Conference sessions

9:00 AM | Doors open

9:30 AM | Welcome and Introduction
By Tuuli Mattelmäki & Christina Sarvani (EU)

9:45 AM – 10:15 AM | Creative practices for Transformational Futures – ‘CreaTures’ in short.
By Tuuli Mattelmäki.
CreaTures was set out as a three year project to advance understanding of the power of creative practices in ecosocial transformation. This introductory presentation gives a brief overview on who we are and what we have done during the project. It gives an outline of the project with insights to the research structure and the exploratory and caring ways of working towards a long term aim of more creaturely ways of being and becoming.

10:15 AM – 11:30 AM | A CreaTures Tale: research design and development
With Cristina Ampatzidou, Andrea Botero, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Lara Houston and Tuuli Mattelmäki.
How did CreaTures come about and where has it been? How did ambitions translate to working methods? This session will focus on the challenges and advantages of doing a new, unconventional project.

12 PM – 12:30 PM | Experimenting with Engagement
By Cristina Ampatzidou and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi.
Engagement is central to transformative creative Engagement is central to transformative creative practices across sectors. It has been also central to CreaTures by design – entanglements as concept and approach – and also engagement as the core of the experimental creative practives. For engagement with and around creative practice to be truly participatory and impactful, its design must be informed by a rich understanding of the contexts in which the creative practices and engagement activities take place. There is limited understanding about research and practice around this nascent yet important field. This session aims to investigate and share with broader audiences insights into the field to provide creative-critical voices for care-full engagement around creative practices towards transformational futures.

12:30 PM – 2 PM | Engagement as relating
With Andrea Botero, Josefina Buschmann, Ruth Catlow, Felipe G. Gil & Laine Rettmer, hosted by Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and Cristina Ampatzidou
The intersection between transformative creative practice and engagement is a relational space where constant entanglements of different disciplines, art forms, cultures, power relations, and other/more-than-human, and more take place. This panel brings together practitioners and researchers from across diverse creative fields, ranging from participatory art and design to contemporary opera, to present the keywords that represent, guide, challenge, inspire, interweave, or intrigue how they understand and experience engagement in relation to their practices. We encourage participants to get actively entangled with this collective questioning and imagining of how engagement might take place around creative practices towards change.

9 AM | Doors Open

9:30 AM | Welcome and Introduction
By Andrea Botero.

10 AM – 11:30 AM | CreaTures Co-Laboratory: Entangling Creative Practice and Research.
With Andrea Botero, Ruth Catlow, Markéta Dolejšová, Felipe G. Gil, Anab Jain, Isabel Beavers and Jana Putrle Srdić.
In this conversation among artists and researchers from the CreaTures Laboratory, we share insights from the last two years of developing our experimental productions (ExPs) and discuss our distinct ways of working towards eco-social change. As creative collectives and individuals coming from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds, our understandings of eco-social change vary but we share the common aspiration to help foster better futures. In the co-moderated session, we get together to discuss the motivations that drive our creative practice and research and reflect on the experience of working together as CreaTures: how have we managed to enrich each other’s ways of thinking and doing, where we struggled, how has it changed us, and where shall we go next?

12 PM – 12:30 PM | The Observatory: Tuning into to transformational strategies
By Lara Houston and Ann Light.
We present the work of the CreaTures Observatory: our collective process for tuning into signals of eco-social change happening across creative fields, including art, design and social change. We used several methods to query how change is being understood and enacted, including gathering and analysing over 140 cases of transformative practice. We reflect on the process and share our results – a set of over 20 ‘transformational strategies’ – being tried and trusted techniques used by creative practitioners to work with existing conditions and prompt or manage change towards more livable futures for all life.

12:30 PM – 2 PM | Anticipating Change: Intersections between Climate Collapse and Transformation to Eco-social Futures
By Dani Admiss, Kit Braybrooke, Lara Houston, Ann Light, Martyna Miller, Genevieve Rudd.
Let’s explore the CreaTures ethos that change towards better worlds is both possible and necessary. We will collectively look at the tools being produced by creative practitioners to effect that change against a backdrop of detrimental transformations that are already underway, as the planet faces increased weather disruption and forced migration, a turn to populism, increasingly polarized belief systems and ambitions for an intensification of automation. We ask: how can gentle aspirations and intimate encounters prepare people for the need to change (and to become skilled practitioners of ongoing change), including but also going beyond sustainability science concepts such as adaptation and mitigation?

9 AM | Doors Open

9:30 AM | Welcome and Introduction
By Ann Light.

9:45 AM | 10:15 AM – Evaluating creative practices for sustainability transformations.
By Joost Vervoort and Tara Smeenk.
In this session, we present key insights on the role evaluation plays in how creative practices contribute to sustainability transformations. Evaluation that is sensitive to its context and the complexity of societal change can help us understand creative practices and why they matter. What can we say about the value of creative practices from an evaluation perspective? How can mainstream practices and conventions around the evaluation of creative practices be changed to help open opportunities for transformative change?

10:15 AM | 11:30 AM – Opening the richness of creative practice: the CreaTures Open Creative Practice Framework.
With Joost Vervoort, and invited policy makers from The Netherlands, Scotland and Finland.
This is an interactive session plus panel discussion about the CreaTures Open Creative Practice Framework. The OCPF has been designed to help unpack and investigate the richness and power of creative practices in the context of urgently needed sustainability transformations. It offers new insights, drawn from CreaTures work, on how we can think about transformation and change. We discuss how creative practices make a difference, and what the roles of different individuals and organizations in societies might be to help use art and creativity to bring about real change.

12 PM – 1:30 PM | Ethics complexities and opportunities in art science projects
With Claudia Garduno, Jana Putrle Srdić, Špela Petrič, Víctor Renza, and Melanie Sarantou, and Tuuli Mattelmäki.
Transdisciplinary, practice-based projects with transformative aspirations like CreaTures, present complex ethical issues. Disciplinary, institutional, and research expectations vary, challenging the conventional forms of evaluating the intentions, processes, and outcomes of transdisciplinary projects. This session brings together experts from arts, sciences, and humanities to reflect on the experience of navigating this complex and complicated space within and beyond the CreaTures project.

1:30 PM – 2:00 PM | CreaTures Townhall Meeting
With CreaTures consortium members, moderated by Iryna Zamuruieva
Open discussion where all consortium members are invited to share their experiences and thoughts about the collective work so far.