🐲Shedding the Skin🐲

With the 2022 theme Shedding the Skin, the art-design festival sustains its ongoing interest in exploring creative pathways to eco-social transformation, shifting the focus to internal, personal and embodied dimensions of change. How do inner transformations happening within our diverse private ecosystems – our bodies, hearts and minds – matter in the larger context of societal change? Can we, as socially and ecologically entangled individuals, appreciate and better understand our relational co-existence by turning inwards to our personal and, by definition more-than-human, interiors? How can this look and feel in the context of everyday living, working, playing, policy making? 

The festival proposes for critical reflection that to help foster eco-social change, we must embody and become a change ourselves. Through its program, Uroboros 2022 hopes to open a safe space for experimental mingling of human and non-human collaborators to explore how we can live and thrive together in the times of climate change and social segregation. 

🦑 CreaTures offerings to the Uroboros include:

🐍Feral Policy Panel (Lara Houston, Iryna Zamuruieva, Markéta Dolejšová, Ann Light, Julia Lohmann, Marion Lean): https://www.uroboros.design/events/feral-policy-panel/

🐍Design for Relating – Letting Go, Drifting, Making Shifts (Kirsi Hakio, Tuuli Mattelmäki / Aalto): https://www.uroboros.design/events/design-for-relating-letting-go-drifting-making-shifts/

🐍Interspecies Meditation and Sharing Circle (Ruth Catlow / Furtherfield): https://www.uroboros.design/events/the-interspecies-meditation-and-sharing-circle/

🐍The Feral Gift Exchange (Markéta Dolejšová, Danielle Wilde, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Andrea Botero, Iryna Zamuruieva, Ann Light, Felipe G. Gil, Martyna Miller): https://www.uroboros.design/events/the-feral-gift-exchange/

🐍 Walking with Feral Forests, Creatures, Stories (Open Forest Collective, led by Chewie): https://www.uroboros.design/events/walking-with-forest-creatures-and-feral-stories/

🎤🐕 Full festival program & details: https://www.uroboros.design/  

While most of the program happens in Prague, a remote participation at selected events is available as well, via online videoconferencing and streaming platforms. The festival is free-entry, only two specialised events require a participation fee. 

The Uroboros Festival is curated and produced by Markéta Dolejšová, Lenka Hámošová and Michal Kučerák, in collaboration with Tereza Lišková, Denisa Reshef Kera and Enrique Encinas.  

Uroboros Festival 2022, 5.–8. 10. 2022

IG: uroborosfestival

Twitter: @uroboros_design

FB: Uroboros Festival

Youtube: Uroboros festival

The festival is organised in collaboration with the CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures) project.

Climate collapse is forcing us all to rethink our practices, from our daily habits through to coordinated intergovernmental action. Yet to create a shared sense of urgency and motivation, we also need to establish integrative approaches to transform how we live together on the planet, which in turn depend on our cultures, value systems and world views.

While policymakers on all levels of government talk about natural resources management, ecosystem services as well as land use planning and biodiversity conservation, creative practitioners and social scientists use terms such as more-than-human, nature-cultures and feral. 

This panel brought together both groups to provide a space to rethink relationships between humans and the other species and ecosystems on our shared planet. 

Panelists reflected on how moving away from anthropocentric thinking and understanding nature as “out there” can change the way institutions work and what policies are made. Possible leverage points and spaces for translating feral and more-than-human thinking into action were also explored: parliamentary processes, national & regional governmental processes; organisational policies, strategies and plans. 

The panel was be moderated by Ann Light, Professor of Design & Creative Technology (Engineering and Design) School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, who also introduced the CreaTures project and ongoing work on the transformative potential of creative practice. 

Watch the event recording here (link coming soon)

Speakers:

Our creature Ruth Catlow, co-author of the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, talks to David Bollier on his podcast “Frontiers of Commoning” about Furtherfield’s distinctive approach to participatory art as a way of thinking anew about the world 💬 🌍

Listen to the podcast below and read David’s accompanying blog post here.

Join our upcoming event on collecting and sharing transformative practices:

🗓 March 3, 2022 ⏰ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm, 💻online

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

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

Participation is open to everyone but registration is required. To join, please fill in your details in the registration form and we will email you the link a day ahead of the seminar. 

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

Watch the event recording here. You can find out more information on the openCOP event here, and can read about The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 here.

Zeynep Falay von Flittner, CreaTures Partners at Hellon, will participate as panelist in the Service Design Global conference (Oct 21-22, 2021).

She will present shortly Hellon’s upcoming article “Envisioning Desirable Futures – Service design and sustainability transformation of organisations” from the Touchpoint Magazine (to be published online soon but you can view the previous issues here).

See more about the Roundtable session (LINK) / or the conference (LINK).

Feral ways of knowing and doing: tools and resources for transformational creative practice

Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards sustainability transformations. With this in mind: What are the possibilities and limits of the tools and resources that contemporary creative practices are using to reconceive and redesign forms of interaction between different disciplines, audiences and cultures for sustainability transformations? This contribution presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary workshop where the participants were invited to share their experiences of designing or using “tools and resources for feral ways of knowing and transformation” within creative practice. While the concept of “feral” remained open to a wide range of different interpretations, participants used the term in two main ways: to foreground embodied, situated, bottom-up, ways of working with organic material and more-than-human issues that require relinquishing control, and; to refer to reappropriating existing tools and processes in ways and for purposes different to the original intentions. We look at the transformational possibilities of these feral tools and resources, and their feral uses in terms of 1) Enabling the shared imagining of sustainability transformations, 2) Proposing concrete actions toward sustainability transformations, and 3) Expanding meanings and feelings.

Our creatures Cristina Ampatzidou and Lara Houston participated at the Transformation Conference 2021 (June 17-18). See the following links to follow their fantastic contributions:

• Cristina & Lara’s workshop: Mapping transformative entanglements in creative practice (LINK)
• Cristina’s live Q&A session: Arts and creative practices (LINK)
• Cristina’s presentation: Mapping instances of Co-evolution in the Commonspoly game actor network (LINK)

CreaTures partner Anab Jain from Superflux had a discussion at (re)programming: Interdependence Post-Human Politics with the following guests:

• Saša Spačal is a post-media artist working at the intersection of research into living systems, contemporary and sound art.

• Anja Planišček is an associate professor at Ljubljana’s Faculty of Architecture and a practicing architect. Her focus is architecture of social engagement, international development cooperation and humanitarian aid, housing politics, socialization and promotion of architecture, Slovenian architecture in the period of socialism.

• Špela Petrič is a new media artist and former scientific researcher. Her practice is a composite of natural sciences, wet media and performance. Much of her recent work has focused on plant life.

See more at (re)programming: https://aksioma.org/reprogramming/interdependence/

At the plenary, we welcomed four new CreaTures on board: Agnieszka Pokrywka, Isabel Beavers and Amira Hanafi who are working on their Feral experimental productions, and Eva Tausig who has recently joined the Superflux crew. We had a farewell party with Kit Braybrooke, which was not really a farewell party, because we refuse to say bye and will always stay connected – “once a CreaTure, always a CreaTure” (the party really was really an excuse to have a pistachio cake, that’s all).

We shared our observations and findings from the work done so far, but also our stone talismans, water kefirs, bouncing balls, stuffed toys, future cones of hug-possibilities, postcards from the future-past, and other artifacts capturing what CreaTures is to us. DJ Frazzle Mama played her beats; Felipe came dressed as a potato and danced like crazy.

Everybody danced along.

What a fantastic bunch of creatures! We will be sharing more updates about our experimental productions, observatory cases, engagement events and evaluation insights, as they come along ✨✨✨.

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

Society>Tech Initiative is about developing more effective and socially useful approaches to technology innovation. This initiative links three academics from the University of Sussex with tech entrepreneurs. It is designed to look at how social science research can help tech innovators move beyond models that assume that if tech receives investment and market share, then it is automatically socially useful. 

In this 3-month programme between Jan and March 2021, a number of events were organized. In particular, Ann Light had a discussion with Ann Longley (Founder of Something New Together) on the topic of Designs to Reshape Humanity.

How can design and design practices be re-thought to centre on social and environmental justice?

• Watch Professor Ann Light’s talk on Designs to Reshape Humanity
• Watch Ann Longley and Professor Ann Light in conversation.
• Catch up on the Roundtable event with Ann Longley & Professor Ann Light

See the whole programme: https://www.wiredsussex.com/initiative/1309731/societytech?fbclid=IwAR3RE2zF9fGUoe9MFznX3hMv-c5wGX8YTkAOCySgnpqtDtPPosLrAHmrJ2U

Thursday March 4th, 3:15pm CET – Transforming Europe’s Adaptation panel held together with Gillian Dick [Connecting Nature / ICLEI] and Gemma Lawrence [Clyde Rebuilt / Creative Carbon Scotland].

Come along to join the discussion!

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

👉 The online panel took place on November 29th, 2020 and you can watch the recording here:

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

The event was held online, on the 26th of November 2020.
See more information about the Freaktion Bar event and long-term program.

👇You can watch the event recording below 👇

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

The panel took place on 9. September 2020, online – recording is available below

🌿 Panelists:

Saija Hollmen, Vice Dean of Art and Creative Practices, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (Aalto ARTS)

Pirjo Kääriäinen, Associate Professor in Design and Materialities, Aalto ARTS

Julia Lohmann, Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design, Aalto ARTS

Kirsikka Vaajakallio, Lead Service Designer, Hellon

Ali Akbar Mehta, Artistic Director, Museum of Impossible Forms

Moderated by Markéta Dolejšová and Namkyu Chun (Postdoctoral Researchers at CreaTures, Aalto ARTS)

Thanks Helsinki Design Week for having us 💚

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