You can join in person, in the Kasárna Karlín venue, Prague (CZ). Please register via the Uroboros festival Eventbrite.

Creative reflection, self-awareness and embodied activities are applied to guide participants on a journey where the ability and willingness of individuals to let-go, shift perspectives and adopt new roles and practices is central.

The transformation toward eco-social sustainability involves a personal dimension of change. It calls for turning inwards and paying attention to the fundamental, innermost questions: Who am I (as part of a larger whole and eco-system)? What is my work? (as a human being on this planet)? Such personal, internal journeys of change often require external stimuli to help us become aware of what might have been invisible, stuck and hidden. These experiences might help foster our understanding of our interconnectedness: how we relate to the world, to other human and non-human creatures, and to ourselves.

In this session, we will approach such personal dimensions of change by guiding participants on a journey of shedding their skin through creative reflection and self-awareness practices, as well as generative embodiment activities. We will explore our inner worlds and the fundamental questions of our entangled existence through a co-creative exercise in opening a space for non-doing, pause, and letting-go. We will pay attention to the qualities of our relating, focus on how our perspectives shift, and experiment with radical openness: receiving and trusting the emerging elements that unfold beyond our control. By creating connections between non-doing and doing as an inspiration for future shifts, these exercises may enhance our sensitivity to how ‘change’ might feel like here and now.

🌳 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/

The fashion system causes and carries a number of complex issues, beyond sustainability matters. Yet, the market-driven discussion overshadows alternative narratives. Different narratives, as ideas, actions and perspectives, would contribute to change the way these issues are created and addressed. Fashion Lab intends to expand the voice of the alternatives by inviting diverse actors–anyone who make, sell, buy, wear, and throw away clothes–to come up with new narratives of becoming and living with fashion.

Join us two-day event in which you are invited to reflect on ​experiences and relationships with fashion, and to collaboratively speculate alternative narratives for individuals and communities.

• Opening session: Mon. 13th September, 17-18.30 EEST
• Closing session: Mon. 20th September, 17-18.30 EEST

Where: Online (see the link)

*Participation is open to everyone but registration is required. To join, please fill in your details in the registration form and we will email you the link. REGISTRATION FORM: LINK

*The opening day participants will be asked to return to the closing day. More info will be presented at the opening. 

*The events 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.

*This event is organized as part of Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures) project. 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 organizers, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.

*The event is also part of Aalto University’s Designs for a Cooler Planet / Helsinki Design Week 2021.

The workshop will be organized between the CreaTures and AMASS project members to discuss shared work on two connected themes for creative practices and transformation: evaluation and policy engagement. These sister projects offer complementary perspectives: the CreaTures project mostly focuses on these themes from 1) the perspectives of creative practitioners and 2) the perspectives of policy makers and other governing actors. By contrast, the AMASS project focuses more on literatures and research around the impact of creative practices on publics. This complementarity can be made to be highly productive and helpful. We will organize a process that will identify complementary insights and synergies. 

The online workshop will be facilitated by Dr. Joost Vervoort (Utrecht University) – work package leader on evaluation in the CreaTures project. We will use Miro as a platform. We will start with a mapping exercise of key areas of expertise and challenges between the two projects. This mapping exercise will be done in plenary, followed by the identification of synergistic themes which will be discussed in smaller breakout groups. Reporting back, these groups will discuss their insights and proposed directions for collaborative work with the overall group, so that all present can express their interest in collaborative work, in the form of papers or other outputs. 

The workshop is meant for CreaTures and AMASS project members in principle and is a closed session, but those outside these projects with a strong interest in this session can get in touch with the workshop organizers to participate. Please contact Cristina Ampatzidou – cristina.ampatzidou@rmit.edu.au

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.

We are inviting people to participate in one/more of three ways:

1. SEND US A MESSAGE, WE WILL WRITE IT FOR YOU: In the lead up to Itämeripäivä and on the day itself, we are inviting people to submit messages which will then be transcribed onto rocks along the Baltic shoreline at one of four venues, then photographed and shared online: Hanaholmen, Helsinki; Tvärminne Research Station, Hanko; NN, Sweden, and NN Estonia. Submit your messages to: departmentofseaweed@gmail.com

2. COME TO SEND A MESSAGES WITH US: On Itämeripäivä, the Baltic Sea Lab will transcribe these messages onto the rocks in Hanaholmen, Espoo, between 2pm-6pm (register here). Come down to the shore and engage in a moment with the sea by writing your own message onto one of the rocks. We will be on-hand with pieces of chalk and open ears.

3. SEND A MESSAGE FROM YOUR LOCAL WATERFRONT: Pick up some chalk sticks (calcium carbonate) from your local store and spend a moment with your local sea. Write a message and share it with us by adding the hashtag #amomentwiththesea and handle @thedepartmentofseaweed to your Instagram posts, or by sending your photographs to departmentofseaweed@gmail.com. 

Join us in fostering a stream of solidarity for this body of water with the Instagram hashtag #amomentwiththesea and handle @thedepartmentofseaweed. We’ll see you by the shore!

A moment with the Sea is inspired by the Ocean Confessions by Pete Fung and Samein Shamshar and adapted by Jaanika Blomster, Gary Markle, Aman Asif, Selina Oakes, Tuuli Mattelmäki and Julia Lohmann during a visit to  Tvärminne Zoological Station as part of the Baltic Sea Lab experiment.

Baltic SeaLab is an experimental production of Creatures Project. The 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.

We’re hopeful this would entangle the existing dataset with data that question and obscure the currently collected and available – mostly quantitative – data about creatures in and around urban forests. In recognition of the profound need in mapping to dismantle the imperialist and colonialist discourses, and support for pluralism, some data and information are deliberately made ambiguous on the map and the portal itself. With More-than-Human Dérive, we desire to playfully encourage people to join us in this questioning so that we can imagine and build beyond human-centred and instead more-than-human futures. We found inspirations from and applied the “drifty” ways the Situationist International challenged the established urban systems through creative engagement. We are  hopeful that further evolution of More-than-Human Dérive will deepen and diversify means of troubling across scales, and importantly, imagining and care-full action towards more-than-human futures. More-than-Human Dérive Uroboros Edition is inspired by and entangled with many different projects past and present, including the version launched at 2021 Melbourne Knowledge Week, with a feral twist.

To register for the More-than-Human Dérive – Uroboros Edition session, visit the event page at the Uroboros 2021 festival website.

The More-than-Human Dérive – Uroboros Edition is part of the Feral Creative Practices track at the Uroboros Festival 2021, along with Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals by Isabelle Beavers, Cyano Automaton by Agnieszka Pokrywka, Building a vocabulary for change by Amira Hanafi and the workshops Feral ways of knowing and transformation and Learning Feral Ways of Transformation – hands on workshop. The festival track will conclude with an open conversation on Feral Creative Practices.

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.

In this 2-hour collaborative online session, we hope to gather around the diverse tools and resources brought in by participants and creatively engage with their existing and potential features and meanings – what do these resources do in the world and why? Who can use them and how? How does their use help the practice to grow? What are their limits? Our aim is to develop a better understanding of how transformational creative practices can take place in different social contexts and environments, as the first humble step in supporting a change towards better, more inclusive, nourishing and regenerative futures. 

🌱🌱 To participate in the workshop, please send us a one-page proposal including a brief text describing a resource (cards, cookbooks, manifestos, websites, toolkits and similar) that you have used in your creative practice and an accompanying image (optional). Please send this proposal as one pdf to marketa.dolejsova@aalto.fi, no later than Thursday 6th May midnight [Anywhere on Earth].

Practitioners with whom we already confirmed their participation at the workshop include Rachel Clarke, Kit Braybrooke, Iryna Zamuruieva, Leonardo Parra-Agudelo and Špela Petrič 🌱🌱

The workshop is facilitated by CreaTures researchers Markéta Dolejšová, Cristina Ampatzidou, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi & Andrea Botero and is part of the Feral Creative Practices track at the Uroboros Festival 2021, along with Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals by Isabelle Beavers, Cyano Automaton by Agnieszka Pokrywka, More-than-human derive and the Learning Feral Ways of Transformation – hands on workshop. The festival track will conclude with an open conversation on Feral Creative Practices.

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.

The CreaTures Glossary is a radically open, fluid and changeable, interactive interface for giving meaning to a lexicon of terms related to creative practice and transformational change. It thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. 

Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though language is a dynamic social thing. The CreaTures Glossary meets language where it lives—in social situations. It tries to give users access not just to use words in new ways, but also to be heard and understood while doing so. 

This workshop invites the first public interaction with the Glossary that is currently being developed in collaboration with the CreaTures project. Participants will play language-generating and meaning-making games in a relaxed, collaborative online space. It is also a chance to give feedback on the interface, which is under development. Anyone can participate; there are no required skills or experience. Artists, creators, and people who use more than one language are especially encouraged to attend.

To register for the Building a vocabulary for change workshop, visit the event page at the Uroboros 2021 festival website.

The Building a vocabulary for change  workshop is part of the Feral Creative Practices track at the Uroboros Festival 2021, along with 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. The festival track will conclude with an open conversation on Feral Creative Practices.

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.

As a result of the ongoing protest and manifestations against inequality and police violence in Colombia, Colombian student participants are on strike. In our support for their decision and the call for equality and fight against violence, we, the organizers of the workshop are cancelling it. Please see more information below:

• A bit of context: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56986821
• The Universidad de los Andes student council ig account with info about the strike: https://www.instagram.com/rad.uniandes/
• The Universidad de los Andes  student strike ig account: https://www.instagram.com/arqdis_en_paro/
• One of the street interventions designed by the students of Universidad de los Andes on ig: https://www.instagram.com/en_tendedero/

Sprouting from the Feral Creative Practices track, this workshop invites students from creative areas working with socio-ecological themes to share their favorite tangible, digital or imaginary tools that can assist, provoke and advance socio-ecological transformations in troubled times.

Participants will be asked to bring examples of the sets of tools – cards, cookbooks, manifestos, guidelines, and similar – that they are working with and share them with others.

We want to understand what it takes to learn how to design in troubled times while reflecting how transformational creative practices operate in different social contexts and environments. 

Interested students (individuals or in groups) should send a one-page proposal with a short statement of interest in the workshop theme, with an example of a tool they want to bring to the discussion. Please send those proposals to andrea.botero@aalto.fi, no later than Thursday 6th May, midnight [Anywhere on Earth].

The workshop is facilitated by Andrea Botero, Jaz hee-jeong Choi and Cristina Ampatzidou from CreaTures, and Leonardo Parra Agudelo, assistant professor in the Design Department, Faculty of Architecture and Design at Universidad de los Andes.

The hands on workshop Learning Feral Ways of Transformation is part of the Feral Creative Practices track at the Uroboros Festival 2021, along with Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals by Isabelle Beavers, Building a vocabulary for change by Amira Hanafi, Cyano Automaton by Agnieszka Pokrywka, More-than-human derive and the workshop Feral ways of knowing and transformation. The festival track will conclude with an open conversation on Feral Creative Practices.

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.

What about snacking on spirulina, a biomass of cyanobacteria rich in nutrients, vitamins and minerals? Spirulina will in fact be included in astronauts’ diet during extended space travel. 

Welcome to Cyano Automaton’s workshop, where attendees got a glimpse on how to grow your own spirulina and use it to prepare delicious space food recipes, right here on Earth! It was also the background for a critical discussion on terrestrial and interplanetary colonization, of which cyanobacteria –as the first photosynthetic organisms on the planet – have been key players. 

The workshop was built around the Cyano Automaton, an interactive bioreactor that cultivates spirulina and gives voice to this species to tell a story about past, present, and future colonizations. The reactor takes data from space explorations and terrestrial conquests to intertwine a multifaceted narrative, dictated by the bacteria’s own growing cycles. 

The bioreactor is physically located in Helsinki, Finland, but available to the public online during the Uroboros Festival 2021 at www.cyano-automaton.monster.

Participants were encouraged to bring dry spirulina (available in most shops with healthy food). Easy access to basic kitchen utensils was also encouraged. However, people without access to these resources were welcome to participate in the workshop (without hands-on activities).

The Cyano Automaton workshop was part of the Feral Creative Practices track at the Uroboros Festival 2021, along with Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals by Isabelle Beavers, Building a vocabulary for change by Amira Hanafi, More-than-human derive and the workshops Feral ways of knowing and transformation and Learning Feral Ways of Transformation – hands on workshop. The festival track concluded with an open conversation on Feral Creative Practices.

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.

Rooted in intimate experiences with the elements, landscape, seascape, and more-than-human species, each site called upon a specific and ephemeral moment of sensory collaboration: times when the sun, light, sound, and scent coalesce through the senses of the human body to produce sublime or ordinary but intimate moments. 

Artist Isabel Beavers launched an ongoing, feral, and experimental public art project: Nocturne. During this two hour workshop participants designed their own wild altars to engage in new eco-rituals. Beavers shared her process for site-selection, altar design, and temporal engagement.

Workshop participants contributed to a global network of wild altars, generating worldwide practices for momentary eco-spiritual gestures. Participants also generated point cloud models of their altars using photogrammetry and contributed to a virtual archive of wild altars, commemorating the more-than-human species we collaborate with. Following this project launch, the network of wild altars became an experiment in collective care-taking. 

Background reading that might be useful and interesting:

Robin Wall Kimmerer, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ – Chapters: ‘Learning the Grammar of Animacy’ and ‘The Honorable Harvest’

Arturo Escobar, ‘Designs for the Pluriverse’ – Chapter 3: In the Background of Our Culture and Chapter 5: Design for Transitions 

Isabel Beavers, ‘How to Nocturne’ PDF 

The Nocturne Altar Hack workshop was part of the Feral Creative Practices track at the Uroboros Festival 2021, along with Cyano Automaton by Agnieszka Pokrywka, Building a vocabulary for change by Amira Hanafi, More-than-human derive and the workshops Feral ways of knowing and transformation and Learning Feral Ways of Transformation – hands on workshop. The festival track concluded with an open conversation on Feral Creative Practices.

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.