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 🍬

Exhibition opening and sound performance: 29th June @7.30pm

taro knopp is a researcher and artist, who works within the frame of the cultural centre Stadtwerkstatt (Linz), focusing on mycelia as an omnipresent organism, a communicator between various plants and organisms. In his projects mycelia is viewed as a tactical socio-political comparison, used to critically rethink the alternative models of economic production and co-existence.

Within the MyCoBiont series with fungi, taking place at Kersnikova (Ljubljana) in the last year, taro and Kersnikova’s mentors set up the exhibition ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus, bringing it now to Seville. The techno-organic hybrid consists of a specially constructed transparent acrylic globe, populated with mycelia, spreading through soil, partly polluted with substances, usual for our environment, and equipped with various technological sensors. The electronic devices sense the changes in the living mycelia and create a sound environment, which enables us to hear the changes inside the globe.

ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus globe exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide inside a sealed environment and create a symbiotic and self-sustainable eco system. Author will leave the globes as distant satellites in the local environment, enabling a constant observation on development of their live content over a prolonged period of time.

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.

Thank you, dear CreaTures, for all the conversations & provocations!

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.