The Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston, USA is founded on the principle that creative work is essential to all human cultures and the foundation for building sustainable and interdependent global societies. The Center is a site for experiments in the arts, technology, and research methodologies, and creating the future shape of planetary cultures. The Center is an advocate for the importance of critical culture to a global world. Its programs recognize both greater social connectivity and greater social fragmentation. It is a space for new forms of cooperation, and also one which is attentive to new and productive forms of conflict and friction. It is both theoretical and practical, a place of thought and action.

Coutts attended 'Unwriting Nature 2' (27th September - 4th October 2022) in Spoleto, Italy as a visiting researcher. Un-Writing Nature II was intended as a radically hospitable space for revitalizing and reconnecting across multiple strata of matter and difference, continuing a comparative conversation about systems of consciousness and communication. This includes questions such as: What are the ways that “nature” can be understood and represented, now? What languages, media, and codes help us to revitalize and reshape our connections to our bodies, to water, land, sky, and the other beings with whom we share the planet? What needs to be learned and unlearned? Challenging colonizing and extractivist practices requires other ways of knowing and doing, including refiguring or reaffirming relationships between humans, more than humans, and the planet itself.

Coutts gave a presentation on her recently completed body of work 'Traumatic Objects' (2021), large scale drawings that were influenced by the captive gorilla Koko’s short sign language speech at the COP21 climate change conference in 2014. Koko was taught to transmit a message at COP21 of protection for the planet that warned humans of the greater damage they could cause to the natural environment. 'Traumatic Object 1' recalls Koko’s shape and gravity as she sits to deliver the message she has been taught to sign. She has become a yellow mass ‘displayed’ on a blue support. Her animal surface has become planetary with fissures, outcrops, eruptions, plains, mottled and bruised areas. Multiple lines sprout and wind, point and break.

Coutts' presentation centred on gesture and embodiment as a means for inheriting and continuing while also resisting and countering exploitative relations between humans and non-human animals. It also involved readings of a series of short fictional works proposed as a means for thinking otherly on potentials for human and beyond human interactions.

• http://www.nickycoutts.com