Wandering in a forest somewhere upstate, yellowing leaves dropping from silver birches overhead. It’s been a while since the seasons reversed: sunburnt sweating in the winter cold, shivering at the beach on the summer solstice – a weirded climate normalised, weather management systems downplaying the slow apocalypse into a non-issue. Losing yourself in thought, your attention suddenly snaps back to a nearby shimmer. Looking out under a sycamore, there you see them: a cluster of clavicles, rib cages, femurs, vertebrae, flourishing with mushroom colonies enmeshed, bright white overlaid with holographic green. It’s impossible to tell where bone ends and fungus begins; in this network of more-than-human life, a chimera is born.

In her multi-headed practice, which sees projects spanning over a decade, Saya Woolfalk uses tactics of speculative fiction and multispecies hybridity to complicate boundaries between humans and plants, fantasy and reality, utopia and dystopia. Collaboration is a core component of her work, and this porosity folds in a host of research methods from anthropology and biology, to choreography and filmmaking. Built across painting, sculpture, video, installation, mural, and performance, Woolfalk’s worlds are generative systems for prototyping transformation – they embrace social, political, and ecological entanglements – and as a result, they feel simultaneously futuristic and otherworldly, but also incredibly close to the world we already inhabit.

Since 2009, Woolfalk has worked on The Empathics, a multilayered project of worldbuilding that spans a fictional social system, spirituality, corporation and research institute run by the Empathics, who are a fictional race of women who can alter their generic makeup and merge with plants. They can grow extra spines, legs, heads; their skins are made from lace, butterflies, pearls, and animal symbols. In this ecofeminist folktale, the superpower of hybridity emerged by uncovering chimeric bones, remnants of an ancient plant-human hybrid species lost to time, that triggered a metamorphosis into the Empathics’ current state.

“With each project,” suggests Woolfalk, “I want a person to experience something that simultaneously makes them slightly uncomfortable about the potential of the world that I have created, but also gives them an excitement about a harmonious, multi-cultural society.”

Working from a wide pool of sources, The Empathics fuses artefacts and rituals spanning space and time: from spiritual practices in Brazil, to Native American baskets, Tantric paintings, masks made in the Sande Society in Sierra Leone, and Japanese textiles. In Woolfalk’s haptic world, these multicultural influences are woven together with western temples of consumer culture, perhaps best epitomised by shopping malls and Times Square billboards. ChimaTEK, a later phase in The Empathics project, sees the fictional society’s nonprofit Institute of Empathy morph into marketable commodities.

Woolfalk worlds in a space that considers the various social and political thresholds of utopia – including its capacity to be marketed and positioned as a commodity. The Empathics fold this anticipation of capitalism realism into their practice, of which they are inextricably, and self-consciously, involved. Despite materialising in a forest, the Empathics’ Institute of Empathy sells relics of themselves to fund their research practice; they vend “Life Product Systems” in galleries in Brooklyn, offer soul uploads to the ChimaCloud, premiere their latest products on Times Square billboards, and download VR crystals in downtown Manhattan malls.

But the speculative company is also attuned to the demands of the art market, and deftly navigates those desires to inject a density of meaning and political possibility into a layered body of work that also presents itself as immediately visually engaging, broadly accessible, and yes, Instagrammable. ChimaTEK’s Virtual Chimeric Space, for instance, is a technicolor playground previously installed at the Seattle Art Museum.

Woolfalk’s multimedia immersive environments combine storytelling through objects, female initiation rituals, anthropology, mythology, digital avatars and virtual beings, and local dancers, to merge material and digital worlds through movement. In its strategic use of curiosity and play, The Empathics works – like any good folk tale – on multiple thresholds, where an imaginative story becomes a metaphorical scaffold for exploring salient topics of gender, race, politics, and environmentalism.

Born in Japan and raised in New York State, Woolfalk’s intercontinental upbringing and multicultural heritage informs her interests in hybridisation and building more equitable possible futures, but these ideas are infused across layers in her work. Inspired by speculative fiction authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler – whose stories, which often fall under the category of ‘science-fiction’, are equally as concerned with topics of race, class, gender, and interspecies collaboration – the Empathics. ““Because I’m mixed race, I have this idea that to leave the conversation ambiguous is interesting,” suggests Woolfalk.

The ethical dimension of an ever-expanding technological field is also a principal concern of the Empathics, who are themselves a transhumanist race that has benefitted socially and existentially from moving beyond binaries and biases that still ensare the modern world. But as advanced as the Empathics are, much of their world-view remains entangled with issues of the human.

As part of its research praxis, the Empathic’s Institute works towards a distributable metamorphic system so that any human can opt into becoming an Empathic. In ChimaCloud, the Empathics wrestle with the morality of introducing a novel piece of technology that would increase global empathy output, but with wildly unpredictable social side-effects. They weigh the pros and cons of bio-engineering people, plants, nature, and animals. Just like in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, in which an interstellar conflict between two societies with radically different social views acts as a stand-in for the comparative critique of capitalist and socialist systems on Earth, The Empathics deal with a set of seemingly “posthuman” concerns that are ultimately not too different from our own.

In many ways, the Empathics’ capacity to move beyond seemingly all-too-human issues of race, gender, politics, and society is also a move towards an interspecies approach to the future. It is an approach that acknowledges the complexities of hybridity and the mutual accountability that comes with a non-anthropocentric relationship to the Earth — in Haraway’s terms, of staying with the trouble.

The elaborate multimedia installations that comprise much of The Empathics project is a kind of stage for testing these alternative realities, together. Woolfalk’s use of performance in her storytelling – choreographed dance in particular – conjures a kind of slippage point where the utopian and chimerical nature of the Empathics are momentarily materialised in a physical dimension, a moving body. This creates a space where non-verbal forms of knowledge built by the Empathics can be transferred to a human audience without relying on language.

We begin to comprehend their existence as one that’s constantly in flux: they metamorphose, change colors, and eventually become part of the landscape when they die, in a way that recalls the mantra of Butler’s Parables series – “All that you touch / You Change / All that you Change Changes you / The only lasting truth is Change / God is Change.” By creating a more permeable space to speculate on the many possible futures of the future, The Empathics foregrounds the potentials and pitfalls of technological sublimation while underscoring the role of multispecies collaboration. It posits a future as nature, as plant and animal and yet still human, in a ritual of collaborative dreaming and becoming.