This paper draws on a research project that investigates how artistic practices can be an infrastructure to intergenerational collaborations, fostering epistemological relationality in the face of contemporary polycrises. This study is grounded in the perspective that ongoing struggles, environmental, political, and social, are entangled with epistemological values that produce fragmentation, hierarchy, and processes of othering including between generations (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2011; Lugones 2007). Focusing on generational divisions as dialectically formed by and reinforcing these structures, the research examines how dominant frameworks of knowledge disrupt relational continuity. It offers potential to expand intergenerational and epistemic theory-building and its practice by embracing arts-based flora and participatory methods, thus contributing to the exploration of means of cultivating collaboration across generations as a relational epistemology that includes more-than-human agencies and challenges linear conceptions of time (Phillips 2024; Krenak 2021; Haraway 2016; Kimmerer 2013).
Methodologically, the study also contributes to expanding transdisciplinary and participatory research approaches by integrating Participatory Action Research (PAR), arts-based methods, and Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), positioning community oriented and creative processes as sites of knowledge production. These frameworks are enacted through a case study of the New Futures Arts Collaborative (2025), a four-month international arts residency that took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, bringing together participants across generations, geographies, and disciplines.
The reflections suggest that artistic and participatory processes enable forms of knowledge that move beyond fragmented and hierarchical structures, fostering relational, plural, and horizontal ways of knowing. While context-dependent, these practices offer grounded pathways for reimagining collaboration and collective futures within conditions of polycrisis.