Forensic Architecture is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK). Working with activists and civil society groups, they investigate human and environmental rights violations committed by state and corporate bodies. Forensic Architecture’s work is rooted in architectural research and practice. This group of architects, researchers and technologists, gather data points about a violent event from a range of accessible sources – such as satellite imagery, witness testimony, atmospheric sensors, and cameraphone footage. They cross-reference and re-compose these into a timeline of what happened and when. This practice of ‘counter-forensics’ takes place outside the state or corporation and beyond their sources. Forensic Architecture have provided evidence to national and international courts as part of legal cases and investigations, and their work is also regularly exhibited in art galleries and other cultural institutions.

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The Centre for Contemporary Nature is a sub-group of Forensic Architecture that focusses on the environment. Conflicts are not simply human; plants, animals and ecosystems can also be destroyed by states or corporations. In some cases, the extraction of natural resources is a major trigger for armed conflict, resulting in harm to people and ecosystems. In other cases, environmental destruction is a side effect of war.

Forensic Architecture’s spatial practice often demonstrates the interconnectedness between ‘ecological’ and ‘social’ forms of violence, for example in their investigation of gold mining in the Amazon rainforest (2019-present), which links the destruction of the rainforest and its ecosystems with attacks on the Yanomami people and specific policies of the Bolsonaro administration.

Forensic Architecture’s ongoing work in Gaza (including with Palestinian collaborators Al-Haq) shows a similar pattern, where herbicide spraying and targeted attacks on chemical factories create toxic environmental events whose impacts can last for generations.

Transformative creative practice:

Forensic Architecture incorporate tools and techniques from art and design into their investigations, and art institutions are also an important outlet for their work. In 2018, they were nominated for the Turner Prize in art.   

Forensic Architecture’s founder Eyal Weizman explains “we don’t want to be limited as a technical service to the judicial system, we want it to do political work, we believe that evidence is only as good as the political process that can use it. Showing the evidence in galleries can allow for different forms of engagement, and levels of reflection” (UNSW talk, May 2022).

Since institutions each have their own boundaries, one strategy used by Forensic Architecture is to show their work in different settings.

“No forum is ever neutral, no institution in our society is a kind of perfect arena to present material in. What you can do is to offset the limitations of one by taking your evidence from the court to the media, to the art space to academic environments also” Eyal Weizman, UNSW talk, May 2022.

In a recent book called Forensic Aesthetics, media theorist Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman also use counter-forensics to contribute to art and media theory. They suggest that aesthetics should be refigured in terms of sensing and sense-making – a capacity that all kinds of material artefacts, from networked sensors and AI to clay bricks have. The gallery is not a privileged space per se, but is a somewhere that we slow down and pay attention to aesthetic connections.

“Think of galleries or courts as kind of media systems… in a gallery you slow down your movement, you attend to the detail, you look at the very specific kinds of objects that brought together in certain kinds of ways” – Matthew Fuller, interview Pierre d’Alancaisez, February 2022.

Learning and evaluation:

Since the organisation was founded in 2010, Forensic Architecture have embraced rapid technological changes, notably the increasing availability of satellite mapping data, new 3D modelling tools, user-generated content, and Artificial Intelligence systems.

“We take projects only inasmuch as we can develop new techniques… We never take projects that we know how to do. So, it requires you to constantly innovate in order to momentarily be above what you think the forces here… can do with the evidence” – Eyal Weizman, UNSW talk, May 2022.

Working to investigate well-resourced state and corporate actors, means engaging in constant innovation and learning in order to be able to counter their techniques.

Learn more:

Forensic Architecture’s website

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s interview with Pierre d’Alancaisez.

Eyal Weizman’s talk at UNSW.

Fate of the World is a global strategy game dedicated to solving the climate crisis, which was created by Red Redemption in 2010. The game is set ten years in the future, in the year 2020. All twelve regions of the world have opted to put their faith into a new governing body – the Global Environmental Organisation (GEO), and you – the player – are the President. You must take on a series of simulated real world policy missions. You win if you reach 2120 with your climate and societies still intact. You lose if the world warms more than 3 degrees centigrade, if the global human development index falls to an unacceptable level, or if regions lose faith in your leadership.

‘Mankind stands at the brink of two disasters: the spectre of peak fuel production alongside ever worsening global warming. Your job is to navigate humanity’s way through these potential disasters and reach 2120 with hope still intact.’ – The game’s ‘Peak Oil’ mission

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The game features a background animation of the earth from space slowly revolving, indicating that days, months and years on earth are slowly passing. As President of GEO you can navigate to one of twelve geographic regions, and using a series of intricate menus you can make drastic policy changes with one click. Decarbonise energy systems in Europe? . Shift food systems in India? . Boost research funding in Brazil? . After each turn the game moves on 5 years, showing whether your actions have had utopian or apocalyptic consequences (or something in between).

The game’s strength is in combining multiple datasets about societal and environmental development into one model-like system. The game is eco-social in tying together sustainable development for the world’s poorest (you lose if they go hungry) with robust climate action. The game’s developers worked in collaboration with Oxford University climate scientist Myles Allen, to create a comprehensive and integrated overview of pathways to decarbonisation using official data sources, notably from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Transformative creative practice:

Climate change is often framed as a ‘wicked problem’ of immense complexity that is difficult for individual people to fully understand. By putting the Fate of the World into players’ hands, as Presidents of GEO, the game invites them to experience the complexity for themselves in a much more interactive way than reading policy documents or looking at individual datasets. Indeed, it may help players to question the lack of concerted political action around the urgent challenge of climate collapse. However, the game remains complex and best suited to players that have at least a basic knowledge of how earth systems are changing, and the dominant policy perspectives.

On learning and evaluation:

An increasingly large body of academic research explores the possibilities of playfulness, and game-like formats in helping people to imagine alternative futures. CreaTures Researcher Joost vervoort argues that deep seriousness and deep playfulness are not opposites, but rather deeply intertwined in our everyday lives. In this blog post, he asks:

‘Can we let go of the associations of playfulness as the opposite of seriousness, and therefore perhaps also frivolous, superficial and not valuable? Playfulness can loosen us from the constraints of society and its norms and values, and help us to re-perceive what is simply considered to be accepted reality. It can subvert and invert the ‘normal’, it can challenge existing power structures and ideologies and spark the imagination needed for new societal alternatives. With playfulness, after all, comes humor, the breaking and hacking of rules, and imaginative pretending…it also points to endless possibilities for imagining things otherwise.’

Learn more:

The game is available on the Steam platform.

Since 2019, developer Soothsayer Games have been exploring how to raise funds for an updated iteration of the game, Fate of the World online.

More blogs from Joost Vervoort on games and sustainability are available at Anticiplay.

Context:

Cape Farewell was founded in 2001 by the photographer David Buckland, following a collaboration with climate modellers at the Hadley Centre for Climate Science. At that time, models were showing the scale and urgency required to tackle climate change, yet overall public awareness was low. Buckland established Cape Farewell in order to promote exchanges between creative practitioners and scientists. The aim was to create new, high-quality artworks that would reach a range of audiences and spark discussions about climate change as a cultural problem, caused by industrialised ways of life.

Transformative creative practice:

Over the last twenty years, Cape Farewell has organised a wide range of activities. One strand of work has involved bringing creative practitioners and scientists into dialogue. Often that has happened through a series of unique expeditions, which have taken scientists artists, writers and musicians to the High Arctic, the Andes in Peru, and the Scottish Islands – places where environmental changes are increasingly visible. These compelling field investigations were intended to provide creative practitioners with embodied experiences of climate breakdown, to which they responded by creating new works for public audiences.

In addition, Cape Farwell has also created compelling climate-focussed artworks and showcased these to large-scale international audiences. An extensive programme of exhibitions, such as Carbon 12, Carbon 13 and Carbon 14 in Paris (France) Texas (USA) and Toronto (Canada) have invited audiences to think about climate change as a cultural concern. Cape Farwell’s many commissions have enabled the production of new works of performance and experience focused on the changing relationship between human societies and earth systems – from poetry to installations based on global micro-climates.

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Over their long history, Cape Farewell has investigated the relationships between human societies and their environments from many different perspectives. Climate change remains a pressing challenge for us all and takes a central position in Cape Farewell’s work. However, the team has also explored other sustainability challenges, such as the environmental impacts of farming and food production, the health of rivers, global air pollution, the life of islands, and the changing Arctic.

Cape Farewell’s home for artist residencies, The Watershed in Dorset, has knitted the organisation into a local landscape with its own concerns, in addition to outward-facing expeditions.

Our Life is Here – The Marshall Islands expedition.

In August 2023 twenty artists and scientists voyage to the Atolls of the Marshall Islands whose average height above sea level is less that 2m. Their 3000 year old culture is under serious threat from the climate crises and in particular, sea level rise. The expedition narrates their plight focussing on climate justice and the counties of the global south who are unfairly picking up the tab of western excess.

The core of the project is a sea expedition with visual and written artists who will experience the Marshall Islands and the impact of climate change on the region, produce content for media outlets, and eventually produce artwork inspired by their experiences. The goal is to have at least half of the artists come from the Pacific Islands and to bring on board Marshall Islands-based scientists and anthropologists, as well as filmmakers, film editors, and social media figures. Parallel to the main expedition, a team of 10 Marshallese youth will sail off, eventually linking up with the expedition team.

On learning and evaluation:

Cape Farewell has worked with researchers to try to understand how the experiences of environmental artworks may influence visiting audiences. The Pollution Pods artwork was part of the collaborative and inter-disciplinary Climart project, which included researchers at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Commissioned in 2017 and touring since then, the micro-climates of global cities are simulated inside a series of interconnected glass domes – including their polluted air.

Using a questionnaire to survey visitors after their immersion in the pods, researchers found increases in individuals’ intention to act after physically experiencing the scents of air around the world. This was accompanied by a piece of qualitive research in partnership with the Climate Psychology Alliance, including a published DreamTime workshop which included the artist, Michael Pinsky.

Learn more:

Visit Cape Farewell’s website to learn more about their 20+ year history of working on culture and climate.

Project credits:

Cape Farewell is supported by the National Lottery Community Fund and the Arts Council England.

The People’s Bank of Govanhill is a long term collaborative project, exploring ways of putting feminist economics into practice in community contexts, collectively ideating radically different economic models beyond capitalism. It is based within the Govanhill area of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, and was initiated by visual artist Ailie Rutherford, during a residency with Govanhill Baths Community Trust (a grassroots organisation formed to save the area’s historic public baths).

Transformative creative practice:

In 2015, Ailie Rutherford began mapping local networks of exchange in Govanhill, and exploring the potential for community currencies. She took these experiments to the streets, often performing as an iceberg – a visual metaphor for the feminist economy. She talked to local people about all the subsistence and care labour hidden blow the water line, and how this contributes to economic value, too.  

“My practice is often about finding accessible ways to talk about feminist economics, so I did this performance in a chip shop, in a kebab house, on the street, encouraging people to add to the iceberg from their own experience. It’s about valuing the forms of labour and the ways of being that have been deliberately undervalued under capitalism – acknowledging that it’s often feminised labour such as care work that has been systematically devalued.” – Ailie Rutherford, Guest at Gray’s lecture, Feb 2022

The People’s Bank of Govanhill has grown from these early performances and currency experiments to include larger scale collaborations and inter-local projects across the globe, with one foot still very much rooted in the local community.

In 2018, Ailie and a team of women opened the Swap Market in a former pawn shop in Govanhill. This was a space to put feminist economics into practice within the local community. Over 1500 residents became members. They used the space to swap goods and skills, and to run music, language and film events. The project reflected Govanhill’s diversity, making space for different cultural backgrounds.

While working on the Swap Market project, the team of women co-organising the space became a more formally constituted women-led collective, the Feminist Exchange Network. This is inclusive of transgender and intersex women as well as non-binary and gender fluid people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experience of women.

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The People’s Bank and Swap Market projects open up the ‘black box’ of the economy – going beyond the market focus that is so common in the mainstream media. This includes asking questions about planetary heath and the use of the earth’s resources. Feminist perspectives are often holistic, addressing questions of ecological and social wellbeing together. Ailie Rutherford’s practice centres on organising creative and accessible gathering spaces for people to explore these current problems on their own terms, and to create alternative ways of doing things together.

“We work together to build shared spaces, environments and systems that might just allow us to exchange and create in a world that will outlive capitalism… This work is really about connecting with people differently, finding joy together where we can. In a world that is so driven by individualism, competition and greed moments of real connection and collective action seem increasingly important” – Ailie Rutherford Guest at Gray’s lecture, Feb 2022

On learning and evaluation:

The People’s Bank and Swap Market projects work prefiguratively – their feminist aims are modelled by the project organisation in the design of all the activities. The rapid growth of the Swap Market led to reflection and further experimentation with modes of feminist governance. Rutherford and her colleagues Carmen Sawers, Caroline Darke and Elisa Bujokova now co-run a Community Interest Company called the Feminist Exchange Network, which also includes 20 associate members.

“What does feminist governance look like? How do we ensure that we don’t fall into the standard hierarchies as we grow? Or when things take us by surprise. It’s quite easy to do things in a way that counters the capitalist model when you’ve got plenty of time to think about it but when things take you by surprise you can more easily fall into those norms.” Ailie Rutherford

Nominator:

“The swap market, it’s such a simple thing – you bring something you take something away. It’s a rule set that allows people to spend time together. It allows people to think critically about something that’s part of their every day…It might be the first time anyone’s ever invited them to question what money is, or to think about the fact that they provide free care. It opens up the space to have different kinds of conversations – people start to question something that so fundamental as money and our relationship with it.” – Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield

Learn More:

People’s Bank and FEN website

Project credits:

Artists and activists who have collaborated with The People’s Bank of Govanhill, Feminist Exchange Network and Swap Market include: Ailie Rutherford, Inga Zaiceva, Calina Toqir, Monster Chetwynd, Rabiya Choudhry, Ellie Harrison, Zara Kitson, Rae-Yen Song, Sibell Barrowclough, Usma Ashraf, Rahela Cirpaci, Altron Hamilton, Alaya Ang, Najma Abukar, Carmen Sawers, Brian Morgan, Nadine Gorency, Katherine MacKinnon, Caroline Darke, Shreya Agarwal, Bettina Nissen, Libby Odai, Chrissie Ardill, Vishwanath Pasumarthi, Foxy, Dania Thomas, Raman Mundair, Elaine Gallagher, Layla-Roxanne Hill, AB Silvera, Sapna Agarwal, Deniz Uster, Magpie, Rumpus Room, Nat Walpole, Bob Moyler, Jean Cameron, Re-Peat, UNA festival, Saoirse Amira Anis, Mandy Roberts, Zineerah Ali, Maria Tolia, Thelma Okey-Adibe, Teresa Feldmann, COCO Collective, Más Arte Más Acción, Colectiva Curuba, Elsa Caucus, Padmini Ray-Marray and Arts Initiative Tokyo. 

The Stove Network was started by a small group of artists in 2011, who wanted to use creative practice to aid the regeneration of the rural market town of Dumfries, Scotland (UK). Stove used participatory events to engage townspeople in imagining futures for the town centre, creating a community-led vision for regeneration, as well as platforming the arts through a range of festivals and events.

Stove followed an emergent process of co-creation with local people, building capacity in the town and its organisation, eventually leading to the regeneration of a section of the high street called Midsteeple Quarter. It is the only arts-led development trust in Scotland.

Transformative creative practice:

“It’s about visioning for places, so using creative practice as a way of visioning, and getting under-represented voices being heard in local decision making and place planning, which I think comes into the sustainable future conversation quite strongly” – Matt Baker

The Stove Network’s approach embeds arts practice within communities, by creating a physical hub that features a venue, café and offices on Dumfries High Street. Stove uses creative events at the hub (and beyond), to gather people together in engaging ways, enabling their voices to be heard within planning and regeneration processes that may otherwise feel closed or inaccessible. Stove’s approach has been so successful that they have started working at a regional level. The ‘What We Do Now’ project aims to re-create creative place hubs in five towns across Dumfries and Galloway, to enable other communities to adopt arts-led processes that fit their localities.  

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Stove’s place-based work engages holistically with the environmental aspects of local regeneration. For example, the Nithraid project features an annual river race and festival that helps the community to forge relationships with the town’s river that are both practical and meaningful, against the backdrop of flood management consultations in the town.

As an organisation, they input into regeneration strategies that have practical consequences for the management of the local environment, and also deal with future action on climate change, equality, diversity and inclusion.

On learning and evaluation:

The Stove Network team have been keen to document their approach, alongside other social innovations in the Dumfries and Galloway region. They led the Embers: Creative place-making in South Scotland research project (supported by the South of Scotland Economic Partnership and the Carnegie Trust UK). Over a 6 month process of reflection and consultation, they worked with local organisations in Dumfries and Galloway, and policy-makers to create a framework about what works in creative place-making.  

“The framework is more like an approach to working, it’s like a values and principles based approach because again the project looks very different in each place because of the different set of circumstances… So, it’s like who needs to be heard, who’s not being heard who’s involved in decision making? It’s more like a set of interrogations and principles” – Katharine Wheeler

Learn more:

Find a longer and more detailed case study in the CreaTures-commissioned report Transforming futures through place-based creative practices, written by Gemma Lawrence and Emma Hall from Creative Carbon Scotland.

Visit The Stove Network website – https://thestove.org/

Context:

David Burns and Austin Young use fruit as a starting point for artistic exploration. Working under the name Fallen Fruit (originally with Matias Viegener) the duo has produced a series of participatory artworks that explore the cultural and social lives of fruit trees. They began this work in 2004 by mapping the location of fruit trees in public space, using digital platforms to make fruit trees more visible a common resource. From there, the duo moved to planting new fruit trees as part of participatory events that bring together local communities, plus cultural and municipal leaders. The Endless Orchard online mapping platform invites visitors to log their local public fruit trees and to plant new trees of their own, participating in what the duo call the world’s largest public artwork ‘a noncontiguous public fruit orchard planted, mapped shared and cared for by everyone who participates’.

Hope Builders: Fallen Fruit – PBS PSA for KVCR, produced and directed by Maria Burton.

Connections to eco-sustainability:

“Trees that are planted in public space save money because of their impact on the environment and public health. Public fruit trees benefit the environment by catching rainwater they also remove CO² and other pollutants from the air. They reduce crime – there are several theories as to why, whether they draw more people into public spaces, they foster community cohesion. It changes the nature and feeling of a neighbourhood” – Austin Young

Fallen Fruit combine multiple forms of artistic, cultural and environmental production, engaging a variety of different audiences in their work. Planting fruit trees delivers direct eco-social benefits for soil and air, as well as providing a long-lasting healthy food sources for humans and other species. However as Young points out, their practice also has an aesthetic dimension. It changes the feeling of a neighbourhood and shifts the relationships within it.

Transformative creative practices:

“Sometimes people don’t understand how planting fruit trees could be art. But when I think about art in the 21^st century I think that the role art has in our lives is to capture our imagination about something that we think we already know, and allow us to open our mind even more. The work we do, we do that in a way that doesn’t look like a photograph, a painting or a sculpture but the impression and the effect it has on people has the same effect as art is supposed to do.” – David Burns

When tree planting is performed as a cultural practice, the acts of digging, planting and nurturing fruit trees become part of a wider set of imaginative explorations – in this case, Fallen Fruit ask: what might future cities be like, if shared food growing was prioritised? Fallen Fruit’s recent creations explore historical depictions of fruit in institutional archives. They have created large-scale wallcoverings that blend botanical and creative renderings of fruit. These are immersive portraits of specific places, through which fruit has travelled – as commodities, scientific specimens and forms of pleasure.

Learn more:

Visit the Fallen Fruit website – https://fallenfruit.org/

Visit the Endless Orchard fruit map – https://endlessorchard.com/

Nominator:

“So they started as a collective of people mapping fruit trees in a city…there wasn’t any transformational narrative at the beginning, but then it started to grow when they started adding all kinds of art”. – Markéta Dolejšová

Project credits:

Fallen Fruit – David Allen Burns and Austin Young

Linked video – Hope Builders: Fallen Fruit – PBS PSA for KVCR; produced and directed by Maria Burton.

The video game Escape from Woomera was created in 2003 by a collective of developers, artists and journalists. It aimed to give players a sense of what life was like in an Australian asylum detention centre. Since journalistic access to these sites was severely limited, the collective used testimonies of former detainees to model the Woomera detention centre in virtual space. Players take on the character of Mustafa, who escaped from Iran after the torture of his parents and whose asylum claim has just been denied. To win the game Mustafa must find a way to escape, while maintaining his levels of hope. Only methods and techniques attempted by detainees in real life are allowed in the game. If his levels of hope fall too low, Mustafa is deported and the game ends.    

“The game was one of the first depictions that Australians got of what it was actually like inside a detention centre – and it was a game, it wasn’t an undercover journalism exposé” – Rachel Roberts, Applespiel

At the time the game generated large amounts of press coverage, drawing condemnation from Philip Ruddock (then Minister for Immigration) and a host of refugee and human rights representatives (Golding, 2013). At least part of this reflected the choice of a playful medium to platform serious and critical content, in what turned out to be an early example of what are now called ‘serious’ games.

Between 2018-2020, theatre artists Applespiel revisited the game as part of a series of participatory performances, riffing on the live format of e-sports tournaments. The piece was entitled Return to Escape from Woomera. While individual audience members would take turns to play the game on a large projection screen, performers would lead the rest of the group through a series of facilitated discussions and reflections about the history of the game, and the current state of asylum policy. Each event featured a different panel of former asylum seekers, commentators or researchers that were able to reflect on the previous 15 years.

Asking former asylum seekers to return to traumatic testimonies was not a decision taken lightly by the theatre collective but became part of a shared process of reflection on how current and historic policies have tended towards the repression of non-white communities including refugees and Indigenous Australians.

“These are policies put in place by a white Australia; these are policies that we benefit from. They are from governments that either we, our parents or grandparents have voted for. There is a white obligation to look at this part of our history and this part of our present.” – Rachel Roberts

Transformative creative practices:

The retrospective nature of the performance raises critical questions about the ability of creative practice to make meaningful social change. Although the game was highly successful in bringing visibility to the situation of asylum seekers at the time, Rachel Roberts from Applespiel reflects on how conditions are actually worse today for asylum seekers than in 2003. Over the last 15 years there has been a revolution in the role of video games in society, yet a total stasis in asylum policy.

“we would have audience members who remembered going to rallies in 2002-2004 really thinking, “this has got to change, this will change, this is outrageous, this is such a violation of human rights” and their disillusionment now 16 years later…and having that sit in the room…you are confronted with how little power you have and with how resilient these structures are.” – Rachel Roberts, Applespiel

The performances also introduced younger audiences to the game for the first time and asked them to examine their position on an asylum regime that is deliberately obscured. The act of returning to Escape from Woomera (rather than making an entirely new piece) enables the struggle for refugee rights to be seen as part of a longer movement for change. However, the experience of creating the piece has also shown Roberts the limitations of creative practices.

“it hammers home this feeling that the art we make isn’t going to change anything. It might have some impact on the way someone thinks about something, but it will never be enough. That’s not art’s fault, art does what art can. The systems that we are trying to change are too resistant to being transformed. It’s very easy to get disheartened by thinking – there’s this huge issue and I want it to change and I have this expressive tool that helps me connect to other people, and help people to connect to each other and hopefully even provide new perspectives and create actionable ways forward – but it will never be enough to create mass change.” Rachel Roberts

This poignant reflection highlights the courage that is required to care about something without any medium-term hope for political change. For Applespiel, continuing to meet and talk about refugee rights marks for the historical record that somebody cared enough to bring connect people and to ask them to think differently about human rights.

Connections to sustainability:

Applespiel’s performance does not address sustainability issues directly, but it does speak to key questions about the forms of change that art can (and cannot) engender. Since climate change is widely predicted to trigger an increase in extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heatwaves, many researchers expect this to act as a driver of forced migration, though significant data gaps remain (see IOM, 2020 for an overview). 

Learn more:

http://www.applespiel.com/

Project credits:

Developed for and premiered at Performance Space’s Liveworks festival in October 2018, and also shown at Arts House Melbourne in 2019, and Canberra Theatre Centre in 2020.
Lead artists: Applespiel (Nathan Harrison, Emma McManus, Rachel Roberts, Simon Vaughan), Dramaturge: Paschal Daantos Berry, Technical director: Solomon Thomas
Lighting and set designer: Emma Lockhart-Wilson

Nominator:

“There were moments where you were watching and having to reflect on what decision you’d make in the game. Then you were brought back to reality by the fact that someone on the panel said, “I made that decision and it landed me another five years in detention”. The multi modal element of that was really transformative.” – Lizzie Crouch, nominator

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The methods that the Re.imaginary collective have gathered, designed and adapted are intended to spark alternative paradigms and mindsets. These help us to begin from where we are, by recognising and working on our own assumptions and worldviews (as part of a process of ‘inner transformation’ involving deep reflexivity). At the same time, creative methods can also help to generate inclusive spaces for group work, where others can be invited to participate equitably in the process of developing new forms of knowledge and action for sustainability.

“We want to support holistic and integrated ways of learning and knowing, opening the floor for different ways of creating knowledge, drawing from Indigenous perspectives, experiential learning, somatic embodied ways of knowing and sensing, but also the emotional side of producing knowledge – which is important and so many times dismissed. We have found that creative methods and Theory U processes can help us achieve that.” Angela Moriggi, Re.imaginary project

Creative methods can provide a welcoming platform to weave together these different ways of knowing, contributing to the aim of a truly trans-disciplinary and pluralistic sustainability science.

Transformative creative practice:

The Re.imaginary project has prioritised methods meant to evoke transformative mindsets –  new frames that help to direct and motivate people towards sustainability transformations. Transformative mindsets can be activated by new ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, and envisioning the world. These allow us to imagine and to experience a level of emotional connectedness and care for other beings that other ways of knowing may not. They challenge the anthropocentric worldviews and mindsets that we often carry with us and that shape our everyday actions.

“We try to understand issues from the perspective of other beings, and by doing so we enlarge our horizons. We enlarge our perspectives – not only to try to understand what an ant, or an eagle, or a bear would think of a certain situation – but also, to become more empathetic with other humans.” Angela Moriggi

An important aspect of the Re.imaginary website is that methods and resources are made  visible and usable for everyone. Each method is complemented by specific instructions, allowing people to experiment with them, as well as highlighting their importance as a wider strand of thought and action. The website encourages and enables translations – across different creative fields, into sustainability science (and beyond!). The development of the resources – and communities around the resources – also creates playful spaces where the direction of sustainability science can be (co-)creatively re-visioned.

On learning and evaluation:

Evaluation has been an important part of the events that the ReImaginary team have organised to promote the resource collection. They have been gathering feedback from education, research, collaboration and dissemination events. Iterative learning and evaluation is an active research topic within the team, currently developing new frameworks.

“What we really like to do is to create meaningful processes…not just to use creative methods because they are cool… inserting them here and there. Creativity is really tied into every step of the way. It’s really about the processes and not each specific method.”  Angela Moriggi

Learn more:

Visit the website at: https://www.reimaginary.com/

Pearson, K. R. (2021). Imaginative leadership: A conceptual frame for the design and facilitation of creative methods and generative engagement. In A. Franklin (Ed.), Co-creativity and engaged scholarship: Transformative methods in social sustainability research. Palgrave-Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84248-2

Moriggi A. (2021). An ethos and practice of appreciation for transformative research: Appreciative Inquiry, care ethics, and creative methods. In A. Franklin (Ed.) Co-creativity and engaged scholarship. Transformative methods in social sustainability research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84248-2

Watch the Repositories event on the CreaTures YouTube channel, featuring Kelli Rose Pearson talking about the Re.imaginary website as a repository of transformative methods.

Project credits:

The Re.imaginary team includes Kelli Rose Pearson, Angela Moriggi, Siri Pisters, Anke De Vrieze, Sara Grenni, Marta Nieto Romero.

Partners include: SUSPLACE, RECOMS, Economic Transformations Group, Orca Song Institute, Sustainability Atelier, The Centre for Space, Place and Society, Imaginative Disruptions, ParCentra and Jan van Boeckel.

Context:

2050—An Energetic Odyssey is a future vision of a large-scale renewable energy transition in the North Sea, which aims to meet 90% of the North Sea countries’ energy needs in 2050. It takes the form of an immersive installation, featuring an animated map projected onto a low platform. This moving topography beyond human scale, invites audiences to gather around. Starting in the year 2016, a narrator describes a detailed plan to install 25,000 10MW wind turbines into the North Sea. As the animation plays, the audience sees the map changing every year, as each stage of the transition is completed. The narrator fills in concrete details of the vision, touching on the economics, logistics and ecology of the project.

“When we wake up, will this scenario survive the pressure of the day to day policy dilemmas? We have good reasons to think it can. The interactive production of this installation in the cultural domain, forged a coalition of key actors. It is the result of an intense collaboration between designers and scientists, and a consortium with expert input.” – 2050—An Energetic Odyssey

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

2050 – An Energetic Odyssey was commissioned by the International Architecture Biennial of Rotterdam (IABR) for their 2016 festival. Reflecting their dual role as researchers and cultural producers, they have created the IABR-Ateliers platform for trans-disciplinary investigation. Ateliers are multi-year processes of research and development that orient towards existing global challenges in the built environment. They bring together researchers, policy-makers, industrial and environmental partners. However, the process remains in the cultural domain, allowing alternative priorities and relationships to emerge. The Energetic Odyssey took inspiration from existing efforts to create an offshore grid in the North Sea. An important outcome of the process was renewed relationships between offshore builders, wind turbine producers, ports, utilities companies, environmental organisations and Ministries in the Netherlands. Since the Netherlands held the EU Presidency that year, the installation was also shown to EU leaders and officials.

Transformative creative practice:

Maarten Hajer, the co-designer of the project (with Dirk Sijmons) has described the Energetic Odyssey as a technique of futuring – a dramatic staging of one possible vision of the North Sea’s future. Hajer and his colleague Peter Pelzer, argue that the physical materialisation of future visions can provide ways to attract a range of different groups. For audiences, seeing a future ‘brought to life’ through visual, aural and olfactory cues can engage emotional processes that provide different prompts for decision-making (than information alone). Rich, multi-layered future visions are sites for individual and collective meaning-making and can also contribute to more diffuse social imaginaries of what is possible or desirable. In these ways, creative practices can help to disrupt established patterns of environmental politics and offer some alternatives.   

Learn more:

Visit: https://iabr.nl/nl/projectatelier/Atelier2050

Read an interview with the lead designers: https://scenariojournal.com/article/2050-an-energetic-odyssey/

Hajer, M. A., & Pelzer P. (2018) 2050—An Energetic Odyssey: Understanding “Techniques of Futuring” in the Transition towards Renewable Energy. Energy Research & Social Science 44, 222–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.01.013.

Project credits:

2050–An Energetic Odyssey was produced by IABR in collaboration with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Van Oord, Shell, TenneT, Zeeland Seaports, European Climate Foundation, Natuur & Milieu, RWE, Port of Rotterdam Authority and Port of Amsterdam.

Concept by Maarten Hajer and Dirk Sijmons (lead designer). Research by design and animation by H+N+S Landscape Architects, Ecofys and Tungsten Pro.

“Get better stories, get stories that are positive – get stories that feature things that people really believe bring about change” Seeds co-founder Elena Bennett

The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project gathers real-world initiatives that benefit environments and enhance human well-being. The project aims firstly to collect hopeful stories that demonstrate change is possible, and secondly to provide new materials for the development of future scenarios for environmental governance. Scenarios are stories about how the future might unfold, often used by governing bodies to take decisions in the present. Using elements from real-life change processes to create scenarios is a way to add grounded, positive action into these future visions.

Seeking out transformative practice:

“Anthropocene means a world that is dominated by people… how do you have that, and have it be good? It’s jarring to people – but that’s what I want” Elena Bennett

Human influence on the planet is now so great that it has led to the declaration of a new geological age – the Anthropocene. The title of the project – Seeds of Good Anthropocenes – proved to be a creative provocation. The team used crowdsourcing to identify inspiring initiatives that they call ‘seeds’, reaching out to other UN networks, peers and members of the public via social media platforms. The project seeks out transformative practice across all domains (not just creative practice).

The cases were then written up and logged in an interactive repository on the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes website, providing a resource for researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The project team also hosted place-based workshops in North America, Europe and southern Africa that gathered seed initiatives and used them to create new scenarios using participatory exercises.

“We need a world where there’s a two-way relationship [between humans and nature] and it’s reciprocal… maybe we can learn from some of what our Indigenous partners have been doing for hundreds and thousands of years – this isn’t a static thing… it’s a relationship” Elena Bennett

The seedbank now contains over 500 stories. Most of them address the relationship between people and nature, in ways that were often surprising to the researchers involved.  

“A lot of the seeds that we collected… they would start intending to be a project about ‘natural’ things like gardening or restoring – some way that they were trying to improve the environment. When they got to the end they found that “oh we also changed the social system – we made connections among ourselves and it made all these other things possible, we thought we were just building this garden”….It grounded my feeling that transformation has both social and ecological components to it and really made me see those are really intertwined, more even than I would have said before.” Elena Bennett

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Six distinctive types of seeds have been identified so far, including: social-ecological approaches to food growing, enhancing wellbeing in urban environments, fostering novel approaches to learning and education, processes for equitable decision-making and social movements for just futures (Bennett et al. 2016). But beyond the content of the seeds themselves, Bennett notes how important socio-economic conditions were in even allowing seeds to come into being. Situations where people worked fewer hours in employment meant that they had more time to give to their communities.

“If you’re trying to bring about a different world, what are the drivers, what are the variables that matter? I think that it at least for me it unearthed some different things that I hadn’t seen in scenario building before. The ones that seem to show up a lot are how people conceive of work and time…we’d see people working in ways that they had more time to give to their communities and that just seemed to change everything.” Elena Bennett

On learning and evaluation:

The team made use of smaller pots of funding to develop the project in a range of directions, learning and reflecting iteratively (rather than using formal processes). The case seed collection has contributed to diverse outputs including talks, events, theses, reports and articles. Indeed, the crowdsourcing and participatory scenarios methods have become known more widely as the ‘seeds approach’.    

Learn more:

Visit https://goodanthropocenes.net/

Watch the Repositories event on the CreaTures YouTube channel, featuring Garry Peterson talking about the Seedbank as a repository of transformative cases.

Project credits:

The project team includes Elena Bennett, Garry Peterson, Reinette Biggs, Laura Pereira, Joost Vervoort, Rika Preiser, Timon McPhearson, Albert Norström, Stephen Carpenter, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, Per Olsson, Tanja Hichert, Martin Solan, Victor Galaz, Kimberley Nicholas, Frank Biermann, Myanna Lahsen, Gaia Vince, Erle Ellis, Manjana Milkoreit, Jianchu Xu, Berta Martin López.

This project is made possible through funding from the Future Earth FTI program, PECS, ecoSERVICES, and SIDA.

Nominator:

“The Seeds project involves working with people who are doing creative things in the present – transformative activities from all kinds of places around the world to imagine pathways towards a better future. It is just an incredibly inspiring thing to work on” – Joost Vervoort

Context:

Design researcher Kirsi Hakio worked with the custodians of Elisaari island in Finland to develop a set of ‘awareness-based’ service design methods that help people to tune in to their inner worlds and think of themselves as connected to wider ecosystems. Elisaari island sits off the coast of Helsinki and is accessible to the public for recreation from May to October. Although it is owned by the city, it is managed by an entrepreneurial couple, who run nature-based tourism services there including a café, boating services and camping facilities. Hakio was interested in working with these custodians to develop new services. However, she soon found that traditional service design methods couldn’t adequately account for the island’s main stakeholder: nature. She began exploring new techniques to connect with Elisaari’s human and non-human stakeholders.

“Mainly it’s inhabited by the non-humans, the animals the plants, the nature – they really own the place, and then people come part-time in the year.” – Kirsi Hakio

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Hakio is interested in the inner dimensions of sustainability: our personal modes of sense and meaning-making that we each carry around with us, which deeply influence our everyday choices.

“Our inner world really animates our actions…our inner conditioning and mental models and the worldviews that we have – even though we may not notice it, they effect how we behave, how we make decisions how we encounter others – humans and non-humans” – Kirsi Hakio

Hakio created a series of co-design workshops that brought together stakeholders from Elisaari to help them to recognise and share these unspoken assumptions. At the first workshop she trialled awareness-based exercises that asked participants to become present and observe what was happening inside their minds and bodies. This was followed by dramaturgical exercises where participants used their bodies to take on different roles and to act out scenarios for future services, which enabled participants to visualise and share their own inner lives and orientations with the group.

Transformative creative practices:

The second set of workshops took place on Elisaari island and focussed on generating empathic connections to the non-human stakeholders. A series of walking meditations helped participants to connect more deeply to the place. Hakio also asked participants to assume the role of animals, trees, historical figures and nature spirits from Elisaari. She then interviewed the participants in character using classic service design questions, asking someone acting as a deer or a rock how they would ensure repeat customers. All of these activities were designed to give participants the experience of being deeply connected to a wider ecosystem of which they were one part of a larger whole: an experience of the ‘ecological self’ (Bragg, 1996). 

“Participants see themselves as part of this interconnected worldview… and I think in that state they want to start changing their behaviour… they are having experiences that are very difficult to explain to others maybe of connectedness and of connecting to the place.” – Kirsi Hakio

However Hakio notes that the challenge in sustaining these motivations beyond the workshop experience.

“when participants enter home it’s really difficult to maintain because the environment is completely different… It’s really difficult to turn those experiences into actions… I see how the custodians of the island are living in that kind of state all the time. So I’m not sure if we’re supposed to be in that bubble for a longer time – because usually we don’t have time and resources – or if we need to build our communities differently.” – Kirsi Hakio   

In the later phase of the Elisaari project Hakio worked with the island’s custodians to develop co-design techniques for the orientation of new employees. These helped the group to co-create shared values that subsequently went on to influence the working culture of the island. Awareness-based approaches provide ways to intervene in the interactions between people and place, by opening up space to articulate different mental models and bring alternative worldviews into being. Hakio’s work challenges us to think about how awareness-based methods might be used beyond service design to prompt cultural and social change. What might we need to change about our material and social worlds for people to act as their ecological selves all the time? 

Nominator:

“We were walking through the forest in different roles. I walked with someone who was a sheep…I had to think through the nature materials and how we could bring that into the catering….it was more or less play around with the idea, but it was such a change maker to my, my thinking is, I’ll never forget.” – Tuuli Mattelmäki

Project credits:

Funded by Aalto/Department of Design.

Learn more:

Hakio, K. (2021). The New Paradigm Is Already Here: The Practicing of Prototypes of Future through Vertical Alignment. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change, 1(2), 73-94. https://doi.org/10.47061/jabsc.v1i2.939

Hakio, K., & Mattelmäki, T. (2019). Future skills of design for sustainability: An awareness-based co-creation approach. Sustainability, 11(19), 5247. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11195247

In Colombia, textile making has emerged as an important way for collectives of women to process the grief and trauma that they have suffered through many years of conflict. Since the 2016 peace agreement, the country has turned towards processes of reconciliation. The project Remendar lo Nuevo (Mending The New), brings together researchers from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad de Antioquia and Universidad de Los Andes with several women’s textile collectives to explore how physical and digital artefacts can be combined to create an archive of textile testimonials. The project is called Remendar lo Nuevo (Mending The New), because communities are being asked to explore what reconciliation means for them, and in many cases they are still figuring out how (and with whom) to mend relationships in an unstable situation where violence still regularly emerges.

“It’s often assumed that peace means leaving something behind, but in Colombia (and many other societies) it doesn’t work like that because conflict is an ongoing situation. When you’re asked to reconciliate – a discourse that is new – but there are still things happening in terms of conflict, how can you reconciliate and with whom? Why do I have to? The idea of something new that has to be mended came about because people haven’t considered the meanings that are attributed to this mandate.” – Tania Pérez-Bustos

Transformative creative practices:

During the two-year project, researchers organised a series of ‘workshops with communities inviting them to think through their textile making about reconciliation, they also organised a couple of mingas (spaces for collaboration and thinking/making together) where researchers, artists, designers and technologists worked with women’s stories and pieces to add digital artefacts into their processes of memorial-making. In these spaces they experiment with textile and digital artefacts – often augmenting textile pieces with the capacity to send SMS messages, or store digitally-recorded oral histories. The physical and sensory qualities of textile work create what project leader Tania Perez-Bustos calls ‘textile atmospheres’ – that allow people to listen differently.

“If you have a threaded needle and a round tambour with some fabric in it, you are holding it close to you… the needle goes into the fabric and goes out. The movements are reflexive and that creates some inner reflection… and when you do that with others it creates a textile atmosphere in which you are listening with the bodies of the others that are also making. There’s a togetherness that is created in this process.” –Tania Pérez-Bustos

Doing textile work together opens up a space of reflection and offers a way for the women to re-narrate traumas stitch by stitch amongst a supportive group. In addition to making the textiles, they are also re-making themselves through a process of deep reflection. Pérez-Bustos calls these practices and spaces “improvisational technologies of healing”.

“When you take the time to stitch in a beautiful typography the name of someone who was killed, then you stay with that name for five hours in that silence it is very powerful…you’re creating memory, you’re creating a document that you have made.” 

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Past conflicts in Colombia have been deeply entwined with control over land use, in what Pérez-Bustos calls an “an ecological war”. Women displaced from their own smallholdings and into cities also grieve the loss of this connection to the land through textile making. Flora and fauna are often included in textile pieces remembering lost practices: of growing, of cooking and of healing using medicinal plants. Sustainable land stewardship relies on stable communities, and in Colombia, rebuilding one lays the foundations for rebuilding the other. 

“The losses of war are not only human lives, but also territories in danger… the women are creating memories of those more-than-human losses to an ecological war”.

Learn more:

Researchers worked with textile collectives in Chocó, Bolivar and Antioquia to carefully document new and existing textile works in collaboration with the women. Together the project participants produce an online exhibition, an e-book and an online web archive that seek to capture the spirit of collectivity engendered at the research, and to invite people from outside to connect with the stories that are being told by the women through their embroidery.

The online exhibition Los Tiempos De La Escucha (Time to Listen) is a curated exhibition of the works created by the women working in common exploration with artists, designers and makers in spaces of shared reflection. It includes images of the work and oral testimonies of the women. It reveals some of the metaphors that the communities use to characterise reconciliation: seeing echoes in certain cooking practices, in medicinal plants, or in the movement of animals. The e-book Remendar lo nuevo: Compartiendo Aprendizajes (Mending the New: Sharing Learnings) was composed by the communities, and includes pieces of oral storytelling, photographs and texts. Finally, the Archivo Digital De Textiles Testimonials (Digital Archive of Textile Testimonies) is a wider digital archive that links together the work of 10 different initiatives of sewing for memory in Colombia. The Archive was also co-designed with the women and provides detailed information about each piece, including recordings of how it was made, and an object biography.

These web resources amplify the women’s own documentation practices, helping them to reach new publics as part of a responsive and open research practice. They ask visitors to step into communities of displaced people, as Pérez-Bustos says “to make the trouble of these communities our own, to understand that we are in here together”.

Project credits:

The project was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Colombia. It was let by Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Principal Investigator: Dr. Tania Perez-Bustos, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Co-investigators: Natalia Quiceno Toro, Olga Jaramillo González and Isabel Gonzáles, Universidad de Antioquia, Jaime Patarroyo and Eliana Sánchez Aldana, Universidad de Los Andes.

The Project received collaboration of the Newton Fund. Prof. Dimitris Papadopoulos, The University of Nottingham, Prof. Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University, Dr. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Warwick University.

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.

Citizen Sense was selected because of its experimental focus on air pollution as an environmental phenomenon and focus of community concern, rather than as a clearly defined ‘problem’ that could be ‘solved’ through the application of technology. Citizen Sense practitioners and researchers have sought to understand the specific ways that citizens were – and were not – able to mobilise citizen data within air quality campaigns. Here, research and design are mutually supportive outcomes of the ongoing project.

“How do sensors and the environmental processes they trace influence relations and responsibilities toward environments?” – Citizen Sense

“This project continues to produce deep insights into the politics of citizen-generated environmental data, where sensing technologies are just one set of relations in a complex ecosystem”

LARA

“The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, the canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”  ― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour

“Rather than being this abstract idea of climate change, reading the novel it became something that people experience in their daily lives through the monarch butterfly, and how their migration patterns are changing. It made it so much more real, than the way we talk about it in the scientific literature – novels can do that, can make something real for people.”

SANDRA

“The people that we have collected as friends are the key, they are the heart of what we do…we keep going because we have met these people” – Felipe

When CreaTures began in 2020, we asked our colleagues to nominate transformative projects for our ‘Observatory’ (the section of the project where we map key directions in eco-social sustainability). To our delight, rather than nominate projects or art works, Felipe Gil from Zemos98 nominated his friend Maria Ptqk. In doing so, Felipe challenged us on idea of what a ‘case’ could be. Felipe and Maria helped us to understand that much of the transformational power of creative projects comes from the relationships that they create, and so this case explores what a transformative friendship looks and feels like. 

Transformative creative practice:

Fostering new relationships between people with different disciplinary backgrounds is a core part of Part of ZEMOS98’s work, and Felipe first discovered Maria when he was looking for people to invite to one of their events. Maria transformed ZEMOS98 by introducing them to different ways of understanding the world from a feminist perspective. Learning about the reproductive economy (all the care work that contributes to economic structures but isn’t ordinarily recognised, such as cleaning, and childcare) helped ZEMOS98 to deepen their practice. They recognised care not only as theoretical concept, but also an invitation to practice a different kind of ethics within the cultural sector. More recently, Maria has shared emerging ideas of ecological interconnectedness with Felipe and ZEMOS98, where humans are understood as just one species in relationship to many others, living together on a shared planer (a damaged planet that is urgently in need of regeneration).   

For Maria, Felipe and ZEMOS98 have formed part of a valued community that sustains and renews her practice. She comments:

“Sustainability is something that you tend not to see unless you lack it. Only when you feel yourself vulnerable, you realise what you need to sustain yourself. Coming back to this idea of community and networking – in the longest run that’s what supports you… Support can be material or economic, it can be political in the sense of providing a sense of purpose to what you do… Having the people around you that create value, and give meaning, then you feel that you are building something together.” – Maria

Transformative friendship, then is not only about liking or loving someone, but includes those in a shared community, who work together to shape a combined context and sense of purpose. Part of transformative friendship is also being open and critical – being able to talk to each other about what has failed and how to improve things for next time.

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

Maria’s current work explores what she calls a new “multispecies paradigm” – a necessary shift in our worldview from being completely human-centric to recognising the symbiosis between humans and all other beings on earth.

“All of us earth beings are part of a unity of life, which manifests itself in different forms. This comes from biology, but it obviously has deep philosophical implications and cultural and political implications…it’s connected to the multispecies new paradigm, to biocentrism, to ecological thought and a lot of that of course, but it also implies a shift of paradigm… for me it’s very interesting because it’s really on the edge of what is called science and what is called – whatever else – philosophy, cultural studies, whatever, art! I am attracted to that edge because it is totally unstable.” – Maria

On learning and evaluation:

In her role as a researcher, Maria has explored the impacts of creative projects. She finds the most compelling transformations happen to those involved in them. What she calls a “reverberation” doesn’t happen immediately, but might become visible long after a project, when relationships have taken time to fully mature and influences have become discernible. We might think of a stone thrown into a pond, where ‘impacts’ reach partners and collaborators first, moving on to other that they may subsequently influence. For her, the question of how to reliably record these changes to relationships is an open question:

“How can we measure that impact? I would say we have to use our imagination and our creativity as cultural practitioners to invent ways to make that visible, to invent indicators and new words. We need a new vocabulary to speak about that kind of impact… a reverberation” – Maria.

Felipe adds:

“If you put in a report “I made a new friend” it seems like homework for school… but indeed it is crucial…If we could work out how to document these things without sounding naïve…We have to change the ways that we report projects and the way that we value them.”- Felipe

In this interview, Felipe and Maria put forward a truly relational perspective. What matters is how we can think and talk about the relationships that we have. This holds true for Maria’s poetic description of the unity of life, and Felipe’s question about how to record transformative friendships. We need better ways of capturing their significance and making them visible to those in different fields or disciplines.

Learn more:

Zemos98: http://zemos98.org/

Maria Ptqk: https://www.mariaptqk.net/

Science Friction: https://www.cccb.org/en/exhibitions/file/science-friction/234907

Credits:

Thanks to Maria Ptqk and Felipe G. Gil for doing the interview.

Nominator:

“Lately, I think Maria is leading in Spain, something that is now happily a global trend, which is: we cannot stay in the cultural sector as we were before, just producing things without [acknowledging] the ecological context we are all facing as a humanity…We need to learn a lot from many people, but Maria is one of the people that we just basically, follow”. – Felipe