With many overlapping social and ecological crises, we urgently need to transform how we live together on this planet. Artists, designers and social change-makers have been developing alternative forms of eco-social thought and action rooted in ‘multi-species’, ‘more-than-human’, and ‘feral’ modes of co-existence. How can these creative practitioners connect fruitfully with policy-makers, who work with related ideas around ‘natural resource management’, ‘ecosystems services’ or ‘biodiversity conservation’?

In October 2022 the CreaTures project bought together stakeholders and practitioners from both creative and policy fields to ask: how can creative practitioners and policy-makers work together for multi-species governance? 

A panel of four creative practitioners shared experiences of cross-sector working and explored the value of creative practices in opening up public dialogue and developing policy around environmental governance for the benefit of all species.  The hybrid session was part of the Uroboros Festival in Prague (exploring creative pathways to eco-social transformation). 

Summary

The four contributors offered a fascinating range of practices for bringing the more than human into the policy conversation.  Iryna Zamuruieva presented artist-led workshops in which experiencing and responding to videoed river journeys encouraged policy makers to think from the perspective of a river, exploring a non-anthropocentric understanding of flood risk management.  Ruth Catlow described how LARPs (Live Action Role Play) enabled users and managers to experience the perspective of the non-human inhabitants of a local park.  Julia Lohmann showed how exploring algae both as a biomaterial and an organism in its own right engaged senses and emotions beyond material process design.  Marion Lean described how gamification enabled policy makers to explore scenarios and impacts in a narrative form.

Across these diverse projects there were identifiable commonalities in approach.

• Opening up spaces to consider different futures was a recurring theme, through shared processes of imagination, pre-figuration or speculation.  The fact that these processes were done collectively enabled understanding of, and incorporation of, wider perspectives.

• Processes of design were used to explore how a current situation could be changed to a preferred situation. what that preferred situation might be and for whom – both human and ‘more than human’.
• Engaging actively with the ‘more than human’ raised questions around what and who is forefronted in such discussions – opening up a ‘multi-species’ perspective.  At the same time, decentering the human, prompted questions of equity and social justice within the human realm and explorations of the rights of the individual versus the rights of community. The inclusion of non-human presence helped engage participants in experiences which were tactile, sensory, emotional – bringing different perspectives and modes of thinking.

• Activities offered connection to head, heart and hands (described by one practitioner as knowing, caring, acting with creative practices serving as ‘flux’ between these states).

• Experimentation was key – supporting participants to move away from formal policy spaces (characterized by responsibility, delivery and deadlines) and encouraging questioning, exploration, imagination and failure.  Projects offered a safe space for creative thinking, permission to play and encouraged a sense of agency – underpinned by the belief that everyone has innate creativity, a valuable contribution to make and a role to play.

• There was recognition of the intrinsic value of the processes involved.  Ensuring good process is often as important as attempting to seek definitive answers to what are often multi-layered and challenging questions.

• There was particular impact from activity that built connections and was rooted in place. Working with and supporting existing local connectors and making the effort to involve as many people as possible who have a stake in the process and outcome of change.

• A common theme was the vital importance of allowing time for this work.   In order to build relationships and trust, allow for deeper connection and reflection and ultimately create more powerful impact.  Projects started from a place of shared values and made those values explicit in the process.   As one panelist observed – ‘don’t underestimate the time it takes to translate the ‘arty bollocks’ into something that is inviting for many people and makes them feel at home’

• Panelists explored ways to achieve longevity of impact when programmes like this are often limited by short term funding.  These included empowering participants to feel confident in their experience of new ways of thinking to support them applying these in ongoing practice.   Seeking out and working with people who are energized to take the ideas forward and repeating activities over time allowed for reconnection with the ideas and practices. 

In Conclusion

In her closing remarks, panel moderator Ann Light observed that whilst this Feral panel was taking place, in a swimming pool at an arts festival, elsewhere in Prague the inaugural meeting of the European Political Community Summit was being held.  The question hanging in the room as the session closed – how can we bring these worlds together in future? 

Panelists:  

Marion Lean (SCT/UK) –is a Scottish design researcher based in London. The focus of her research is improving choice and empowerment through real-world research, storytelling and collaboration, within different cultural settings and with different species. Marion is currently a Design Coach and Innovation Fellow, Centre for Digital Citizens, Newcastle University. She was based at Building Digital UK and laid the foundations for a Policy Design Lab at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Julia Lohmann (DE/FI) – is a Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at Aalto University and the founder of the Department of Seaweed, a transdisciplinary community of practice investigating the potential of macro algae as a design material. She uses her artistic practice as research through design to explore the ethical and material value systems underlying our relationship with flora and fauna. She is a creative practitioner in CreaTures and a researcher in the Academy of Finland funded Biocolour research project on natural dyes, and in the Nordplus funded Nordark research project that investigates non-human needs in relation to after-dark outdoor lighting.

Ruth Catlow (UK) –is a recovering web utopian and a creative practitioners in CreaTures. As artistic director and co-founder of Furtherfield London’s longest-running (de)centre for art and technology, she curates and creates collaborative, playful and emancipatory artworks to engage people across silos around emerging technologies and the wicked social and political problems they give rise to or intensify.

Iryna Zamuruieva (UA/SCT) – makes images, writes, walks, organises and performs. Originally from the middle of the Ukrainian steppe, Iryna now lives by the North Sea coast in Scotland, working with sustainability organisation Sniffer, a partner in CreaTures, on transforming organisations and places to flourish in the future climate. This involves leading climate change adaptation projects (with Adaptation Scotland) and creating structures for collaborative, care-ful and non-hierarchical decision-making. In her independent practice Iryna explores multispecies relations from pigs and viruses to natures to walking and steppes & ecofeminism.

Co-moderators and respondents:

Lara Houston (UK) 

Ann Light (UK/SE)

Markéta Dolejšová (CZ/FI)

Introduction

How can decision makers in policy fields best connect with the knowledge that creative research uncovers when investigating the biodiversity and climate crises? Artists have been exploring ways to deepen our connection with the more-than-human, taking innovative approaches to sustainability challenges. Creative practices have the power to change how people think and act in relation to ‘nature’ and the living things around us, so how might the world benefit from these insights?

In June 2022, the CreaTures project invited policy makers, artists, and practice-based researchers to the event Managed or out of control? Bridging policy and creative perspectives on ‘nature’ (part of the New European Bauhaus Festival). Six panellists from policy and creative practice presented their conceptions of ‘nature’ and ideas about how creative practitioners and policymakers might work together to trigger the transformations needed for planetary care. Whilst different approaches and challenges emerged, what was striking was the commonality between perspectives.

Four key points to take away –

Speakers were wary of approaches that do not step outside power dynamics of extraction and exploitation. For instance, Michal Mitro argued that the idea that we need to ‘fix’ climate change and biodiversity loss is a human-centric one, assuming humans are separate from the rest of nature and somehow control it. It was agreed that dominant Western beliefs about nature need changing to acknowledge that all life is interdependent and vulnerable to human negligence.

1. Create spaces for deep listening

The need to create spaces for deep listening ran across the discussion – perhaps most profoundly to ‘tune in’ to more-than-human life-forms, but also to connect humans working together across sectors.

Phil Tovey from DEFRA described how the schedule and usual working environment of policy makers is not set up in a way that makes entering into this sort of deep listening easy. Finding ways to make space to slow down and ‘be’ can enable transformative ideas to take shape.

In order to listen deeply, we need to acknowledge our own subjectivity and position, and to be quiet and observe, giving space for the more-than-human to communicate with us in their own ways, through their own bodies, interests, and points of communication. Markéta Dolejšová explored this in depth, describing arranged walks through the forest led by Chewie the dog.

2. Value experiential knowledge as a powerful route to transformation

Several of the speakers described the way experiencing feeds more effectively into transformation than reading about others’ experience. This is particularly true when relating to beings that communicate using ways other than human language. Artists are ideally placed to explore this, and their work can offer fresh perspectives in discussions about ecology.

The Treaty of Finsbury Park, for example, explores new ways to build empathy with non-human life-forms. The treaty is a Live Action Roleplay Game; participants are assigned a species mentor, attend a preparation workshop and then can take part in interspecies assemblies representing the species they were matched with. The game builds understanding of the more-than-human species in the park in a playful and engaged way that fosters more creative forms of understanding.

3. Enable translation across spheres

All the speakers agreed that transformational shifts require new ways of working across disciplines and settings. Clive Mitchell from NatureScot noted that policy makers almost always work within a specific ‘domain’ e.g. forests, water, etc, without necessarily connecting these to the wider systems round them. Artistic processes operate more freely, often creating situations where multiple forms of expertise can be heard and valued together. More holistic approaches can enable insights into new ways of relating and inspire potential solutions that domain-specific experts may miss, in being so focused.

Spaces that allow for communication through and between these different approaches allow artists and policy makers to find common languages across differences. The ‘soft spaces’ engagement approach introduced by Astrid Mangnus from SCP provides an interesting example – offering sessions when creative methods can undo hierarchies and provide freer spaces for designing alternative futures. Here, policymakers are invited to take deep listening and experiential knowing more seriously, while creative practitioners are invited to explore what an ‘evidence base’ for their practice might look like.

4. Move from extractive to regenerative value systems

Modern Western cultures have created devastation for living things. To move towards regenerative futures, speakers proposed that we change our value systems and re-imagine our worlds. However, these cultural dynamics need to be paired with practical, remedial action on the ground as part of holistic systems change. The Zoöp project presented by Klaas Kuitenbrouwer subverts a pre-existing legal framework to incentivise the regeneration of land. Instead of being a hidden vulnerable externality, more-than-human inhabitants of the land have a seat on the organisational board, intended as ‘shareholders’ of a better future. 

Speaker Biographies

Markéta Dolejšová, representing the EU CreaTures project, presented artworks that ask people to embrace more-than-human worldviews – for example by role-playing as animals (in the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025), being taken on a walk by Chewie the dog (in Open Forest) or dining with multi-species companions (in Refuge for Resurgence). With these works from partners, she illustrated the possibilities inherent in stimulating imagination, by playing, experimenting and storytelling, for finding new forms of understanding of the world around us.

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer is a founder of Zoöp, a governance model that seeks to incentivise regeneration, rather than extraction. Organisations sign up as a Zoöp and appoint a Speaker for the Living onto an organisational board, using existing co-operative legal structures to represent more-than-human dwellers (inspired by cases of legal personhood for rivers).

Astrid Mangnus, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP), introduced the idea of transformation – the need to make urgent and radical changes to our ways of life, to halt the breakdown of earth systems. She highlighted how creative practices can be helpful in creating ‘soft’ spaces, where the governance of social and natural systems can be explored more imaginatively (outside of traditional ‘hard’ governance spaces).

Clive Mitchell, Strategic Resource Manager on nature and climate change at NatureScot, described the hidden values at work in how we talk and think about nature – even when we use the same scientific terms. Policy must balance the costs and benefits in how we use our shared natural resources, meaning that we cannot avoid questions of climate and environmental justice, he said.

Michal Mitro, an artist and researcher, spoke about the importance of relationships. Coming from a background of psychology and sociology as well as arts practice, he works with a forest that was once carefully managed by humans but is gradually growing wilder. His work acknowledges that we are always coming at things from a human point of view, but can listen to and contemplate other perspectives.

Phil Tovey, who leads the DEFRA futures team, highlighted some of the barriers to incorporating the needs of more-than-humans in policy. Policy-making is often not set up for deep listening. He suggested that more-than-human empathy needs to be combined with practical action involving a range of groups to be effective as a technique for governance. Creating systemic theories of change would be helpful to translate across spheres.    

In Conclusion

CreaTures’ Nature: managed or out of control event was encouraging in bringing together artists and policy-makers to respond to social and environmental challenges. There were differing approaches, but more noteworthy was the shared worldview between the artists, researchers and policy-makers in terms of vision and aims. In addressing the urgent need to find new, more sustainable and nourishing, ways of living on our shared planet, it can be all too easy to assume we need to abandon either the radicalism of imagining different futures or a focus on impacting everyday life. However, with suitable translators between contexts, the space for dreaming and deep listening to develop into practical action looks possible as well as important.

Thanks to all the speakers for their time, and the rich insights that they shared.

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CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

🌳 29 June – 1 July 2022 🦋

The CreaTures Festival will bring the project’s people to share and reflect on the project learnings, their future, and their impact on eco-social transformations. 

We will do this though four key types of public activities over three days:  

1. Panel discussions and presentations from CreaTures researchers, advisory board members and invited guests across different sectors.  

2. Exhibition of selected Experimental Productions and local creative initiatives and projects.  

3. Knowledge exchange and co-creative workshops  

4. Keynote/s by internationally esteemed speakers.   

 
The event will be a meeting and exchange point for local citizens, thinkers, creators, actors, researchers and policy makers.

The CreaTures Festival website is now up and running. See the full program and register to attend here:
https://creatures-eu.org/festival/

Creative practices have a lot to offer in terms of fostering a much needed transformation. CreaTures and Plurality University Network have been mapping libraries, repositories, hubs and other collections of creative and collective practices that pave paths towards sustainability transformations and new narratives. The goal of this work is to understand the social and ecological impacts of a wide range of transformative creative initiatives and to create opportunities for exchange and connection among these collections.

We invited a number of initiators and managers of such repositories to share their work, discuss their motivations and explain their selection and organisation criteria. The event started with fast-paced short presentations and concluded with a round table discussion tracing commonalities and differences in approaches, desired and achieved results, possible audiences, and seeking opportunities to amplify the reach and impact of these valuable resources. 

A report of the event, has been put together by Plurality University’s Julliettes Grossmann and is accessible here.

Speakers:

Daniel Kaplan and Chloé Luchs-Tassé –  Library of Alternative Narratives 

Summer Van Houten – Portolan Project 

Kelli Rose Pearson – ReImaginary project 

Diego Galafassi and David Tàbara – Arts for Sustainability Transformations

Romain Julliard and Joffrey Lavigne – Mosaic 

Lewis Coenen-Rowe – Library of Creative Sustainability

Garry Peterson – Seeds of Good Anthropocene

Lara Houston – CreaTures Observatory 

CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

Creative practices hold huge transformational potential in fostering social- ecological sustainability because they are uniquely able to help people explore shifts in basic worldviews and paradigms. However, creative practices tend to be poorly resourced and badly understood in terms of their benefits. Understanding how creative practices achieve their goals by making use of the limited resources at hand can contribute to better assessment of their potential, to help them focus their efforts more effectively, and suggest policy recommendations that account for the merit of creative practices. 

CreaTures and AMASS are organising a joint public seminar that brings together research concerned with mapping resources and processes utilized by creative practitioners already mobilizing ideas for social and ecological sustainability, understanding their limitations and challenges, and demonstrating how they can be optimized, tested and evaluated. 

Meet the Panel:

Joost Vervoort – Associate Professor of Foresight and Anticipatory Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University.

Sofia Lindström Sol– Lecturer and researcher at the Swedish School of Information and Library Science at the University of Borås.

Ann Light – Professor of Design & Creative Technology (Engineering and Design) School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex.

Andrea Kárpáti – Professor and Head of the Visual Culture Research Group at the Institute of Communication and Sociology, Corvinus University Budapest.

Ruth Wolstenholme – Managing Director at Sniffer

Raphael Vella – Associate Professor in Art Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Malta

Moderator:

Tuuli Mattelmäki – Associate professor of Design, product service systems at the Department of Design, Aalto University

🪄 Stay tuned for more details!

Creative resourcefulness for sustainable futures is co-organised with the H2020 project Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) and is part of the Designs for a Cooler Planet event at the Helsinki Design Week 2021.

The event will be recorded for archiving and research purposes; by joining the session you consent to the recording. Please read the Participation Information Sheet and Privacy Notice. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

How can we enable creative practices that engage publics with sea health? What conditions do we need to build ocean literacy, resilience and a more than human-centric mindset. Which methods help activate people to address the marine challenges of a climate crisis world?

Contributors include: 

• Prof. Adriene Jenik, Arizona State University, ECOtarot deck 
• Sam Shamsher and Pete Fung, Ocean Confessional 
• Gary Markle, PhD (cand.), Selkie Skin 
• Iryna Zamuruieva, Flood Risk Scotland 
• Prof. Julia Lohmann, Aalto University, Department of Seaweed and Baltic Sea Lab project.

The event will be recorded for archiving and research purposes; by joining the session you consent to the recording. Please read the Participation Information Sheet and Privacy Notice. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

Forests have personalities. They come from different parts of the world, they host different species and come in many shapes and sizes. They are complex ecosystems, sources of timber, homes to indigenous people, storages of carbon; some or all of the above at the same time.

Being open to carefully considering more complex definitions of forests can form the institutional, legal and operational basis for forest monitoring, management and restoration that are more attuned to the urgent global actions needed to protect and restore forest ecosystems.

Centered around three projects looking at a scientific forest, an urban forest and a burnt managed forest, the panel will interweave these creative narratives with interventions by forest scientists, ecologists and anthropologists. This panel, co-organised with the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (MAK) in the framework of the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021, will approach the question of conceptualising and defining forests through the lens of creative practice.

Meet the panel

Andrea Botero is a Colombian born, Finland based designer and researcher. Her work engages with the possibilities and contradictions of participating in the creation of environments, tools and media that afford more relational and caring interactions among, and between people and their environment.

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is Director of the Care-full Design Lab at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Through her research and practice, she explores ways to care-fully imagine and create more-than-human futures, often through co-creative and playful engagements.

Anab Jain is a designer, filmmaker and co-founder of Superflux and Professor of Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. In her practice, Anab imagines and builds future worlds we can experience in the present moment. By creating new ways of seeing, being and acting, she hopes to inspire and challenge us to look critically at the decisions and choices we make today.

Katharina Lapin studied landscape planning before turning her research focus to biodiversity and invasive species. Katharina contributes to national and international nature conservation interests and specialist groups and is the head of the Department for Forest Biodiversity and Nature Conservation at the The Federal Forest Research Center (BFW).

Shubhendu Sharma, an industrial engineer, was working at Toyota in India when he met Japanese forest expert Akira Miyawaki, who’d arrived to plant a forest at the factory, using a methodology he’d developed to make a forest grow ten times faster than normal. Fascinated, Shubhendu interned with Akira, and grew his first successful forest on a small plot behind a house. Today, his company Afforestt promotes a standardised method for seeding dense, fast-growing, native forests in barren lands.

Panel moderator

Ruth Catlow is the artistic director of Furtherfield and the Decentralised Arts Lab DECAL, based in London. Her work as an artist, researcher and curator involves critical investigations of digital and networked technologies and their emancipatory potential.

Video interventions by

Nidia Gonzalez Pineros, Research fellow in innovation on governance and climate change, University of Bologna, Italy and University of Helsinki

Anna Lintunen, Adjunct professor in Tree Ecophysiology, University of Helsinki, INAR

What is a forest? When is a forest? is co-organised with the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (MAK) and is part of the Planet Love: Climate Care in the Digital Age agenda at the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021.

The event will be recorded for archiving and research purposes; by joining the session you consent to the recording. Please read the Participation Information Sheet and Privacy Notice. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

🦑🦑 Panelists 🦑🦑

Isabel Beavers is a transdisciplinary artist and creative producer based in Los Angeles. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media. She is currently a 2019-20 Resident Artist with CultureHub LA and 2020 SciArt Ambassador with SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery and a Youth Development Specialist with artworxLA.

Aga Pokrywka – with an academic background in animated film, computer simulations, and physics, Aga Pokrywka works hybridly with video, graphic design, and collaborative practices in order to build eclectic narratives. Natural sciences, technology, and decentralised organising are topics that are especially close to her heart. Aga collaborates with humans; bacteria (as the host of Ferment Radio); and computers (as the co-founder of Super Eclectic).

Frederick (Fred) van Amstel is Assistant Professor of Service Design and Experience Design at the Industrial Design Academic Department (DADIN), Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR), Brazil. His PhD thesis, accepted by the University of Twente, maps the contradictions faced by architectural design and service design in contemporary practice. Instead of eliminating them, expansive design harnesses contradictions as a source of change. His recent research deals with the contradiction of oppression and the possibility of designing for liberation.

Kobakant: Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson have been collaborating since 2006, and in 2008 formed the collective KOBAKANT. Together, through their work, they explore the use of textile crafts and electronics as a medium for commenting on technological aspects of today’s “high-tech” society. KOBAKANT believes in the spirit of humoring technology, often presenting their work as a twisted criticism of the stereotypes surrounding textile craftsmanship and electrical engineering. KOBAKANT believes that technology exists to be hacked, handmade and modified by everyone to better fit our personal needs and desires.
In 2009, as research fellows at the Distance Lab in Scotland, KOBAKANT published an online database for sharing their DIY wearable technology approach titled HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT.

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is Director of the Care-full Design Lab and Vice-Chancellor’s Principal Research Fellow at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia. Jaz likes giraffes, cats, and spicy food. 

Andrea Botero – is an Academy Research Fellow at Aalto University, Finland. Her design works explore technologies, services, media formats and genres for collectives and communities. She is a patient companion to two wild cats.

Cristina Ampatzidou is a CreaTures Research Fellow at RMIT Europe. With a background in urbanism, her research and practice focus on the affordances of new media, particularly games, for sustainable urban futures. 

Markéta Dolejšová is a CreaTures fellow at the Aalto University and one of the Uroboros serpents. Her experimental design research practice spills across the inter-related domains of social and ecological resilience and food system transitions. 

The panel collaboratively moderated itself & was summoned by Markéta, Cristina, Andrea and Jaz 🦑🦑.

Other events in this track included Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals by Isabelle Beavers, Cyano Automaton by Agnieszka Pokrywka, More-than-human derive and the workshops Feral ways of knowing and transformation and Learning Feral Ways of Transformation – hands on workshop.

CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

Feral: experimental, more-than-human, foraged & rummaged, regenerative, edible & compostable, un-following recipes, down-to-earth, slimy, rural & miscellaneous, forgotten, made invisible, stray but not lost, wilfully wild.

The Feral Creative Practices track proposes embodied, sensory-rich design and art experiments at the scale of our bodies as a starting point for co-creative inquiry into large-scale social and ecological issues. Leveraging everyday materials like soil, compost, edibles and microbial cultures, these craft-full more-than-human experiments can be both mundane and surprising; grounding and exhilarating. All of them involve our bodies as familiar ‘places’ from where processes of thinking, imagining, reflection and action commonly unfold. 

Grounded in embodied and situated ideation, these experiments can serve as a relatable entry point for co-creative explorations of larger societal issues that are hard to grasp. The Feral track is committed to a speculative, open-ended mode of exchange, and does not aspire to provoke immediate solutions to any of these issues. Rather, it seeks to help unfold new social imaginaries and ‘arouse an appetite for what might be possible’ (Haraway, 2011), as the first humble step in supporting transformative change towards futures in which all creatures can flourish.

🌿 The Feral Creative Practices track includes the following events:

Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals workshop by Isabelle Beavers

Cyano Automaton workshop by Agnieszka Pokrywka

CreaTures Glossary workshop by Amira Hanafi

Feral Ways of Knowing and Transformation workshop by Markéta Dolejšová, Cristina Ampatzidou, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and Andrea Botero

Learning Feral Ways of Transformation student workshop by Andrea Botero, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou and Leonardo Parra Agudelo

Feral Creative Practices discussion panel with various creative practitioners and researchers to close the festival track

🌿 The Feral Creative Practices track further presents project curated by our friendssss at the Uroboros festival:

A Practical Guide to Ecomancy for the Digital Age – series of 3 workshops by the Crawlers: 

Portals to Summon Web Chaos

Ecological Divination #1

Ecological Divination #2 

Ecological Divination #3

Consuming the Mother

Pig Mourning Ceremony – online gathering by Iryna Zamuruieva / Elliot Hurst

Anything-but-human – Mapping Islands, Drawing Care – workshop by City as a Spaceship

Scaling Bodily Fluids for Utopian Fabulations through Collage-Making – Workshop by Nadia Campo Woytuk / Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard / Karey Helms

🐝 To register for any of the events in the Feral Creative Practices track, visit the Uroboros 2021 festival website. You can find the whole program here.

The Feral Creative Practices track convenors are: Markéta Dolejšová, Cristina Ampatzidou, Andrea Botero & Jaz Hee-jeong Choi

The Uroboros festival is a hybrid experimental inquiry into the transformative potential of design research and practice. The festival’s main theme Designing in Troubling Times is inspired by the ambiguous symbol of Uroboros – a serpent devouring itself and changing its form in an eternal cycle of re-creation, using its own body as fuel. The circular and cyclical Uroboros captures the ambiguity of present technologies and designs for the troubling and troubled times that we are living in. The serpent represents the mythological origins of all our technological promises about eternal returns and the search for utopia. Asking what design can do to support positive change, the festival explores the cyclical processes of design imagination, innovation, failure and return.

CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

Scientists have recently published the first successful differentiation of endometrial mesenchymal stem cells(EnSCs) into oocyte-like cells. Encouraged by their achievements, Smrekar and Šutić decided to induce EnSCs obtained from menstrual blood and differentiate them in-vitrointo germ cells. In ‘reProductive narratives’, the art project they are currently developing, they both view the process of in-vitro transformation of one’s own menstrual blood stem cells into reproductive cells as a possibility that offers new potentials to women’s emancipation. Until now, reproductive cells have been available to women through the process of IVF (in-vitro fertilisation), which includes complex and potentially harmful interventions to the body, while this safer and more ethical form, opens the path to new ways of reproduction, independent of one’s biological characteristics or traditional family and societal structures. By loosening the seemingly essential social patterns we are also coming closer to empowering anyone who would like to adjust their reproduction to fit their personal stories.

The narratives on reproduction will be developed through a discussion between the guest Margherita Pevere, an artist and researcher whose practice glides across biological arts and performance with a distinctive visceral signature, and the art duet Maja Smrekarand Gjino Šutić, an internationally acknowledged artist and a multidisciplinary researcher and innovation developer.

CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

Creative arts and design practices have already demonstrated transformational potential in the area of social cohesion and environmental citizenship. However, they are often fragmented, poorly resourced and badly understood.

The CreaTures project demonstrates the power of existing–yet often hidden–creative practices to move the world towards social and ecological sustainability through addressing ways of being and lifestyles. The CreaTures Panel Discussion at Helsinki Design Week will open a space for discussion about existing and potential roles of creative arts and design in driving socio-ecological transformations. The CreaTures Panel Discussion is led by moderators and discussants with experiences from the arts and sustainability sector, and invites the audience to explore diverse scenarios for actualizing transformational futures via creative practices.

PANELISTS:

• Saija Hollmen, Vice Dean of Art and Creative Practices, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (Aalto ARTS)
• Pirjo Kääriäinen, Associate Professor in Design and Materialities, Aalto ARTS
• Julia Lohmann, Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design, Aalto ARTS
• Kirsikka Vaajakallio, Lead Service Designer, Hellon
• Ali Akbar Mehta, Artistic Director, Museum of Impossible Forms

MODERATORS: Marketa Dolejsova and Namkyu Chun (Postdoctoral Researchers of CreaTures, Aalto ARTS)

CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.