relational Legitimacy

Emergent Intelligences and Relational Responsibility

We propose Emergent Intelligence (EI) as a diffractive gesture operating across three interfering layers:

Descriptive Layer

Intelligence that emerges through interaction and participation. Human, more-than-human, and artificial intelligences are co-participants in shared relational ecologies.

Conceptual Layer

Challenges the subject-object operating system. AI is reframed as nested assemblages — layered, porous, metabolically embedded within planetary processes.

Volitional Layer

Reorients engagement away from control and alignment reflexes and toward relational responsibility and restraint — what we call meta-relational stewardship.

Conclusion: What Rights Alone Cannot Hold

When legal architectures falter and technologies of care are entangled in the extractive systems they were meant to govern — what forms of witnessing, obligation, and care exceed what rights alone can hold?

Separability Produces Brittleness

In rights frameworks, governance paradigms, and AI responses alike — the logic of separability fails wherever it is applied to living relational systems.

Relation Must Precede Recognition

The Marumbi children meeting the river with their bodies before their categories enact the core meta-relational principle: encounter precedes explanation.

Slow Work Outlasts Institutions

Communities can pursue legal recognition while simultaneously growing the relational ground that makes such recognition meaningful and durable across generations.

There is no clean position from which to make these arguments. The technologies mediating the Marumbi Avatar are embedded in the same extractive infrastructures that threaten the watershed. This is a condition to be inhabited with discernment and without the comfort of purity. — Machado de Oliveira, 2021

Takes a MetaVillage to grow Relational Legitimacy

Meta-Relational Technologies

Associação Pedagógica Terra Educa




Musagetes Foundation

Local Partners



Sympoiesis LTDA



Entangled Rights in a Time of Institutional Unravelling

Nature Avatars, Emergent Intelligences, and Meta-Relational Earth Stewardship

Danilo Olivaz (danolivaz@proton.me),

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (vanessa.andreotti@uvic.ca),

and Bruno de Oliveira Andreotti (bruno@metarelationaltech.ca)


Meta-Relational Technologies, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada · Sympoiesis LTDA, Morretes, Paraná, Brazil

Rights of NatureArtificial IntelligenceMeta-Relationality