The idea of DOMIE goes against gentrification: we expose the ‘ruin’ that has occurred as a result of the transformation of Poland after 1989 – the rapid change of systems, neglect of memory and responsibility. In such conditions, we underline the need to support the weakest groups and enhance ideas of solidarity.

The DOMIE itself is a single-standing house in the yard of Św. Marcin – the most famous street of Posnań city. After 1989, the building and the yard were abandoned; after being used for several years as an important cultural site: it hosted a Fotoplastikon (life-sized zoetrope, and an early precursor to cinema), or Kaiser’s Panorama. Since 2018, Katarzyna Wojtczak and Martyna Miller have taken over the building, creating a social, artistic, economic, and architectural experiment of collective care, which today is developed by a growing artist collective.

In the View from the Window we focus on building neighbourly relations across difference, by hosting picnics in the yard. The artists and youngsters of DOMIE are often considered a foreign element of the hood, a threat to the old order. The project thus aims to enhance dialogue between the local neighbours and the new inhabitants of DOMIE, since they may not have the tools to acknowledge that they can gain something from each other. Both communities deal with traumas, poverty, and loneliness. Creative engagement in overcoming the obstacles and treating them as opportunities can help build bridges. Building up a sense of trust in the neighbourhood can start an ongoing exchange, promote engagement and strengthen agency. The war in Ukraine has brought a new context to the project, as many refugees have become new members of the neighborhood.

In March 2022 we started a series of picnics in the front yard of DOMIE, to which all the local neighbours are invited. We meet for a meal and get to know each other by spending a Sunday afternoon together. The yard is in terrible condition: there is wild parking, trash, an uncontrolled toilet, and a place of daily alcohol use. During these meetings we have started a common conversation about the idea and future of the yard – creating an urban garden together, moving away the cars, thereby creating a safer space to spend time together. The neighbours bring ideas and engage in work for the benefit of a common yard and the emerging community.

When photographed from above, due to the unusual shape of the roof, DOMIE visually resembles the first photograph ever taken by Nicephore Niepce in Le Gras (France). In the process of building trusted neighbourhood relationships, the lead project artist Martyna kindly asks the neighbours to photograph the view of DOMIE from their own windows. The photographs are then shared back with them and displayed inside DOMIE as part of an exhibition.

By playing with this visual connotation in relation to our neighborhood, I want to evolve the feeling of something dear and beautiful, connected to memories and storytelling, a place that we should take care of and treat as a treasure that belongs to all of us. The View From the Window simultaneously uncovers the history of the building, including cherished childhood memories of the magic of the Fotoplastikon, and enacts repair of the ruined building, navigating a better future through shared ideas of space and place.

Yarmouth Springs Eternal brings the perspectives of those with lived experience of homelessness and migration into conversations about ‘nature’. Last year the project featured a community programme of artist-led workshops with adults connected to Herring House Trust (a group for single, homeless people) and GYROS (a group that supports migrants and culturally diverse communities) and a public exhibition with open-to-all free events, including a conference, artist-led walks, printed folded pamphlet and a resource booklet on creative walking activities by the participating artists. 

In the second year, the project authors took a different approach to the first year of activities. With a mix of returning and new participants and facilitators, they nurtured their roots and built valuable space for reflection and evolution throughout the process. Growing from long relationships with the people connected to the project, the group has developed to make space for unheard voices and those with an interrupted connection to ‘home’ or place. The relationship between these life stories and self-seeded plants growing around town has become a symbol of respect for all lives and journeys. The group has also been recognising the difference between gardened and wild, valued and neglected, and how this mirrors particular social conditions too. 

In 2022, the group took part in a series of workshops, welcoming an inspiring team of visiting arts and ecology practitioners who brought their own perspective on engaging with the natural world through arts, science and wellbeing approaches. Inspired by the ideas and approaches presented by the visiting practitioners, the community participants co-designed and led a series of free events for the public, organised during the Creativity and Wellbeing Week in May.  

Some reflections of the group members:

• “To compare to last year, I feel more confident. It’s so important to share knowledge and experience with others. I received so much positive feedback” (Sara Moreira, reflecting on leading an event for the public).

• “After the first Yarmouth Springs Eternal, I was really looking forward to the next one. This year has exceeded expectations. This group has helped me to create space in my head to appreciate the spaces around me. I enjoyed hosting a session” (Russell Hughes, reflecting on the whole programme and leading a public event).
• “Six years ago, when I was in the depth of depression and addiction, I would never have thought I would be leading a group. It has really boosted my confidence, and inspired me” (a participant, sharing their personal journey with pride after leading a public event).
   

Through the programme, the group explores what living/working in Great Yarmouth means – whether people are here through choice or necessity – and continue to explore the symbolism of Spring unfolding, plants growing in neglected or overlooked places, and bleak spaces becoming beautiful with the presence of abundant life. The experience this year has been turned into a short film produced by filmmaker Becky Demmen of Supporting Your Art.

Selfies, memes, tweets; they all live in the “cloud”, an opaque metaphor of our times. Where are those “clouds”? What footprints do they leave on the ground? How can we make their materialities and geographies visible? 

The project uses the “myth” of the cloud as a way to connect two contemporary issues – the growing expansion of digital infrastructures and the climate crisis – marked by forms of historical extractivism, such as the exploitation of minerals and water. The Fallen Clouds project locates the ethico-political tensions between technological development and the socio-climatic crisis in three critical digital zones and infrastructures in Chile: a submarine Internet cable extended around the coasts of the Pacific ocean, a new Google data center in Cerrillos, and the carbonate plants of lithium in the Atacama salt flat. In each territory, we relate with different beings affected by the presence of the infrastructures including crabs in the submarine bottom, an ecofeminist group in Santiago, and Lickan Antay women in the Atacama.  

The Fallen Clouds film is composed of images of the different beings, sensory observations, and processes happening around the digital infrastructures. It is recorded in S16 mm to draw attention to its organic materiality. The film narrative starts with a submarine observation of a new fiber optic cable extended throughout the coasts of the Pacific Ocean in Chile. It then follows the actions of MOSACAT (Movimiento Socioambiental Comunitario por el Agua y el Territorio), an ecofeminist group protesting against the installation of a new Google data center in Cerrillos that would use 169 liters of water per second to cool down its servers. Finally, the film observes the extraction of lithium in the Atacama salt flat from the perspective of a geologist and three Lickan Antai women: a girl, a woman, and an elder.  The film is presented as a 20-minute video loop of the digitized S16 mm.

The sound is recorded using different sound artifacts, from direct sound captures to contact and hydrophone mics. It experiments with viscous and electric sound compositions, in which the narration of different myths told by MOSACAT and the Lickan Antay women are embedded. From these materials, a cloud symphony is born. The symphony is played through floating sound sculptures that have been created with the materials that we gathered around the three explored infrastructures: salt flat crust, water pipes from the lithium extractive sites, dried seaweeds from around the fiber optic cable, or a piece of a fiber optic cable itself.

This visual, sonic, and material experience allows the viewers to get immersed in a trance journey that bewitches them to break the spell of the cloud. It invites them to have a different perspective on digital technologies and imagine other possible futures that embrace circular temporalities as well as interspecies and intercultural relationality based on mutual care.  

The Fallen Clouds production process has involved several field sites and collaborators. In January 2022, we conducted fieldwork in Cerrillos, where we worked with MOSACAT and visited the territory where the new Google Data Center will be located. We also worked with MOSACAT on the scriptwriting process in order to understand their needs, demands, and desires connected to this creative process. Later in March, we followed five MOSACAT members and filmed their process of making different flyers that they glued at a bus stop during the night. 

In February, we traveled to San Pedro de Atacama to attune to the territory and to generate collaborative bonds with local communities to whom we previously presented our project. We visited the Atacama salt flat, a place we had only seen on Google Earth images, and discovered the gigantic water tubes that feed the pools where lithium is extracted. We met with Karenn Vera Tito – a Lickan Antay woman and educational mediator, and Juan Carmelo – a traditional environmentalist educator and a fellow friend of Karenn from her same indigenous community. We made a ritual of asking permission from the land and the ancestors to start developing our project and visited the land of their ancient abuelos (great grandparents). Tradition, respect, and sincerity are fundamental for this community.  

In April 2022 we engaged in an educational mediation in Río Grande. We worked in the local Lickan Antay school together with Ashley, the only ten-year-old student in the school, and her teacher Isabel Tito along with a traditional educator Juana Anza. Karenn Vera Tito was the educational mediator of the process and applied different ludic dynamics to create a myth connecting the idea of the “cloud”, its local socio-environmental resonances, and the Lickan Antay cosmovisions. 

Our filming process continued in the Atacama desert, starting in San Pedro de Atacama town located 2.408 m above sea level. We worked with the Lickan Antay community of Río Grande in the Chaxa lake, which is characterized by a rich and unique ecosystem and considered a sacred place by the original inhabitants (the local Toconao community that is currently administering the place kindly allowed us to film there). 

In May, we followed the installation of the new submarine fiber optic cable called “Prat”. This cable is owned by the local telecommunications company GTD which allowed us to observe the complex process behind the cable construction. 

During the fieldwork and filming process, we collected different materials that make up the “cloud”: from algae to salt flat crust and water pipes used for lithium extraction. We then defined the different sound artifacts to create the vibrant composition – speakers of different sizes and transducers – that form the eventual Fallen Cloud installation to be unveiled at the CreaTures festival in Seville, June 2022.   

Open Urban Forest planted at ssesi.space is a six-month research project exploring how the human and the more-than-human work with and around each other. These explorations are situated in the specific context of a nature-reclaimed communal garden located on the steep hills of the Svratka river in the city of Brno, Czech Republic. The research seeks to pave the path for meaningful communication and cohabitation of various agents that occupy and utilise this garden space. The Open Urban Forest research strategy is to approach the site and its actors through the prism of four expert teams with Michal’s additional guidance as he has been visiting the site regularly for the past eight years.

The experts involved in this inter-species conversation are: 

AVA collective: sonic enthusiasts, explorers and flâneurs who re-search and re-shape the  environmental sounds, combining live sonic feeds as well as field recordings with an open palette of post-club tendencies.

d’Epog: a post-dramatic theatre company whose performative interventions explore given space across extended time scales often elevating the invisible features and dynamics of the given context.

Ing.arch. MArch Jan Kristek, Ph.D and his architectural class: Jan is leading a studio at Faculty of Architecture, Brno University of Technology that explores various shapes of architecture as well as the ways architecture shapes the social and urban fabric of given space. He is currently serving as a dean as well.

Associate Professor, Ing. Radek Pokorny, Ph.D: head of the department of Forest Planting and Nourishing of Mendel University in Brno. He is an ardent advocate of both sustainable and pragmatic approaches to forestry.

MArts Michal Mitro: (main project author): his role in the project is to guide and facilitate the guests as well as process and curate their findings

The experts in the team are asked to use their distinct knowledge, tools, and skills to elaborate on the aspects of the Open Urban Forest space. The research is thus structured loosely and allows a lot of space for subjective preferences, focus and attention to detail. The team agreed to openly acknowledge their active and transformative role in the environment rather than positioning themselves as “objective observers”. 

The bourgeoning garden forest is shaped by a multitude of human-initiated contexts such as traffic infrastructure extension, drought, and municipal urban planning. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly feral. Throughout the project duration, guests experts from fields of architecture, forestry, visual arts, field recording, and performance art will visit the forest and conduct their research. These guests are invited to observe, analyse, abstract, and speculate on meanings and datasets that the forest conveys to them, or to which they happen to incline. Equipped with unique tools, knowledges, and viewpoints we hope to jointly shape an inter-subjective representation of the forest that would reflect its stacked and multifocal nature. We hope that, by doing so, we can set an inviting and supportive base for the interspecies dialogue and reinforce dynamics that would make the space open, urban, and forest.

Within the context of CreaTures research, the involved Pixelache authors set out the hope of answering:

What internal transformations have happened within the association over time that helped to maintain its structure and social dynamic? How is cultural programming sustained, and how are cultural and organisational practices passed on? What happens when key association members leave or new organisational formats emerge? What makes socialised creative practice sustainable? How might we engage and make accessible the past history of the association, to assist social sustainability and awareness of transformations over different generations of active contributors, wider cultural community, and research communities? How do we keep going?

Members of the Pixelache group conducted mapping of the social history and internal transformation of the Pixelache festival and platform over the period of its 20 years of existence, with a focus on those stages and processes that are relevant to eco-social transformation as it is broadly understood. This work involves a compiling of metadata and details from past Pixelache events and processes with a focus on Pixelache’s transformational objectives, ambitions, and impact in the field of social ecology/economical – sustainability.

The compiled data helped to build a timeline of main Pixelache events and internal transformational moments in the organization, and a generational map of key members and their roles in sustaining the organization. In spring 2022, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Irina Mutt and Sumugan Sivanesan from the ExP work-group led an internal workshop with Pixelache members to collectively consider the thematic and metadata compiled in the timeline and generational map, and to identify other artefacts (events, objects, narratives) from the associational history. An ‘audio(fan)zine’ approach was taken to gather voices and short narratives.

These audio zines with situated memories vignettes recorded in the Pixelache office are hoped to encourage further engagement in the Pixelache archival documents and the association’s content management system online. The aim is to encourage those who interact with Pixelache’s documentation to look further and consider in which way did the association respond to its internal transformations, and what was the impact of those changes: What type of stories can be told? What is more difficult and challenging? How can we work with the gaps? What was sustainable and what was lost in the process?

You can consult their project webpages to view their documentation & listen to their audiozines, as well as read the report.

Within the Hackcamp project, participating cultural organisations conduct analysis of their internal environment and processes related to social transformation. Based on the analysis, each organisation identifies challenges that become urgent for the continuity of its strategy and core values and that might be shared by other organisations operating in similar coordinates.

Examples of these identified challenges from past Hackcamps are: 

• To effectively and fairly incorporate the decolonial perspective in their internal practices and in their relations with other agents in a complex environment.

• to analyse cultural practices from an anti-racist perspective and identify strategies to combat racism, economic violence and structural violence against racialised people.

• To analyse and balance the influence of cultural practices at the local and international levels in a complex global and post-pandemic context. 

• Strategies to address eco-social change in cultural organisations, how to be ecologically responsible and incorporate an environmental urgency perspective in our practices and methodologies.

• How to maintain one’s own voice, keep in touch, and listen to each other in times when communication is affected by virtuality and data saturation.

• How to ensure that we put life and care at the centre of our internal practices as an organisation and when developing community projects.

The Hackcamp methodology relies on five main principles:

1. We rely on collective intelligence and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.
2. We consider and value all knowledge. It is important to avoid distinguishing between experts and non-experts.
3. We listen to each other’s ideas and accept diversity as the intellectual basis that we should all embrace.
4. We connect practices and experiences that care for and value the common good.
5. We use visual and body languages in addition to oral and textual tools.

Each Hackcamp responds to particular needs co-defined by its participants. However, the nature of the Hackcamp caters to the following general objectives:

1. Learn and practice new techniques that enable open innovation.
2. Encourage and experiment with the sum of internal capabilities of an organization.
3. Leverage “learning-by-doing” approach and co-creative problem-solving practices.
4. Generate communication channels between people with different profiles and roles.
5. Design tools for a live assessment of the changing needs of an organization.
6. Develop a series of prototypes that can help solve situations or problems through collective action and can be further disseminated in the form of shareable tools.

The edition of the Hackcamp that was run within the CreaTures project scope – a smaller, portable version of the format (so-called Micro-Hackcamp) – was held in Seville and involved the participation of six people of diverse professional and cultural backgrounds. In this Hackcamp, we especially focused on the eco-social and decolonial transformation of cultural and creative practices. The meeting was divided into two days (30 and 31 May, 2022) in which we discussed the strategies and tools that the participants and their organizations can use to work towards these transformations. The objective was to define a roadmap with tips that can inspire not only us at the event but also other cultural organizations.

From the data collected at this Hackcamp ExP event, ZEMOS98 is currently producing an Open Paper both in Spanish and in English that will be published open-source. An example of an outcome from previous Hackcamp sessions is an Open Paper that broadens the notion of what is known as “cultural mediation”. In the Paper, the concept of cultural mediation is expanded by studying ZEMOS98’s own practices using conversations that emerged during the “Laboratory of Cultural Mediation in Pandemic Times’’ using the Hackcamp methodology.

The Hackcamp is an ongoing series of events and a format of co-creative gatherings that ZEMOS98 has been using in a long term. There will be additional Hackcamp events happening in the future. The Hackcamp organised within the CreaTures project helped us to expand and further refine the Hackcamp format and the future events will build on these findings. 

*Live Action Role-Play, or LARP, is a form of game where participants play characters who interact to pursue goals within a fictional setting.

The Treaty project represents a major undertaking to do long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants.

“In The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, we are catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. After much unrest, it has been agreed that a treaty will be drawn up, designating these rights, but first humans must learn to better relate to and understand non-humans so they can cooperate better together. Thankfully there has been a new invention – The Sentience Dial – which allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.”

– Ruth Catlow, Artistic Director of Furtherfield 

The project depicts a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit, in Finsbury Park (and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond). Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gases and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. If colonial systems of dominance and control over living beings continue, we all face an apocalypse.  

Based around a set of interspecies assemblies and LARPs, the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is played from more-than-human perspectives to encourage the blooming of bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action. Players act and think like a dog, bee, or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces and significantly alter community relations with local biodiversity.

There are 4 parts to the story and the wider project which are as follows:

• Part 1. The Interspecies Assemblies – these are games where everyone gets to plan the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park 2023 – an event that will celebrate the drawing up of the treaty itself.* 

• Part 2. The Vote – once artists have had a chance to gather everyone’s input they’ll present 3 proposals for the Interspecies Festival and everyone will be invited to choose the one they want to participate in. 

• Part 3 – The Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park – all the species of Finsbury Park will be invited to join the festival in Summer 2023.

• Part 4 – The Treaty is drawn up and signed by park stakeholders in Summer 2025.

*The first part of the story is realised as part of the CreaTures Laboratory and has resulted in long term local, national and international partnerships.

The Interspecies Festival is a gathering for all species to showcase their cultures, their interests and talents. Like a World’s Fair or an Olympic Games, it is a place of discovery, marvels and broadened horizons. But it can only be planned if we help all the species of the park present their ideas. By planning the Interspecies Festival together, human people from the locality and around the world build empathy pathways to other beings. They learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They explore what it would mean to acknowledge the equal rights of more-than-human beings to the same range of freedoms they expect for themselves. Later, they will draft the Treaty and they will decide how to connect even more deeply with all the species of the park through a festival for all. From September 2022 scannable hoardings wrap the Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park with an exhibition featuring stories about the new knowledge and relationships formed by assembly members for the benefit of biodiversity locally and worldwide.

In the Interspecies Assemblies game (in-park and online), human players are matched with a mentor representing one of 7 species based in Finsbury Park. These include a tree, a bee, a goose, grass, a squirrel, a stag beetle and a dog. Players tune into the mentor’s needs and experiences and then represent them at a series of online assemblies being held to choose the events and the location in the park for the first-ever Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park. By planning the Festival together, human people from the locality and around the world build empathy pathways to other beings. They learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They explore what it would mean to truly acknowledge the equal rights of more-than-human beings to the same range of freedoms they expect for themselves. Together they think about what it would take to prioritise biodiversity and take actual steps to achieve this.

In each game format (in-park & online) players wear costumes in the form of masks and face filters. For this purpose, meticulously researched mentor species provide the basis for beautifully original artworks placed on backgrounds made of lidar scanned habitats and SnapChat Lens face filters to fully immerse human players in deep nature.

The first Interspecies Assembly took place at the IAM Weekend 2021 Festival – Planet Earth edition and was hosted by Ruth Catlow & Bea Xu – full recording is available here. The Assembly was followed by a conversation among the Treaty co-authors Ruth Catlow & Cade Diehm and the CreaTures researcher Dr. Lara Houston, exploring the ideas and motivations behind the project. A live in-person Assembly in Finsbury Park was organised in January 2022; three online Assemblies followed in May – June 2022. Each online Assembly included a rehearsal session that took place a few days in advance, to help participants attune to their non-human roles.

The Sentience Dial as a Cultural Device

In the fictional world of our characters, there are a number of cultural devices, rituals and props to support emersion and world-building. The Sentience Dial is a new fictional technology that supports communication between all living entities. It is deployed in the context of the Assemblies Games to allow humans to tune into all flora and fauna, to match them with a species mentor, and to then represent them in the game. 

Biodiversity Matters

In 2019 with a planetary health check revealing over a million species on earth at risk of extinction because of humans, Furtherfield decided to explore new ways of developing systems for mutual care and respect on earth. We want to ask: How do we care? Who or what do we care for first? And who cares for the carers in a world ravaged by political crises and climate emergency?

The UK has lost more biodiversity than any G7 country, and is in the worst 10% globally. Yet it plays a crucial role in tackling climate change and signals the health of any environment. It provides life sustaining services such as clean air and water, and is essential to health and well being, learning and relaxation. It defines our cultural heritage and identity, and provides us with raw materials for food, shelter medicine, fuel and clothing. There is more nature and biodiversity in cities than we often realise and urban nature is now more diverse than cultivated rural areas. So what better place than a city park for humans to discover more about what role we can play in growing our understanding and promoting biodiversity where we are.

The Game invites players to reflect on a range of realities and proposals

About Biodiversity

• Biodiversity plays a vital role in climate change resilience.
• The greatest biodiversity is found in urban settings, so urban parks now play a vital role in all our futures.
• But what part do all the different species play in a thriving urban park?
• How could our parks be differently managed?
• And how can we better care for everyone?
  

About the connection between biodiversity and justice

• What would it mean to consider more-than-human rights at two levels: 1) basic (or intrinsic) rights (not to be terrorised or killed), and 2) membership/citizenship rights which grant access to services like food, sanitation, security, education, culture and participation in political decisions.
• What is the role of culture in social justice?

Larping as a format 

Since 2016 Furtherfield has developed a specialism in the creation of Live Art Action Research Role Play (LAARRP) games for engaging diverse people in playful experiences that perform deep and rigorous research. Larping was chosen as a creative format as it creates a prefigurative experience for players. By taking part, they literally contribute to the design and staging of an interspecies festival in Finsbury Park. This format uses a conscious bleed between fiction and reality. By playing a game in which they conceive of a festival that celebrates multi-species justice for bountiful biodviersity people contribute to a real-world public event. 

“Players are dramatic performers and inventive gamers who inhabit characters and act out events that commemorate, prefigure or even shape histories – real, fantastical or futuristic. Players improvise new forms of potentially deeply strange situated social cooperation. Cos play, sets and props, audio-visual and digital augmentations, food, and unexpected external story elements and rituals are all used to deepen engagement in a new constructed reality. Together players create the atmosphere and the drama of the collective experience. They shape the narrative and the outcomes.”  

– Ruth Catlow, Artistic Director of Furtherfield 

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The artwork in the laboratory is carried out by Maja Smrekar together with scientist and artist Gjino Šutić. For the artwork, cells are isolated (differentiated) from Smrekar’s menstrual blood and then grown inside growth media that contain hormones extracted from the artist’s own urine. These procedures follow a research protocol published by the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, School Of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University and collaborators in China (2016) that has shown the possibility of extracting somatic cells from menstrual blood. These extracted cells may show egg-like properties (specific protein structure), raising a myriad of possibilities and opening a space for speculation regarding the existing and imagined reproductive functions of the female body (NB: these egg-like cells have 2 sets of chromosomes and cannot be fertilized). 

The female body has been used as a means of production in these times of populism, in which the significance of the nation increases, placing great value on the birth rate. Through such social regression, the female body has often been seen as the property of the state, law, and ideology.

The authors dedicate this project to all the Others out there. Through their deeply dedicated hands-on biohacking research & practice-based process, they warmly welcome further formations of strategic alliances to employ our hormones and bodily fluids as agents for utilizing pharmacological and technological tools as non-invasive (bio)technologies.

A further objective of the reProductive Narratives project is to engage and interact with citizens through dialogue, exchange of knowledge, as well as through co-development of open questions and their answers.

The reProductive Narratives project uses an artistic metaphor to describe social phenomenologies related to the recognition and appreciation of the female body as a production facility of new life. In the art project, which is situated in a laboratory setting, the author Maja Smrekar experiments with her menstrual blood – a socially stigmatized female excrement – as material for artistic expression and later for reflective conversations, which take place after the laboratory work, in a public setting.

The artwork in the laboratory is carried out by Maja Smrekar together with scientist and artist Gjino Šutić. For the artwork, cells are isolated (differentiated) from Smrekar’s menstrual blood and then grown inside growth media that contain hormones extracted from the artist’s own urine. These procedures follow a research protocol published by the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, School Of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University and collaborators in China (2016) that has shown the possibility of extracting somatic cells from menstrual blood. These extracted cells may show egg-like properties (specific protein structure), raising a myriad of possibilities and opening a space for speculation regarding the existing and imagined reproductive functions of the female body (NB: these egg-like cells have 2 sets of chromosomes and cannot be fertilized). 

The female body has been used as a means of production in these times of populism, in which the significance of the nation increases, placing great value on the birth rate. Through such social regression, the female body has often been seen as the property of the state, law, and ideology.

The authors dedicate this project to all the Others out there. Through their deeply dedicated hands-on biohacking research & practice-based process, they warmly welcome further formations of strategic alliances to employ our hormones and bodily fluids as agents for utilizing pharmacological and technological tools as non-invasive (bio)technologies.

A further objective of the reProductive Narratives project is to engage and interact with citizens through dialogue, exchange of knowledge, as well as through co-development of open questions and their answers.

As the first photosynthetic organisms that ever existed, cyanobacteria are responsible for allowing higher life forms to evolve on this planet. The Aztecs called them “tecuitlatl” and used them as an important part of their diet until the fall of Tenochtitlan, in the 16th century. Cyanobacteria are also known as “blue-green algae”, which form mats on the water surface that can produce harmful toxins to humans and aquatic life. We commonly know them as “spirulina”, which is now produced on a global scale and advertised as a fashionable superfood. Since it’s easy to grow and harvest, spirulina is an important element in a space crew’s diet. Actually, it is projected to become a nutritious source of food for the first colonizers of Mars.  

The project author, artist and scientist Aga Pokrywka, in collaboration with the Super Eclectic studio, developed an interactive vessel – a bioreactor – that monitors the growing cyanobacteria’s condition. It is programmed to combine this information with data from NASA’s yearly budgets, global gold mining and the subsequent production of carbon dioxide. The Cyano Automaton communicates by tweeting various information that shed a light on how these statistics are related to exploitation and colonialism; whether here on Earth, or in outer space.

“Through its life cycles, the cyanobacteria inhabiting the Cyano Automaton give us compelling insights on how these huge numbers are interrelated. They also help us realize that the damage caused by human activities, at a systemic level, cannot be just resolved with personal actions (…) There must be a systemic change.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

The Cyano Automaton website displays, in an intrepid style and with scientific accuracy, graphs and numbers of the reactor’s temperature, turbidity, and air pump. It also provides visualizations of statistics on NASA’s space exploration budgets; annual gold mining in terms of tons and profit, as well as the production of CO2 linked to these activities. A livestream of the reactor, sleek blueprints of its design, and an extensive description of the project are also part of the digital platform. The website is linked to the Cyano Automaton’s official Twitter account.

Mining has a strong relationship to colonialism. Colonizers saw the territories they occupied as places they could use without any consideration for long-term consequences, exploiting local populations and natural resources. In many cases, it continues until nowadays. Gold, the symbol of wealth and status, has probably been one of the most sought-after minerals ever. Colonial gold enriched European powers and funded the slave trade. Gold is scarce and that makes it valuable, and extracting it damages the environment by producing excessive carbon dioxide. Its overexploitation, here on Earth, has raised speculations to look for it on other planets.

“Gold means economic value, and each year, a percentage of the gold mined worldwide is spent on space exploration. Sending rockets to outer space may give hopes for an interplanetary future, for some, but it’s damaging our planet now, for all.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

Inspired by the complicated history of microscopic cyanobacteria beings, the Cyano Automaton seeks to find connections between different scales of colonization: bacterial, terrestrial, and interplanetary. Together with cyanobacteria as protagonists and narrators of this story, the project knits a critical narrative about ongoing eco-social exploitation and conquest. In the end, whether it be on Mars or here on Earth, the mechanisms of colonization are strikingly similar.

“There is no way to explain our current ecological catastrophe without looking at past and present colonization practices.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

The Cyano Automaton project was showcased at the Uroboros 2021 festival during the CreaTures Feral track as a co-creative workshop, where participants made their own experimental spirulina-based space food and listened to diverse stories of colonization. Interaction with the Cyano Automaton remains available in the long term, via its own website and Twitter profile.

Nocturne is an iterative and collective project while at the same time originating from a personal impulse. Inspired by portals, imaginaries, spirit worlds and the unseeable – it celebrates more-than-human species that we share the earth with. 

Living in an urban environment during the pandemic spurred many outdoor walks, jaunts, journeys, explorations and observations. Driving through the xx valley I had a vision of a secret altar hidden high up in the mountains that could be accessed only via foot. Rather than asking humans to gather indoors in an art space, I wanted to bring people to site-specific locations that were ecologically significant. I was also interested in the casual and serendipitous encounter – the surprise a hiker might experience to find a favorite trail suddenly occupied by a glowing, living altar. I wanted to punctuate the experience offered by ‘nature’. 

The aesthetics of Nocturne altars are important to their functioning. They are light, semi-translucent sculptures made of beeswax – as a sustainable alternative to plastics – with attached LED solar paneled lights. As the sun fades, the lanterns illuminate at dusk, forming a beacon in the dark and enticing viewers from afar as they notice a soft glow emanating from the trees. The sculptures thus generate a serendipitous moment in which the passerby notices the sculptures’ light first. The altars each spark a distinct sensorial experience: the way the sunlight backlights a native plant species at sunset; the sound of the birdsong at sunrise; the scent of jasmine leaves opening as the day cools into night.

“This pause and break in their typical movement patterns and speed are meant to lead to a moment of deeper observation of the network of more-than-human species around them. Generating this embodied experience aligns with relocalization practices, and subverts the hierarchy of intellectual versus embodied knowledge present in Western epistemologies. To come back to our bodies is to come home, and in this case to come back to the more-than-human entanglements that we are a part of. “

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

Upon spotting a wild altar, spectators also notice a QR code that has been placed. That allows them to read more about the project, and directs them to put their device away, listen, observe, and spend a few moments noticing and recognizing the lives of all of the other species that surround them. Once the first encounter with an existing altar has been made, it depends on the audience’s will and daily routines whether or not they return to the altar.

“The hope is that they plan to return or think of the altar when moving in other urban wilds throughout the city. This becomes a ritual, as participants return to the altar multiple times, or are inspired to create their own altar. This might deepen their awareness of the more-than-humans around them, inspire them to learn more about the local ecosystems, and lead to a feeling of wellbeing, connection, and eventually attunement to one’s community.” 

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

The Nocturne project is an experiment in care-taking, new rituals, and a seduction into intimate moments with the more-than-human world. The practice of generating new ceremonies and rituals with more-than-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and re-emphasizing the grounding impacts of human-more-than-human interactions. The network of altars operates as an economy of care – visitors to the interventions are responsible for upholding the integrity of the site, both in the more-than-human species that inhabit it, as well as care-taking of the art piece and altar.  

Within the CreaTures project scope, Nocturne has been showcased on several public engagement occasions. Participants of the Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals workshop at the CreaTures Feral track at the 2021 Uroboros festival discussed the possibilities of building altars in their diverse geographical locations. Participants were broken up into small groups to brainstorm how they might create a wild altar – what materials would they use, where would the altar be, what would eco-ritual would emerge from the intervention? This online workshop entangled participants from many parts of the globe and provided an enriching dialogue around ritual, ecology, and adaptation. 

The second workshop Co-Creating Wild Altars organised at CultureHub’s ReFest involved participants in creating small light sculptures at the artist’s home studio. Twelve participants joined and created their own small altar. They took these home to place in their own home environment. Participants learned the process of creating these small wax sculptures and dedicated their altar to a new eco-ritual they hoped to enact. 

The Nocturne: Sea Altar installation created for the Atmospheres Deep exhibition in the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art with SUPERCOLLIDER offered glimpses into the depth of ocean creatures’ entanglements. The installation includes 7 light sculptures, an audio-generated animation, and a sound piece. The animation is projected onto the ceiling of the gallery to mimic light coming through the surface of the water down into the water column. Nocturne: Sea Altar honors the ocean through a multimedia installation incorporating audio, audio-reactive visuals, and light sculptures. The work meditates on the criticality of sea diatoms for life in our oceans and asks us to engage in a practice of deep listening to ask: what are more-than-humans telling us?

An iteration of Sea Altar was further produced for the showcase at Sui Generis: Debates about the Singular exhibition, SOLA Contemporary, CA. The altar was adjusted for the space and incorporated new larger sculptures. The Nocturne Wild Altar showcased over six months on the Radio Walk Stairs in Silverlake, CA then invited passersby to experience the altars in their own time and pace. The author took participants, mostly local neighbourhood residents, on several guided tours around the diverse altars installed.

The Nocturne is an ongoing project. Upcoming exhibitions and events include a Nocturne Sea Altar showcase at the Symbiosis: Sculpting the Art of Living Together exhibition, CultureHub LA; starting on July 9th, 2022.

Creative practices offer unique ways of engagement to connect communities with their local sea – yet, these practices are often only enacted once and bound by the artist’s or designer’s spatial and temporal reach. The Baltic Sea Lab adapts and adopts such creative practices with the aim of extending their reach beyond their clearly authored initial framing. Can a creative practice seed a range of similar engagements, all adapted to their specific locality and community context?

In November 2020 – April 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab occupied a large abandoned retail space of the A Bloc shopping centre in Otaniemi (Espoo, FIN). The space hosted a multi-sensory seaweed structure named Hidaka Ohmu, originally designed by Julia Lohmann and the Department of Seaweed for the World Economic Forum in 2020. The sculpture made of Japanese kelp facilitates conversations and alliances by bringing the sea, its materiality, texture, and scents into a human-made environment. Fellow artists and researchers, including the Open Forest collective, were working inside and around the Ohmu for a period of six months and invited other interested creatures for one-to-one dialogues.

After moving out from the A Bloc space, the Hidaka Ohmu sculpture traveled to a new venue, the Glasshouse Helsinki, where it was exhibited in June – August 2021.

The Baltic Sea Lab project followed with two co-creative engagement events, delving deep into the concept of ocean literacy to better understand the needs of the local sea. Partnering with local Finnish institutions like the John Nurmisen Foundation, the Hanaholmen, and the Tvärminne Zoological Station, the Lab invited conversations with artists and designers about various ways of engaging communities with local sea and surrounding environment.

The panel discussion ‘Baltic Sea Lab: How creative practices can support sea health’ held at the Tvärminne station invited six panelists: author of the ECOtarot deck and Arizona State University professor Adriene Jenik; founders of the Ocean Confessional initiative Sam Shamsher and Pete Fung; author of the Selkie Skin project Gary Markle; researcher and artists Iryna Zamuruieva from Flood Risk Scotland, and the Baltic Sea Lab’s very own Julia Lohmann to reflect on contemporary themes and issues in ocean literacy.

The goal of the panel was to identify ocean literacy topics that need to be addressed from a scientific point of view and, alongside it, to understand how creative practices create engagements with relevant individuals and communities. The insightful conversations prompted reflections on the challenges of scaling and reproducing artistic practices and on the nature of an effective engagement.

We observed three interwoven and recurring topics that became the backbone through which we understand how creative practices engage a community with ocean literacy: Knowledge (awareness of ecological and cultural issues), Care (empathy, emotional and embodied connection), and Action (active participation, agency).

A Moment with the Sea event followed with a less structured form of reflection, inviting individuals and communities to spend a moment thinking about and with the Baltic sea. In celebration of Itämeripäivä – Baltic Sea Day – the event called for messages of love, concern, gratitude, confession, and/or fear for the sea to be sent and written with chalk onto rocks along the Baltic shoreline.

The lead project author Julia Lohmann presented the Baltic Sea Lab project and related themes in ocean literacy at the New European Bauhaus Dialogues – Arctic Design Week event (March 2021) and later at the Bauhaus of the Seas conference, as part of the New European Bauhaus initiative – Roundtable ‘Transformative Economies: Ecosocial Wellbeing and the Politics of Participation’ (May 2021). In June 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab ExP team contributed some of their seaweed artifacts, including the beautiful KombuKamui dress, to the Archive of Vibrant Matter, as part of the Porto Design Biennale in Portugal. Another seaweed artifact, the large sculpture named Kombu Ahtola, was shown at the exhibition The World As We Don’t Know It, organised at the Droog Design space, Netherlands. The exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers features 20 international artists presenting their visions on the climate crisis.

In September 2021, Baltic Sea Lab authors unveiled the Seaweed Shrine – a collective sculpture documenting ongoing practice-based research and exploration into algae and seaweeds conducted together with students and staff at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The Shrine co-authors connect their expertise in design, marine biology and chemistry to engage audiences with themes in ocean literacy, material development and the agency of seaweed. Exhibited as part of the Helsinki Design Week, the Shrine aims to alter foster people’s capacities to care for their surroundings while attending to more-than-human values and interests.

The workshop enables interdisciplinary exchange among food-oriented researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in working towards eco-socially sustainable food systems, following the aim to support long-term collaborations and gather participants into a globally distributed network for sustainable food transitions. By nurturing a relational food network, the workshop authors want to cultivate a critical human-food interaction scholarship and ensure that co-creative outcomes of this interdisciplinary work are disseminated to wider public.

Each workshop day focuses on a distinct theme: the day 1 titled Fantastic(e)ating Food Futures: Reimagining Human Food Interactions examines interdependencies between food, eating and social practices, and critically engages with future flourishing through food-tech innovation. The day 2 Designing with More-than-Human Food Practices for Climate Resilience focuses specifically on more-than-human food practices and how they could be plausibly incorporated into food systems.

The two workshop days are thematically intertwined and carefully designed to be complementary: the fantastic food futures imaginaries co-created on day one lay the groundwork for thinking about plausible more-than-human food practices on day two.

The workshop (July 6-7th 2020) is now finished, outcomes were compiled into a collaborative More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook featuring eleven recipes for experimental, sustainable, and just food practices (published in April 2021). In June 2022, the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook was awarded a Special Award of the Jury at the Umeå Food Symposium 2022.

The workshop is organised as part of a long-term experimental design research practice of the FFF collective that works with food as a research subject and tangible bio-design material. Starting from food as an everyday practice and eco-social concern, the FFF’s objective is to support imaginative, co-creative action for a positive change.

The two-day workshop Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures experiments with food as bio-design material and an accessible starting point from which to explore values, concerns, and imaginaries associated with food-tech futures and climate resilience. Participants share food boundary objects, engage in foraging walks, work with diverse food design props, co-designed scenarios and propose diverse imaginative approaches for how to nurture transformations towards sustainable futures. The workshop was organised by the Feeding Food Futures (FFF) collective and collaborators and took place in July 2020, at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference.

The workshop enables interdisciplinary exchange among food-oriented researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in working towards eco-socially sustainable food systems, following the aim to support long-term collaborations and gather participants into a globally distributed network for sustainable food transitions. By nurturing a relational food network, the workshop authors want to cultivate a critical human-food interaction scholarship and ensure that co-creative outcomes of this interdisciplinary work are disseminated to wider public.

Each workshop day focuses on a distinct theme: the day 1 titled Fantastic(e)ating Food Futures: Reimagining Human Food Interactions examines interdependencies between food, eating and social practices, and critically engages with future flourishing through food-tech innovation. The day 2 Designing with More-than-Human Food Practices for Climate Resilience focuses specifically on more-than-human food practices and how they could be plausibly incorporated into food systems.

The two workshop days are thematically intertwined and carefully designed to be complementary: the fantastic food futures imaginaries co-created on day one lay the groundwork for thinking about plausible more-than-human food practices on day two.

The workshop (July 6-7th 2020) is now finished, outcomes were compiled into a collaborative More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook featuring eleven recipes for experimental, sustainable, and just food practices (published in April 2021). In June 2022, the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook was awarded a Special Award of the Jury at the Umeå Food Symposium 2022.

The workshop is organised as part of a long-term experimental design research practice of the FFF collective that works with food as a research subject and tangible bio-design material. Starting from food as an everyday practice and eco-social concern, the FFF’s objective is to support imaginative, co-creative action for a positive change.

The purpose of the game is to help players co-envision a desirable future state in 2030 and then backcast to find out pathways on how different UN SDGs have been achieved. The game is designed to be free from a specific context: it has a holistic societal outlook and allows players from diverse backgrounds to co-create desirable future scenarios and take away from that what matters in the context of their organization’s ambitions and values. Even though it includes educational elements, its main purpose is inspirational and provides ‘food for thought’ for participants’ work practices. Hence, outcomes of each gameplay vary between participants, depending on what they find interesting and relevant. This diversity of perspectives is aimed to increase out-of-box thinking, find opportunities, and create different pathways for reaching the SDGs.

The Sustainability Futures Game has been designed as a continuation of the Nordic Urban Mobility 2050 Futures Game game, which was created by Hellon for Nordic Innovation Nordic Smart Mobility and Connectivity programme in 2019.  

In practice, the game can be played as a half-day session, or as a one-week sprint with much more in-depth analyses and documented outcomes. A game session starts with an introductory presentation by the facilitators to prepare the players for the right mindset and introduce the key terms and concepts of the game. In the first part, the players collectively write a fictional story, which depicts a desirable near-future state of 2030 for a selected city. The fictional story evolves through several collective tasks including, for instance, visual probes, probing questions, and questions related to the UN Sustainable Development goals. The main objective of this part is to facilitate a dialog on desirable futures and collectively imagine a fictional story that integrates multifaceted characteristics of this future narrative, such as personal desires, societal norms, or political structures.  

The game can be seen as an example of a futures-oriented design game that helps participants make the abstract and ambiguous topic more engaging and personal by incorporating elements from design, games, and fictional storytelling. The game session combines varying methods from arts and design, such as improvisation, fictional storytelling, visual prompts, and creative ideation. 

During Autumn 2020, Hellon organised online and physical game sessions with different service designers, researchers, sustainability experts, and system designers which resulted in continuous iteration and redesign of the original version of the game. The final design has been tested in November 2020, with sustainability professionals from the FIBS Corporate Responsibility Network – Finland’s leading enterprise network to promote financially, socially and ecologically sustainable business.

During the first quarter of 2021, Hellon met 15 public and private organisations in Finland, to present the Game and gather feedback. The game was further presented at Hellon’s online webinar and followed by a game session “Helsinki 2030” with selected webinar participants representing different public organizations. In autumn 2021, Hellon organized one more game session for adult students at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences.

Invocation for Hope invites humanity to reassess its place in the natural world. To emerge from the ashes of fire-blackened trees into resurgent greenery – and a glistening pool with a surprise below the surface. The vast, immersive installation examines the complex interconnected relationships throughout the natural world, and raises the possibility of a more-than-human future – a post-anthropocentric planet in which humanity is just one part of a dynamic and multifaceted ecosystem. Audiences are invited to travel through a grid of burnt and blackened pines, salvaged from a recent wildfire, towards a resurgent living forest at its center, where multiple species living in harmony with humanity offer a promise of a new way of living.

In this cradle of biodiversity, you come to a freshwater pool, which reflects, not your own face, but another creature – a bison, an otter, a bird of prey – coming to the water to drink. The pool is surrounded by a cluster of nearly thirty different living trees, including oak, hornbeam, apple, silver birch, and mounds of biodiversity where mosses, grasses, lichens and shrubs grow symbiotically together over the course of the installation. These living ecologies are nourished by regular watering, grow lamps, and natural light from the large skylight on the museum ceiling.

Accompanied by a soundscape created by visionary musician Cosmo Sheldrake, the installation leads viewers one by one on a personal journey from the ravages of the climate crisis to the possibility of renewal and a deeper connection with nature. Wild maples, oaks, birches, and larches spring up and around mosses, ferns, and lichens. Sounds of bird and animal orchestras begin to fill the forest.

With the pool in its heart, this resurgent forest gives visitors the chance to reflect on their place in this more-than-human world – a part of the planet, not masters of it. Encouraging people to reflect on our fragile, interconnected relationship with the natural world, Invocation for Hope explores opportunities to create practices of more-than-human care for our climate-altered futures through ideas around resurgence, redistribution, reparation, and rewilding.

Superflux considers the climate crisis to be what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’ – a phenomenon of such spatial and temporal scale that it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully grasp it. Invocation for Hope explores the complexity of climate change as a hyperobject, making it resonant and meaningful and finding pathways of hope amid disaster. The starting point for the installation is the idea that climate change is the inevitable result of a worldview that sees nature as an exploitable resource rather than a complex and interconnected system of life.

“Climate change is not a problem we can ‘solve’ but rather a predicament we must navigate with responsibility and urgency.”

Jon Ardern, co-founder Superflux

The creation of Invocation for Hope required the installation of more than 400 trees within the MAK. In collaboration with the forestry and fire departments of Austria’s Neunkirchen region, trees that had been burned in a recent wildfire were salvaged and transported to the museum. One of the main contributors to the spread of wildfires is an approach to forestry that prioritises monoculture as a means of maximising yield – single-species forests burn faster. As the result of a human attempt to exert control over nature, the fire-blackened forest serves as a synecdoche for anthropogenic climate change as a whole.

The trees are arranged in a symmetric grid so, as the viewer passes through them to the living oasis at the centre of the installation, they move from an imposed, rigid order to the organic exuberance of nature. The pool at the centre is surrounded by a cluster of nearly thirty different living trees, including oak, hornbeam, apple, silver birch, and mounds of biodiversity where mosses, grasses, lichens and shrubs will grow symbiotically together over the course of the installation. These living ecologies are nourished by regular watering, grow lamps and natural light from the large skylight on the museum ceiling. 

Superflux’s practice does not merely consider ways of avoiding climate crisis but looks beyond ecological collapse, into the more-than-human future. Invocation of Hope can thus be seen as a companion piece to the studio’s other CreaTures ExP and contribution to La Biennale di Venezia 2021: Refuge for Resurgence. Superflux explores the relationship and impact of man and the environment through its ‘mytho-poetic’ framework: Instead of a direct representation of the dynamics of this relationship, the installation takes a more abstract and symbolic position.

“Our proposal for a way out of this dilemma is to completely change the way we view ourselves and our relationship with nature. Instead of seeing humans as separate from nature, we need to understand that we are a part of it. By radically changing our attitude toward natural systems and the ecology of our planet, we have the best chance to reverse the damage we’ve done. How might we – humans and non-humans – truly engage in collaborative living?”

Anab Jain, co-founder Superflux

After the exhibition is over, Superflux will re-plant the trees, creating a small re-wilded community space of contemplation in the city of Vienna. The hope is that this space continues, in the same way as the installation does, to be a place for people to reconsider and reflect on our relationship with nature.

As part of Superflux’s ongoing mission to explore hope through crisis towards a more-than-human future, audiences were invited to a dinner table around which multiple species gather as equals. In response to the Venice Biennale’s theme – ‘How Will We Live Together?’ – Refuge for Resurgence considered how all forms of life on earth might come together to celebrate their ecological interdependence in a post-Anthropocene world — a symbolic home where all species can prosper with resilience, adaptation, and hope.

Refuge for Resurgence presents a magnificent four-meter-long table, hand-made in Didcot from the wood of a wild Surrey oak tree in collaboration with Gareth Huw Lewis of Classic Watercraft. Placed around the table are fourteen wooden stools, each one carefully customised to suit its intended occupant. As the viewer enters the space, they are beckoned by a bespoke soundscape, a chorus recital of a poem that brings the story of the banquet, and its mythological origin story, powerfully to life.

The banquet attendees represent a cross-section of life on a resurgent Earth; inclusive of species that were once domesticated, or might have been considered ‘weeds’, ‘pests’ or ‘vermin’ under human domination, but are now reclaiming their rightful place in the ecological order. Around this table, three humans – man, woman and child – join a fox, rat, wasp, pigeon, cow, wild boar, snake, beaver, wolf, raven and mushroom.

Each creature has a place set at the table, but only the wasp, mushroom and raven (in taxidermied form) physically join the installation. By exploring each place around the table, the viewer can infer the identity of the guests from finely detailed clues on display. These include species-symbolic cutlery, hand-crafted from materials foraged from a former world (avian bones, brakelights, twigs, a rusted circuit board or telephone wire); food offerings carefully catered for each guest; and ceramic plates meticulously illustrated by illustrator Nicola Ferrao with mytho-poetic scenes depicting the species protagonists and their narrative journeys, from destruction to resurgence.

“We’re drawing on ideas of folklore, mythology, the transformative potential of ritual and ceremony. We want to open up poetic aspects of other worlds that might feel enigmatic – or even magical. This is an invocation and a prayer for a different kind of world.”

– Jon Ardern, co-founder, Superflux

The table sits beneath a trio of suspended LCD screens that form a triptych window onto the world outside. Created by designer Sebastien Tiew, the windows reveal a cityscape in the aftermath of catastrophe – streets are flooded, buildings lie in ruins, the urban fabric lies shredded – but the vision is far from dystopian.

Green plants and trees are creeping in to reclaim the city, and the wildlife that was previously barred from human spaces is finding its way back to the streets and making a new home. From the perspective of the creatures at the banquet, nature is building a new world from the wreckage of the old. Their task is to work together and find their respective places within it.

“Our proposal for a way out of this dilemma is to completely change the way we view ourselves and our relationship with nature. Instead of seeing humans as separate from nature, we need to understand that we are a part of it. By radically changing our attitude toward natural systems and the ecology of our planet, we have the best chance to reverse the damage we’ve done. How might we – humans and non-humans – truly engage in collaborative living?”

– Anab Jain, co-founder, Superflux

After being shown at the Venice Biennale, Refuge for Resurgence will travel to Amsterdam, where it will be exhibited by Droog. Then, it will join London Barbican’s touring show ‘Our Time on Earth’, exhibiting first at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery, and then across European venues for a duration of five years.

Under the mentorship of different invited artists and experts, participants delve deep into the possible uses of fungi as organisms that provide a viable alternative to unsustainable materials such as plastics. Fungi may well represent a revolution in the field of new biomaterials and can be also seen as a live, widespread wetware that humans and art can interact with through signaling. The community gathered around MyCoBiont workshops and events – including students, permaculture and fungi enthusiasts, researchers, and designers – is invited to learn from artists and other professionals who have been working with mycelium in diverse experimental ways.

The initial workshop in the series was led by Rok Zalar and Bojana Rudovič Žvanut from Gobnjak, an initiative for urban mushrooming and Kersnikova’s partner organization. The workshop consisted of 7 parts and introduced participants to the lifecycle of fungi and the basics of their nutrition and reproduction. Together with the skilled tutors, participants explored suitable substrates for mycelial growth and learned about the preparation and sterilization of vessels and microbial cultures suitable for fungi cultivation. They also built a mini cultivation chamber, providing suitable conditions for mycelium growth, and crafted their own molds for mycelial bricks. Mycelium was further explored as a commonly-used material for food, packaging, and building material.

The second workshop titled Radio Mycelium was led by the artist Martin Howse and focused on constructing a series of experimental situations examining a new wetware imaginary of fungal mycelium in relation to local, global, and universal electromagnetic signals. Participants built DIY radio receivers, tested the reception of signals, and further explored the connections between mycelium and deep space radio signals, noting simple parallels between the scaled formations of radio telescope arrays, and the arrayed forms of certain mushroom bodies.

At the third workshop Becoming-with Fungi led by artist Mary Maggic, participants explored the detoxifying properties of fungi, experimenting with an artistic household product that contains a xenoestrogen ingredient with hormone-mimicking and displacing properties. Those hormones were extracted with DIY techniques, mixed into a xenoestrogen cocktail, and fed to the Oyster mushroom which was then grown on Petri dishes and stained with Remazol blue, a synthetic fabric dye. Participants will check their growth over time to observe how the mushrooms metaphorically responded to the toxic residues of human industrial capitalism.

Taro Knopp lead the fourth co-creative workshop that took place in February 2022. Tied to Taro’s long-term project titled ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus, the workshop invited participants to construct an installation consisting of transparent acrylic globes equipped with various technological sensors, radio transmitters and receivers. These closed and self-sustaining eco-systems combine different locally extracted organic materials and technological components. The electronic devices inside the globes sense the changes in the living mycelia and create a sound environment with radio waves, thereby creating a symbolic techno-organic machine. The mycelium globes have become a part of a permanent exhibition of artworks at Kersnikova and will enable continuous observation, research and creation of new combinations in the years to come. Artists and biohackers will thus have the opportunity to monitor this inspirational hybrid ecosystem over a prolonged period of time. The ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus workshop, together with an accompanying sound performance, is also conducted as part of the CreaTures Festival in Seville.

The MyCoBiont was concluded with the exhibition Sound for Fungi: Homage to Indeterminacy led by artist Theresa Schubert. The work began as a laboratory experiment in which Schubert played sinus frequencies to fungi mycelia that she collected in the woods near her home in Berlin. After several weeks of observing these collected samples, housed in custom-made soundproof boxes, most showed a positive response to the sound, growing faster and denser than samples grown in silence. An interactive video installation simulates a Schubert experiment in which sound influenced mycelial growth. This biological process is explored using a tracking sensor, where hand movements simulate the role of sound frequency and modify fungal growth in real-time. The digital three-dimensional environment transitions between macro and cellular perspectives, revealing fragile topologies composed of many nodes and connections. These offer insights into the complexity of the subterranean network of microbes that connect the ‘Wood Wide Web’.