In this catalogue, the languages of humans and the Artillería interweave the 22 Experimental Productions presented at the festival. Each description provides details about the work, the artists, and their thoughts on their practice and the festival. The “interludes” interspersed between them are fragments of the space-time we shared with the Artillería during the festival and the words shared by the artists. All words were gathered through the conversations we had over the three years of the CreaTures project and through our making of Messages in a Bottle.

You can also view the digital version of the catalogue in pdf.

Genuine thanks to everyone who came to and supported the festival!

We identified 25 ways that creative practitioners are working towards change – but there are countless more.  

Read the full 25 pathways:
(more details available here)

Imagining alternative futures in an embodied way:

• Backcasting from better futures

Creative practitioners produce scenarios that aim to simulate everyday life in an alternative future, where the climate and biodiversity crises have been resolved. They invite people to have an immersive, sensory experience of a more sustainable way of life; and to reflect on what they would need to do now, to bring that future into being.

• Engaging speculative artefacts

Creative practitioners produce speculative artefacts and environments which project issues from the present into an imagined future, using sensory, physical prompts (such as objects or installations). These stories of dystopia, utopia (and everything in-between), invite people to consider the possible consequences of a particular issue.  

• Fictional world-building

Writers create immersive fictional worlds that dramatise key sustainability challenges such as climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. Climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’ is an emerging genre that makes use of this pathway. How do these stories influence collectively held imaginaries of the future?

• Playful, game-like formats

Some projects use playful, game-like formats to engage participants. Games and play are central to human learning, in childhood and beyond. ‘Serious’ games prompt people to bring a playful openness to serious eco-social issues, as they experience power dynamics and complex situations for themselves.

• Bodies as materials

Creative practitioners make use of human physical connections in eco-social works. Physical movement, touch and co-presence can boost trust and intimacy, helping people to imagine new kinds of relationships with each other, and with more-than-human animals, plants and ecosystems.  

Helping to create new forms of awareness that extend beyond individual human selves:

• Role-playing as animals and plants

Creative practitioners produce experiences where people role-play as an animal or a plant. People de-centre their human selves and attempt to become an imagined other, building empathy and intimacy with more-than-human life-forms.

• Mindfulness in natural places

Creative practices allow people to mindfully bring attention to their own bodies and the environment around them in the present moment. In ‘natural’ places, such as forests, this is a way to tune in to more-than-human ecosystems.  

• Collaborating with living materials

Some projects invite living materials to participate in the creative process, allowing human cells, plants and animals to become active agents. These help us to see beyond our preoccupation with the human, offering critiques of the way we live now, and opening up new relationships.  

• Listening and making together

Creative practitioners gather people together in collective, hands-on material making processes. With careful facilitation, these can create spaces of contemplation in ourselves and encourage deep listening and intimate exchange with others.  

• Looking back in time

Looking back in time helps us to understand how things have changed – helping us to see the importance of everyday practices that we may not recognise on an everyday basis. Reflection can produce practical insights into what’s worked and what hasn’t, and it also allows us to release our emotions around what we haven’t been able to control.  

Building alternative systems:

• Accountability for more-than-humans

Creative spaces incubate new practices and organisations using existing legal systems to design-in ecological regeneration and more-than-human rights. These take inspiration from the ‘rights-of-nature’ movement that seeks legal personhood for ecosystems.  

• Prefigurative alternatives

In prefigurative projects, creative practitioners develop and grow alternative systems. Prefigurative projects model the change that they desire in every aspect of their organising.  

• Activating communities

Creative practitioners and organisations are part of wider, multi-disciplinary collectives that work with community groups to collaboratively shape action towards more sustainable environments.

• Engaging with governing bodies

Creative spaces can be powerful incubators for campaigns, where alternatives to the status quo can be imagined and communicated to policymakers (and other governing bodies) in a compelling way. Less commonly, policymaking happens in creative spaces, where the unwritten rules of governing are suspended, allowing people to meet each other in a different way.  

• Combining cultural production and eco-social action

Some organisations combine creative, cultural and environmental activities. Often, they explore a particular phenomenon (for example, debt) from a range of perspectives – adding new capacities to the organisation each time. In doing so, they nurture a diverse range of audience or participant groups.  

• Working from a particular place

Working from particular places is a common strategy for many of the creative cases. Here the specific qualities and needs of a place are prioritised in an emergent process that allows for experimentation (where decision-making is taken step-by-step based on what has come before). This results in new connections and capacities between people in a particular place.  

Acting ethically and with care:

• Embedding mutual care

Creative practitioners design processes in ways that embed care at every stage. This means living out an ethics of care in everyday relationships with collaborators, by acting supportively and fairly. It also means ensuring that care is taken with wider impacts, for example thinking carefully about the use of material resources.  

• Transformative friendships

Transformative friendships occur when we allow ourselves to be changed by another person. Transformative friends hold us inside a community; they provide support and encouragement, and also constructive critique and tender accountability. They are often under-recognised outputs of creative work.  

• Working towards inclusion

Creative practitioners and organisations develop new ways to connect with potential audiences that may not ordinarily feel included in cultural settings. This can mean opening up new spaces within organisations or institutions and inviting other groups to find a meaningful home there.

• Transformative pedagogy

A new wave of sustainability teaching uses creative practices to help people to understand the complexity of our planetary problems. Trans-disciplinary learning empowers people to imagine themselves as agents for change, and gives them skills to reflect on their own position and approach.

Making translations between groups:

• Bridging worldviews

Creative practitioners design processes that bring people with different worldviews and ways of knowing the world together. In some cases, creative organisations open themselves up to create platforms for exchange, and in other cases, creative practitioners are embedded in different organisations.

• Holding intercultural dialogues

Some creative projects recognise the diversity of human ways of life (beyond a dominant focus on global-Northern, or ‘Western’ worldviews). They increasingly host intercultural dialogues with groups whose ways of life are radically more in-tune with ecosystems. Indigenous groups for example, are protectors and stewards of ecosystems that we all depend on, and their voices need to be heard. These projects must recognise the oppression that minoritized groups continue to face.  

• Collecting open resources

Creative organisations gather together open collections of practical and inspirational resources. These help to inform other creatives, but also researchers and policymakers. They help effective practices to travel and become embedded in new spaces.  

• Translating to policy

Creative practitioners develop processes and artefacts for policymakers engaged in decision-making around eco-social issues. These help to bridge and translate community-level concerns with the challenges that policymakers face. For example, in making the best use of scare resources, or acting effectively within legislative frameworks.  

• Creating new frames

Creative practitioners create new ways of thinking about sustainability challenges framing problems differently and often including a more holistic focus than technology-centric solutions. They seed these new ‘frames’ into existing institutions, asking these institutions to think differently.

Within the Observatory part of the project, we wanted to look beyond the creative projects commissioned within CreaTures. We gathered a collection of 140 examples of transformative creative practice: by asking our colleagues, by reviewing the academic literature on sustainability, and by talking to funders and policymakers in the UK and EU.

We reviewed the online documentation for each case. Knowing more about each case, we were then able to identify similar clusters. This blog post takes a broad snapshot of the topics that each case was exploring.

Full details of the mapping are available here; the (gradually updated) collection of transformative creative practice cases can be viewed here.

It sets out how creative practices can stimulate action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures. There are four curated paths leading through the Framework – Research, Policy, Creative Practice and Funding – each offering a collection of resources charting the key concepts and terms, processes, tools for evaluation, and resources for various stages of creative practices.

The CreaTures Framework is the result of three years of intense research and collaboration between creative practitioners, artists, policymakers, funders and others both inside and outside the CreaTures project. We have gathered and analysed 140 creative projects that creative practitioners and interdisciplinary researchers have found transformative. We’ve commissioned 20 experimental artistic productions during which we have experienced, observed and evaluated for their transformational impacts jointly by CreaTures artists and researchers. We have co-created a tool for evaluating creative practices, and how they connect to transformative change. We have ran 20 seminars on art, creative practice and change with practitioners, policymakers and researchers. Insights from these, and many other, creative and research undertakings have been brought together into the CreaTures Framework.

Knowing that we can only invite you to pull on some of the threads of the tangled galaxy that has begun to gravitate around CreaTures, we have tried to compose a story that can best represent the emotions experienced on this journey.

A symphony of choral voices from the meticulous recording of many of the experimental practices that can be found in the CreaTures Co-Laboratory Catalog, the testimonies collected during our face-to-face encounters, along with the records from the CreaTures Festival, this piece just wants to be a brief approach to the hidden gems that we have found without knowing and without expecting it, moving in ways that we did not know we could still experience.

A short film about the motivations, aspirations, joys, and challenges of the CreaTures research project. Enjoy the show 🍿!

And if you just want a small taste of what we have encountered along the way, check out and share this little magic pill 🍬

The ExPs were experienced, observed and evaluated for their transformational impacts jointly by CreaTures artists and researchers. Drawing on these insights, the CreaTures project has investigated how to make the richness and vital importance of transformational creative practices more visible to policymakers, funders and other powerful decision-makers.

The Catalogue is a free, open-access publication accessible as a pdf (December 2022) and soon also in print (April 2023).

Enjoy the reading!

You can watch the entire experiment at creaturesmessages.org.

So we asked the following researchers in the CreaTures project how they think creative practitioners could make the best use of their key research outcomes. Below are the links to the video recordings of their responses:

• Tuuli Mattelmäki, Aalto University (Open Creative Practice Framework; OCPF)
• Ann Light, Sussex University (Open Creative Practice Framework; OCPF)
• Iryna Zamuruieva, Sniffer (Open Creative Practice Framework; OCPF)
• Markéta Dolejšová,  Aalto University (CreaTures Laboratory)
• Joost Vervoort, Utrecht University (CreaTures Dimensions)
• Lara Huston, Sussex University (CreaTive Pathways)

Messages in a Bottle

To create such a learning space, we devised the following two overall objectives:

• To amplify the voices of creative practitioners, which often hold limited authority in how transformative creative practices are understood, valued, and supported through policy and other related systems and strategies 
• To provide a collective space to share diverse authentic, experiential, and practice-based learning in accessible and engaging ways for peers and the wider audiences

To achieve these, we decided that:

• The learnings must not be didactic and instead be guided by the direct voices of current transformative creative practitioners reflecting on their own experiences, as well as the learnings from the CreaTures project and related literature; 
• The space coalescing these should appeal to the broader audiences, especially those who are currently engaged in or aspiring to engage with transformative creative practices in the future.

OCP Training Guidelines

These led to the reframing of the OCP Training Guidelines, which became the Messages in A Bottle, an online platform that presents a collection of key learnings and experiences of current transformative creative practitioners in the form of short messages; connects each of them with some of the critical research insights from the CreaTures project and beyond, and; provides an avenue for other practitioners to contribute and share their learnings. 

We also decided to use the metaphor of “Messages in A Bottle” as it can be useful for communicating complex ideas in a more relatable manner and making the project easy to remember. The idea of sending messages in a bottle suggests that these practitioners are sending their knowledge and wisdom out into the world, in the hope that it will be found and used by others. The publication of these messages can be seen as a way of sharing learnings with and providing guidance to other practitioners who are interested in pursuing transformative practices. The metaphor can usefully remind creative practitioners of the value of sharing their work, experiences, and insights with others living in different places and temporalities, while encouraging the audience to engage with the ritual of opening and reading the messages, and remember them in ways that are meaningful for them.

So this is what we did

We invited the creative practitioners who directly contributed to – e.g. by showcasing their work, giving a keynote speech, and working as part of the ground staff – and participated in the CreaTures Festival for an individual face-to-face interview, taking advantage of the shared understanding and experience of the project and the festival as the project’s principal engagement “experimental production,” which brought together the project’s various insights, experiences, and outcomes.

In line with the core methodological approach of the CreaTures favouring transdisciplinary, experimental methodologies, we asked the participants to complete a creative pre-interview activity: each to create a hand-written message for future creative practitioners, which was then to be kept in a physical bottle (see Contribute page for the instructions)

Each interview lasted between 30 and 45 minutes and was video-recorded at a place of the participant’s preference. It started with the participant sharing their response to the creative activity, followed by three key questions concerning their current creative practice; journey that has led to their current position, and; CreaTures Festival experience. 

All recordings, including one interview conducted in Spanish, were transcribed in full and reviewed by four researchers to identify the crucial learnings, related CreaTures Dimensions; Creative Pathways, and; CreaTures Resources. In addition, emergent themes from each interview were identified, leading to a total of 34 themes across all interviews. The second review of full interview transcripts guided a comparative analysis of these 34 themes, through which they were revised and their total number was reduced to 10, each with two to three related themes. Informed by the review of literature, the final themes were further interrogated and expanded to result in the Ten Learnings, each corresponding to the ten key themes respectively. Finally, through this winding journey, Messages in A Bottle came to life.

Superflux‘s Refuge for Resurgence ExP exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 has been featured across the world media. Here is a taster of some of the most interesting media coverage:

• Dezeen: Superflux Imagine Multi-species Banquet for Venice Architecture Biennale
• Azure Magazine: 7 Highlights of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021
• Arista News: The XVII International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (by Estella Renzi)
• Sentieri Selvaggi: ZEBRA CROSSING. Biennale 2021. How will we live together? The Arsenal responds (by Federico Fianchini)
• Dezeen: Therme Art’s Venice panel discussion explores how creatives can be environmental activists
• Space: Attitude of Architectural Exhibitions During the Pandemic: The 2021 Venice Biennale (by Park Semi)
• Home Health Hi-Tech: Venice Biennale 2021: all the ways of living together (by Giorgia Bollati)
• Cobosocial: The 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale is a Timely Survey of Architecture’s Role in Building Human Connections Across Geographical and Cultural Divides (by Herbert Wright)
• Strelka Mag: THE SHIFTING FUNDAMENTALS (by Markus Lähteenmäki)
• Architectureau: ‘We have all become cyborgs’: Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 (by Justin Mallia)
• Beyond Mona Lisa: 14 X HIGHLIGHTS OF THE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE 2021 IN VENICE (by Inge Schouten)
• STIRworld: How will we smash the patriarchy by living together? (by Rosalyn D`Mello)
• Pressletter: 17. INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2021: 5 KEYWORDS AND 5 WORKS NOT TO BE MISSED (by Maria Teresa Filetici)
• Wust und Wust: How will we live together? Ask the Architecture Biennale 2021 Venice
• Immobiliare: The 17th Edition of the Venice Biennale Questions About How We Will Live Together (by Giulia Dallagiovanna)
• Linkiesta: ell me yes Love is eternal (hopefully), but the ceremony must be biodegradable (by Claudia Saracco)
• Interior Design: 15 Highlights from the 2021 La Biennale di Venezia by Mairi Beautyman
• VICE: What Can I Be Hopeful About in the 2020s? (by Hannah Ewens)
• Italian Tech: How will we live together? The Venice Architecture Biennale tells us (by Andrea Bartoli)
• Breaking Latest News: How will we live together? The Venice Architecture Biennale tells us
• Land: Modular and temporary
• Sabine B. Vogel: 17th Venice Architecture Biennale: Is it all art? (by Sabine B. Vogel)
• Architect Magazine: Lessons from an Atypical Biennale by Ian Volner
• Mononews: Wildlife, Plastics and Pleasure Gardens: The Venice Biennale of Architecture Fascinates (by Maria Thermou)
• Liberation: Venice Biennale: Architects read the future in disaster (by Diane Lisarelli)
• Artnet: 17 Marvelous Highlights From the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, Where Hope and Optimism Abound (by Sarah Cascone)
• Dezeen: Studio of the Year announced, Superflux as winner
• Dezeen: More-than-human manifesto
  

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. 🌳✨

You can find more about the report and read it here:

Enjoy!

For our Finnish speaking friends, head to 1hr 20 to listen to Tuuli’s talk in the YouTube link below ✨🎧✨

The question of what is a forest runs through numerous environmental research and policy discussions. From international policy guidelines (FAO) to morphological classifications of tree density and height, as well as species variation, spatial extent, and carbon-storage capacity, many definitions of forests can be tied to their role as resources (Chazdon, 2016). Yet many other forests also surface as cultural, social, ecological, more-than-human, and cosmological relations and worlds, which further complicate the question of what is a forest. This symposium engages with the “forest multiple” (cf. Mol, 2002) to consider the pluralistic mobilizations and inhabitations of forests across varying contexts.

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.