Ro Heinrich

Ro Heinrich

ro heinrich is an artist-researcher working with grammars of relationality through spoken and unspoken languages. Through (recorded) conversations and collaborations, their practice is multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on film and book making. Her work stages the refusal to separate the human (always already more-than) and nonhuman, world and body. She explores our critical landscapes at the fertile edges of neurodiversity, process philosophy, black study and artistic research, addressing our present predicament at the end of the world as we know it.

ro is beginning a PhD in artistic research with Erin Manning, at Concordia (Montreal), with Sher Doruff and Shira Avni as co-supervisors. They participate in the 3Ecologies Project and several engaged study groups. Their research project we always need heroes¶—on the crises of capitalism, nationalism and patriarchal storytelling—included a 46-minute film work and an award-winning artist book, published with Fw:Books.

Current Research

The Being of Relation, current work-in-process (2025)

ro’s research moves with questions towards how a paraontological filmmaking practice—a practice emerging through autistic perception that refuses ontology as a given—might contribute to resistance to the present. Within the wider conceptual landscape of process philosophy, paraontology is one of the key concepts she studies towards (cinematic) practices not grounded in identity and not bound by Being.

The Being of Relation, current work-in-process, featuring the voice of Erin Manning thinking with friends, titled after Erin's forthcoming book

Prior research

we always need heroes¶ (2015–2020)

The multidisciplinary research project we always need heroes¶ (2015–2020) navigates a complex of perspectives relating to Iceland’s “Crash” of 2008. The country was hit hard and fast; but rather than purely economic, the Crash was also the collapse of a collective narrative and myth: a Cultural Crash, as it is locally known.

This research project is composed from over 100 hours of recorded conversations with twenty-one Icelandic interlocutors, including political scientists, philosophers, historians, fish farmers, bank clerks, volcanologists, theologians, social researchers, activists and artists.

From this material I produced new articulations in different media: we always need heroes¶ comprises a 46-minute single-screen film (2020), an award-winning artist book (published with Fw:Books: 2018), a multichannel video installation (2017), a choral work called Rational Inattention (2015–2018), and photo works, light boxes and wall pieces.

Each component plays with language and narrative to readdress the notion of landscape—natural, national and political. By speculating on the politics of perception and selective self-storytelling, we always need heroes¶ imagines a shift in the ways we listen to, generate and perceive our narratives.

we always need heroes¶ (2020) film taster (click here for full film: 46 minutes)

we always need heroes¶ (2020) film taster (click here for full film: 46 minutes)