🐲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

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

This year, the CreaTures made generous offerings to the Participatory Design Conference, many of which got accepted 😌. Below is a brief overview of our contributions, with links to open-access papers and presentations:

🍄 Following Seals and Dogs: Experimenting with Personal Dimensions of Transformative Design 🐕💨
Exploratory paper by Kirsi Hakio, Markéta Dolejšová, Tuuli Mattelmäki, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou | 📅 Online, 25th August 2022

Present eco-social crises call for transformative design practices, which include personal dimensions of transformation and self-reflection. This paper builds on ongoing discussions in participatory design about personal transformation and its impact on broader societal change. The paper presents two reflective accounts of transformative encounters with creative practices, to explore how to better understand and nurture personal transformations in participatory design. The common themes emerging from these accounts point to the importance of noticing small events that might seem subtle or mundane at first, but upon reflection, become critical in contributing to personal transformation. The paper argues that the personal dimension of transformative design plays an important role in fostering eco-social change and that self-transformation can be nurtured by creating space for spontaneity, letting-go, shifting of perspectives and trusting emerging elements that unfold beyond our control as designers.

View the full paper here.

🍄 Open Forest: Data, Stories, and Walking-With 🐺🌲
Situated action by Markéta Dolejšová, Andrea Botero, Jaz Hee-Jeong Choi, Cristina Ampatzidou | 📅 Newcastle, hybrid, 30th August 2022

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 co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond techno-solutionist perspectives. In Newcastle we will take an experimental, hybrid walk in the Ouseburn area followed by a co-creation of forest stories, following on our previous walks in other forests around the world. Through these engagements, we hope to entangle the existing, mostly quantitative forest datasets with more messy, abstract data to question the currently available understandings about the forest as a resource to be used.

Full paper is available here.

🍄On Participative Intimacies and Other Invisible Achievements 🌟
Keynote by Ann Light | 📅 Newcastle, hybrid, 1st September

Participatory design is subtle, with a focus on process and an intrinsic collaborative orientation that leaves traces only in the quality of its outcomes. While civilizations are judged on their rich architectures and artifacts, structures for negotiation and co-creation may be entirely invisible. Yet our work hinges on these mechanisms. What are the fleeting relations that we value so highly but rarely see captured or conserved? And how might a greater understanding of the feeling of being-part-of-something hold secrets for urgent transformations in society? This talk addresses the crafting of encounter, from invitation, through action to reflection, and explores what years of engaging with such details might tell us, not just about the creation of better artifacts, but of the relations that support life and flourishing at a time of planetary upheaval. It draws on work on CreaTures as well as other projects addressing eco-social futures and asks what traces of process we might want to leave and why.

🍄Feasting on Participatory Methodologies for Regenerative Food Transitions 🍲🥕 Workshop by the Feeding Food Futures network: Markéta Dolejšová, Danielle Wilde, Hilary Davis, Ferran Altarriba Bertran | 📅 Helsinki, hybrid, 27th September 2022

Human engagements with and through food are essential to the health of more-than-human communities and present a key opportunity to foster positive eco-social transitions. The 21st-century global food system is largely driven by the dominant ethos of extractivist capitalism. Many human-food practices in this system are troubling: the ways that people produce, transport, eat, and dispose of food are destabilising local and planetary ecosystems; contributing to the biodiversity loss and declining health of humans and non-humans alike. Food practices, and the entangled web of social, cultural, ecological and economic relations within which they exist, thus need careful attention.

Full paper is available here.

The workshop Feasting on Participatory Methodologies for Regenerative Food Transitions brings together food-oriented researchers, practitioners and others who use participatory and co-design (PD) methods to collectively envisage how we may leverage co-creative methodologies to meaningfully respond to food-related 21st century concerns. In the workshop, we will share, feast on, and digest our existing methodological practices, with the objective to enrich each other’s work and co-construct a firmer methodological foundation for participatory food design and research. 

On June 16th, The Hologram film was launched to conclude Fonderie Darling’s exhibition Feedback #6: Marshall McLuhan and the arts.

Also this week, Cassie Thornton ran a workshop with 16 people to discover the history and reasoning behind the practice of the Hologram, as well as the opportunity to experience it together. Find out more about the film launch here, and Cassie’s workshop 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.

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. 

In the workshop, 12 participants joined Isabel at her home studio to co-create wild altars in the form of light sculptures. After the workshop, participants took their altars home to place in their chosen ecological environments. Participants learned the process of creating these small wax sculptures and dedicated their altar to a new eco-ritual they hoped to enact.

Find out more about the workshop, and other programmed events at CultureHub here, and more about the Nocturne project here.

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.

The free, online workshop takes place on December 8th, 2021 from 10am to 1pm CEST. More info & registration details are available here.

🌱 Full workshop description 🌱

This workshop invites creative practitioners working in the area of eco-social transformations and the environmental humanities to share their experiences, learnings and tools related to the use of different creative practices as generators and drivers of sustainable change.

Together we will address questions such as: What kind of transformational processes are activated through creative practice? How do they affect our own essential journeys as creative practitioners? What kind of tools and resources do we use to situate our practice in the world and make it accessible to others, in generative and engaging ways? 

In line with the FIBER theme Mutation, the workshop aims to develop a better understanding of how transformational creative practices can take place in different social contexts and environments. Doing so, we want to put our personal journeys at the center of the observation, analyzing the mutations, symbiosis and the substantial changes that are triggered when we situate our creative practices in diverse eco-social contexts. 

Among the presented tools and experiences are also the Commonspoly game and the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook, developed within the CreaTures project.

FIBER x CreaTures: Mapping artistic methods and tools to foster transformative change (workshop)
Location: Online / Free
Wednesday 8/12 10:00 – 13:00 CEST

What do I learn from this?
In this 3-hour participatory process we want to create a space of reflection and collaborative production that allows us to plant the seeds of regenerative and sustainable futures. In addition to learning about other people’s creative practice and research, you also get to know new people and we strengthen the network for possible cooperation.

This workshop invites creative practitioners – artists, authors, managers, and inquisitive thinkers – working in the area of eco-social transformations to share, discover and imagine new and provocative tools to help us situate, communicate, and translate their approaches, methods and techniques. These can be tangible, digital as well as imaginary tools that the practitioners use to irrigate the transformative potential of their creative practices.

How to apply?
To participate in the online workshop (from anywhere on Earth) please send us a short description of your practice including a brief text describing a tool or a resource (e.g, card deck, cookbook, manifesto, zine, performance script, toolkit or similar) that you have used in your creative practice (maximum length: one-page) and an accompanying image (optional). Please send this proposal as one PDF to rosalia@zemos98.org, no later than Wednesday December 1.

Petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industrial activity have permanently altered the planet through the widespread presence of xenoestrogens, or endocrine disrupting compounds. Various molecules and synthetic hormones have hormone-mimicking and displacing properties, and are able to enter and communicate in the molecular semiosphere that we share with almost all animal taxa. While these molecules alienate us from our prescribed notions of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, and our bodies are stolen by capitalist interests, this alienation joins us in a shared species vulnerability as we all live-with and become-with these all-pervasive toxicities.

Several species of fungus are known to be able to break down these toxicities. One species of the white-rot fungus, Schizophyllum commune, grows on almost every continent in the world, has over 28,000 sexes, and has a variety of human applications – cheese-making, prevention of thrombosis, boosting immunity, aiding against cervical cancer, and even petroleum extraction.

This workshop uses a similar species of Oyster mushroom to imagine new cross-species toxic entanglements. Participants will be asked to bring a household product that contains a xenoestrogen ingredient (plastic bottles, cosmetics, soaps, or even their own urine) from which the hormones will be extracted using some DIY techniques. We will then create a xenoestrogen cocktail and feed them to the Oyster mushroom which will be grown on Petri dishes stained with Remazol blue, a synthetic fabric dye. Participants will check their growth over time to observe how the mushrooms respond to the toxic residues of human industrial capitalism.

Recording of one of the forest walks is now available for viewing:

Within this three-day workshop, we will build DIY radio receivers and sculptural antennae, test the reception of signals and interface them with examples of the various growing mycelium and mushrooms. We will learn about interspecies communication between humans, mycelium, and their environments – through sound, radio, touch, smell and ingestion.

We will further explore the connections between mycelium and deep space radio signals, noting simple parallels between the scaled formations of radio telescope arrays, and the arrayed forms of certain mushroom bodies.

Series of workshops // July 5-7,  2021 // Kapelica gallery, Ljubljana [SK]

Details about the workshop & location are available here 🍄🍄🍄

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)

A week-long series of distributed food design experiments, BYOK aimed to connect edibles, forests, humans, and other creatures and critters from around the world. Each experimental session approached food as a complex composite of substances, processes, experiences, and meanings – both existing and imagined – and invited participants to co-creatively reflect on diverse food sustainability-related themes. Experimental processes included foraging in interconnected forests, exploring the boundaries between soil and dirt, cooking ancient grain risotto, tasting flavors of extinction, more-than-human recipe role-play, and much more.

Broadcasted from the Pixelache festival in Helsinki, Finland, the hybrid (live/online) BYOK event was open to everyone, everywhere, via a portal of their choice. All you needed to join this experimental cooking show was to Bring Your Own Kitchen. Details of each session follow.

SESSION I. Food: Old, New, Coming & Gone 🐝

Date: Monday June 7th, 2:30pm – 4:30pm EEST (1:30pm – 3:30pm CEST)
Location: Broadcasted from Malmgård brewery and estate
Guests: Henrik Creutz (Malmgård estate and brewery)

Local and global foodscapes are changing: food practices are becoming faster; food resources, practices, and traditions are disappearing; food cultures are being mutated. How do we humans, as eaters and food makers, feed these eco-social changes in food systems and how do these changes impact us in return? In the age of the Anthropocene, we are what we eat and we eat what we are. 

Do you remember what tomatoes taste like? Or that feeling of having dirt behind your nails, after you’d finish getting the ingredients for your lunch? Can you bake a cake like your grandmother used to do? And does it taste the same? What foods are disappearing, from where, and for whom? Where do they go?

Broadcasted from the Malmgård brewery and estate, the session featured a conversation about the ideals of local food cultures, organic farming practices, and food ingredients & traditions that have gone extinct. While talking, participants merged their experiences and resources and cooked an ancient grain “risotto”. 

SESSION II. Eating the Forest Soil 🌲

Date: Tuesday, June 8th, 1 – 3pm EEST (12 – 2pm CEST) online / 12:30 – 6pm EEST on-site
Location: Sipoo forest & online
Guests: Antti Vuornos (soundscape), Mervi Antila (multi-sensory sketching), Feeding Food Futures (bringing virtual soil from places afar)

The hybrid foraging trip served as a portal to connect more-than-human soil landscapes around the world. Broadcasted from a physical base camp in the Sipoo forest in Finland, the session invited participants to drift around their forests and observe who lives and grows in the local soil. Tour activities included experimenting with Moss Face Spa, dancing in the swamp, collecting wild herbs as well as soil and sound samples, talking about the more-than-human health tricks that forests can offer, and – of course – eating everything around.

On the way, everyone listened to their forest and discussed its nutrients flows: who feeds whom in the forest and its soil, how and why? Where do we belong within the forest infrastructure as human visitors? What are the possible connections between soil, food, dirt, and (more-than-)human health? When it comes to food and eating, where does soil end and dirt begin?

SESSION III: Creatures in the Kitchen 🦑

Date: Friday June 11th, 1 – 3pm EEST (12pm – 2pm CEST)
Location: Broadcasted from Oodi library kitchen
Guests: us, CreaTures 🦑

This session provided a space for creatures and critters living in kitchens around the world to come together at a hybrid dining table and share their stories of change. Everyone was invited to join and bring along, as their alter-ego, a creature living in their kitchen that, to them, embodies a process of change (perceptual, social, socio-technical, ecological, cultural, symbolical, biochemical…). All present creatures gathered and shared their stories that were then weaved together into a collaborative recipe for change.

The set of mycelium cultivation workshops is led by the Gobnjak initiative for urban mushrooming and consists of 7 parts. Each part lasts from one to three hours, taking place every Thursday at 17:00h at the Kersnikova Institute laboratories. At the end of the seven-week set, participants will learn how to grow a fresh mushroom themselves and make a mycelium plate.

At the introductory workshop, participants will learn about the lifecycle of fungi, as well as the basics of their nutrition and reproduction. They will have the opportunity to study the preparation and sterilisation of agar and liquid cultures as well as the inoculation of Petri dishes, liquid cultures, and cereals.

The second workshop will introduce details about suitable substrates for mycelial growth, including the optimal rations of nutrients and tips for substrates sterilisation. The third workshop will address mycelium as a commonly-used material (e.g., food, packaging, building material). The fourth workshop will be devoted to discussing a variety of ways to make moulds for mycelial plates, their production, and the transfer of the partially incubated substrate into moulds.

In the fifth workshop, participants will address the conditions that mushrooms need in the cultivation phase, creating a mini cultivation chamber that will provide suitable conditions for growth. The final workshop will compare the growth of mushrooms on different substrates to be prepared by workshop participants, and discuss possible improvements in procedures. The workshop will conclude with the production of plates from mycelium and discuss the potential of further processing and the plates’ use.

The workshop series will be conducted under the mentorship of Rok Zalar and Bojana Rudovič Žvanut from Kersnikova’s partner organisation Gobnjak, an initiative for urban mushrooming.

Together with Gobnjak and through follow-up research and artistic interventions of various artists, such as Martin Howse and Mary Magic, participants will delve deeper into the world of fungi, organisms that represent a possible revolution in the field of new biomaterials.

The workshop on mycelium cultivation, research, and artistic intervention will be carried out as part of the program called ‘MyCoBiont’ at the Kersnikova Institute laboratories, Likozarjeva 1, Ljubljana.

Created by the creatures from RMIT’s Care-full Design Lab in collaboration with Open Forest creatures at Aalto, this digitally-guided journey will take participants on a multi-sensory exploration of Melbourne’s thriving urban forest to playfully encounter the creatures, critters, and beings that cohabit the city with us. They will then be invited to creatively share their experiences online, which will contribute towards a larger artwork, to be constructed after Melbourne Knowledge Week. This artwork will create alternative, hybrid mappings of Melbourne’s incredible urban forest.

Check more about the More-than-Human Dérive workshop and the full MKW program 🦜🌳

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.