Mesosanctuary is a participatory mural which explores ecological grief and regeneration. Exploring how the Greek μέσος, or “middle” can be a space situated in between grief and hope, the artist DR KITKAT launched an open call in 2022 inviting contributors to enter an intimate 5-step process of co-creation as meditation, where the personal and collective would meet.

Ecological grief can be understood as feelings of loss, anxiety and mourning in response to environmental destruction. These feelings may manifest as a “natural and legitimate response” to a loss of ecosystems, dwellings and livelihoods, or a general sense of species loneliness, a “deep, unnamed sadness” which emerges from the estrangement of humans and non-humans (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018; Kimmerer 2016). In such a setting, what can ecological regeneration look like? How can we world new worlds which offer alternatives?

The Mesosanctuary mural, informed by DIWO (Do It With Others) practices and the Qiyi City Forest Garden in the city of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province, explores the potentials and contradictions of transforming climate grief into regeneration. Media coverage of the City Forest Garden as an experimental site for new urban ecologies focuses on how only ten of its units are inhabited by humans, while plants, mosquitos and other species thrive. Those who live there, however, describe the joys of living alone in a tropical forest. “The air is good when you wake up in the morning,” a resident explains.  

The 22 Mesosanctuary contributions from around the world represent a diversity of co-creations across mediums, from collage and painting to sculpture and poetry – much like the more-than-human residents of an urban forest garden in a solarpunk future. Dwelling together yet alone, they reveal how loss and celebration are innately intertwined on an earth defined by interdependence.

Mesosanctuary is supported by the CreaTures project and has been launched in association with Art Tech Nature Culture, a global community of practice that connects creative experimenters across disciplines. 🌳✨

We invite you for an experimental walk with the SMEAR II research forest in the historical Hyytiälä forestry field station in Juupajoki. The SMEAR II (Station for Measuring Ecosystem-Atmosphere Relations) is a highly instrumentalized patch of forest equipped with a variety of sensors and other measuring devices to monitor the functioning of trees, soil processes, and their atmospheric interactions. The walk takes place on November 13th, 2022 at 2 pm local time.

During this peer-guided walk, we will explore the local forest and its creatures including trees, plants and squirrels as well as sensors and other data-gathering instruments. We will raise questions about power, values and structural inequalities that shape forests. Following the walk, we will share our observations and sensory impressions as forest stories, using the Feral Map portal. 

🐿️ The hybrid walk can be attended either in person or online, via videoconferencing. To join, send an email to marketa.dolejsova@aalto.fi and andrea.botero@aalto.fi before November 10th, specifying whether you plan to attend physically or online.

If you come by public transport, we can give you a lift from the Orivesi train station, meeting you there at 12:45 pm (a train from Helsinki / Tampere arrives there at 12:36 pm). Those coming directly to Hyytiälä should arrive by 1:45 pm. The address and details for arrival are available here. For those who wish to walk with us remotely, we will provide a Zoom link in advance of the session 🐿️.

The walk is organised by the Open Forest Collective – a multi-disciplinary group of forest-curious creatures of diverse cultural, professional and biological origins – and builds on the Collective’s ongoing experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. Since 2020, the Collective has organised forest walks in various parts of the world, inviting diverse forest creatures including forest dwellers, Indigenous forest guardians, healers, scientists, data managers, artists, designers, as well as dogs and trees to walk together and share their stories. Through these encounters, the Collective hopes to better understand how various stakeholders make sense of forest; questioning what can constitute a forest dataset, how it can be produced, and by whom. The main aim is to learn how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise – in feral, co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond techno-solutionist perspectives. Starting from the focus on forest ecosystems, the Open Forest inquiry aims to contribute to the existing critical practice and research addressing eco-social issues in a climate-changing world.

📍Aalto Otaniemi Campus, Espoo, Finland (Väre | Floor 2, FK lobby)

Join us for one last look at the CreaTures exhibition at Designs for a Cooler Planet, before it’s taken down on October 12th. 

The CreaTures Research Assistants will be hosting a guided tour of the 7 experimental productions on display which explore the place of creative practice in moving towards eco-social sustainability.

The 7 CreaTures experimental productions featured at the exhibition are:

🌲 Open Forest

🍽 Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures

🔮 Nocturne

🃏 Sustainable Futures Game

🦠 Cyano Automaton

🌊 Baltic Sea Lab

🎧 Pixelache

🦠 🦠 Arrive early and get your hands on some free spirulina to grow your very own cyanobacteria friends 🦠 🦠

Please register your interest by emailing savannah.vize@aalto.fi

🐲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.

📍ssesi.space

ssesi.space cordially invites you to experience outcomes of several months long research into more-than-human dynamics at the Garden, right in the Garden. The exhibition will be set in cosy wilderness and will feature documentation of performances and research outcomes of our dear guests – d’Epog, Faculty of Architecture BUT, Forest management department at Mendelu and AVA collective.

AVA, on top of being part of the show, will also perform a site specific live set which be based on the research of eco-acoustic, ecological, urban and performative elements of ssesi.space’s environment.

We will be baking pizza in our brand new wood fired pizza oven, serving drinks and teas and playing music into late hours, AVA on decks. 🍕🫖🎵

📍Aalto Otaniemi Campus, Espoo, Finland (Väre | Floor 2, FK lobby)

A selection of seven experimental productions from the CreaTures Laboratory will be showcased at the Cooler Planet exhibition organised as part of the Helsinki Design Week 2022 🌿🌲🌡️.

The seven CreaTures experimental productions featured at the exhibition are:

🌿The Cooler Planet event:

When: 7.9.–12.10.2022
Where: Väre building in Aalto University campus, Otaniementie 14 – the CreaTures exhibition is located in the FK lobby, at the entrance of the Department of Design (2nd floor)
Opening hours: Mon-Thu 7:45–21:00, Fri 7:45–20:00, Sat 9:00–17:00, Sundays and 10.9. Closed

🎤🦑 The CreaTures showcase will be introduced at the Helsinki Design Week Pecha Kucha Night – join us on Wednesday 07.09.2022, at 6-8 pm, in the Aalto campus. More details and registration are available here.

CreaTures showcase at Cooler Planet web.

More about the wider Cooler Planet exhibition is available here.

The Cooler Planet event is organised as a part of Helsinki Design Week’s official festival programme and a World Circular Economy Forum 2022 (WCEF) side event. Aalto University is also one of the EU’s New European Bauhaus partners.

During the 15-minute sound performance, the DIY electronic sound instrument will transform the signal from mycelia inside the self-sustainable globes with local plants and fungi, which are the integral parts of ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus art installation. Symbiotic organisms will be connected with electronic devices in a way that allows the technology to be incorporated into an organic circle of information. OctoSens is a multi-sensory interface and digital sound synthesiser. Data on the mycelial conductivity information, which comes from the electrodes inside the mycelial body, will be used to manipulate several aspects of sound. Multiple oscillators produce a low-frequency ‘square’ signal, which will result in an organic-sounding drone that changes the sound texture, but also turns on the synthesiser in chosen interesting rhythms.

Led by Taro Knopp, Nastja Ambrožič, Eva Debevc / Production: Kersnikova Institute / OctoSens: Osmo/za, Jakob Grčman

The festival is open to all and will be of particular interest to people in the creative sector, government, industry, research as well as anyone interested in exploring how creative practices can contribute to socio-ecological transformation.

The festival will be officially opened by the Mayor of Seville, Antonio Muñoz Martínez, on Wednesday 29 June 2022 at 18:15 at the Real Fábrica de Artillería.

See the full program and register to attend here.

Assembly 1: 🗓 Thurs, 26th May 2023 ⏰ 6-8 pm, 🌳 Finsbury Park

Assembly 2: 🗓 Thurs, 9th June 2023 ⏰ 6-8 pm, 🌳 Finsbury Park

Assembly 3: 🗓 Thurs, 16th June 2023 ⏰ 6-8 pm, 🌳 Finsbury Park

Find the Interspecies Festival in Finsbury Park next summer, where all species will gather to showcase their cultures, interests and talents to serve the bountiful biodiversity of the park.

Booking is essential, so find out more and join the Interspecies Assemblies here.

Their presentation Walking in the open forest: Playing with stories and data takes place on Friday 29th April, 13:25 – 14:30 EEST. Conference entry is free, so you can stop by easily. The full conference program is available here 👀.

Abstract:

Open Forest is a collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise, in playful ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond geo-engineering, techno-solutionist perspectives. In practice, the project consists of experimental forest walks followed by a co-creation of forest stories. Through these playful activities, we hope to entangle existing forests datasets with data that question and obscure the currently collected and available – mostly quantitative – insights about various forests. Our goal is to support collective imagination and care-full sustainability actions towards flourishing more-than-human futures.

Amira Hanafi invites you to join an online, collaborative writing workshop as part of the CreaTures Glossary project. During each 90-minute workshop, we’ll play language and meaning-making games in a relaxed, collaborative space. Together, we’re writing a glossary of words and phrases to talk about the change we’d like to see in the world. Anyone can participate.

Online workshops

Tuesday, 19 April 2022 on Zoom
10:30am – 12:00pm New York | 4:30 – 6:00pm Cairo
Sign up

Friday, 22 April 2022 on Zoom
2:00 – 3:30pm New York | 8:00 – 9:30pm Cairo
Sign up

Workshop for young people

Do you know any high school students who might be interested in learning more about language in a fun, interactive environment? A workshop especially for people aged 12-19 years will take place on Saturday, 23 April 2022 at 15:30 UTC (9 pm India, 5:30 pm Italy, 11:30 am Eastern Daylight Time), in the framework of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Annual Conference. Learn more and sign up here.

About the Glossary

The CreaTures Glossary is an experimental production commissioned by CreaTures, and carried out by Amira Hanafi. Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time, and is therefore built to distribute the power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it. The project includes games, a website, workshops, and other interactions that facilitate language as a social practice. Learn more about the project.

About the artist

Amira Hanafi is a poet, cultural worker, and artist working with language as a material and making systems and games to prompt and play with different kinds of language. 

Weather Engines is an art exhibition and a program of talks, performances and workshops taking place at Onnasis Stegi and the National Observatory of Athens (Thissio). It explores weather as a complex system, as observation and control, and as a lived experience. The projects and events refer to natural phenomena and climate change, past and contemporary strategies of engineering the weather, as well as to different sociopolitical atmospheres related to breathing and living. Approaching the models and systems of art as techniques of knowledge, Weather Engines addresses the need for climate justice, and for embracing the surrounding more-than-human world(s).

Subject to Change is the first ever solo exhibition of London-based design studio Superflux. As a critically acclaimed, boundary-defying practice, Superflux confronts us with the complex and deeply interconnected nature of the challenges we face today. They invite us to remain open to a multitude of possibilities and navigate precarity with active hope. Their stories, films, objects, immersive installations and speculations craft new, optimistic, and enduring relationships with our planet, other species, technology, landscapes and each other.

On view in the gallery@droog from February 18th up until April 10th 2022.

Subject to Change – Resurgent forests, multi-species banquets, solarpunk technologies: stories of hope amidst the climate crisis.

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.

Subject to Change is the first-ever solo exhibition of the London-based design studio Superflux. Among other artifacts and materials, Subject to Change presents the Refuge for Resurgence – one of the Superflux ExPs created within the CreaTures project.

Through their exhibition, Superflux confronts visitors with the complex and deeply interconnected nature of the social and ecological challenges we face today. Visitors are invited to remain open to a multitude of possibilities and navigate precarity with active hope. The showcased stories, films, objects, immersive installations and speculations aim to craft new, optimistic and enduring relationships with our planet, other species, technology, landscapes, and each other 👩‍💻🌍🐍.

Exhibition opening: February 10, 2022 @8pm / Kapelica Gallery, Likozarjeva 1, Ljubljana

Sound for Fungi. Homage to Indeterminacy 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’.

The title refers to the American composer John Cage, who developed ‘indeterminacy’ as an improvisational technique in which aspects of composition are left to chance or free choice. Improvisation, not so much as a musical process but understood as a natural phenomenon of life, is thus a condition of existence itself. This state of being without intention allows for spontaneity and emergence and has been a guiding principle throughout Schubert’s artistic practice.

Simulation development: Sage Jenson. This work has been developed within Mind the Fungi, a research project (2018-20) between the Institute of Biotechnology TU Berlin and Art Laboratory Berlin.

More details:

https://mailchi.mp/kersnikova/premaknite-se-933282

https://kersnikova.org/en/posts/events/all/theresa-schubert-sound-for-fungi-homage-to-indeterminacy

https://www.facebook.com/events/723686918792430/