As complex ecosystems, forests provide an environment for living and dying for many species: they are places of refuge, myths, folktales, and sensorial excitements but also sites for control and industrial extraction of natural materials. The modern, western traditions of forest management and environmental policies tend to see forests as a resource to be leveraged to improve human lives: for instance, through timber yields and stocks or carbon sink cultivation. Increasingly, and particularly in urban environments, forests are used to protect – not all but a small number of select – humans from perils of ecological disasters such as high temperature, ozone, and other health-related consequences. In these challenging times, there is an urgent need to better understand, care for and imagine better forest futures.

Open Forest aims to provide a space for co-creative engagements with such imaginaries, by 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 forest stories. The experimental inquiry involves a series of feral, situated and interrelated activities that aim to entangle the currently available – mostly quantitative – forests datasets with more messy and eclectic more-than-human data. 

Feral ways

The Open Forest inquiry is inspired by feral approaches to creative research practice, where feral broadly denotes the alternative, open-ended, spontaneous, more-than-human, unruly, and wild. In their Feral Atlas, Anna Tsing and colleagues use feral to describe, “a situation in which an entity, nurtured and transformed by a human-made infrastructural project, assumes a trajectory beyond human control.” Playing with the feral metaphor, Open Forest uses feral creative approaches to invite unexpected encounters that may unfold beyond full researchers’ control. These feral approaches connect creatures of diverse shapes, backgrounds and origins and bring them together into a convivial exchange that might result in surprising relations as well as unintended consequences. Emerging from such open-ended, unexplored, and ambivalent contexts, feral engagements carry the potential to shift existing power relations, reaching ‘beyond domestication’ and ‘beyond the Anthropocene’, and challenging dominant ontological and epistemological discourses. The Open Forest’s feral practice is navigated by diverse forest creatures who shape the co-creative activities and emerging more-than-human relations.

Experimental walking-with

Following feral approaches to creative inquiry, the Open Forest walks are performative, centred around the elements of surprise and curiosity. Since autumn 2020, the Collective has organised forest walks in various parts of the world, including (what is known today as) Finland, Australia, the Czech Republic, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. In each location, together with a growing number of collaborators, the Collective experiments with different walking formats and approaches: participants walk both physically and remotely, together and apart, sometimes with actual forests and sometimes through data-based representations of them. Local trees and other forest creatures are considered participants, in both the walking and the larger eco-social phenomena happening in and around forests, such as mass extinction and climate change. 

This relational walking-with follows various types of ‘maps’ with diverse points of interest and is guided by various human and non-human navigators with good knowledge or sense of local landscapes. Some walking guides share narrated trivia about the local forest area; its culture, species and history, which then serve as key points of the walking route. Other guides use their own sensory instincts and invite participants to follow without any predefined route. Following these diverse walking formats and guidance, each Open Forest walk revealed previously unknown aspects of a local landscape and its creatures, including trees, moss and carbon sequestration sensors. The walks create a space for experiential learning about various forests, shifting the focus toward knowledge shared by diverse walkers.  

Feral Map of forest stories

While walking, participants observe, smell, touch, taste, and listen carefully to their surroundings; they take pictures and notes and talk to each other. These conversations and observations become an inspiration for forest stories, which are shared via the online Feral Map. The map serves as a growing public archive of collected forest stories, making the walking experiences available for further reflection and asynchronous engagement.  

The Feral Map stories come in diverse formats and shapes. Some are personal accounts of human-forest relationships expressed in words and pictures, others are numeric datasets capturing, for instance, an exchange of volatile organic compounds between a forest and the atmosphere. 

The initial version of the Map drew upon Urban Forest open data maintained by the City of Melbourne and later grew to include tree datasets from multiple forest areas around the world. Each forest patch where the Collective organises their walks is added to the map as a new location to share forest stories. However, map contributions are not limited to the walked-with patches only, and a story can also be added anywhere outside of these locations. Anyone, not only participants at the walks, can share their stories, thus contributing to an evolving dataset of situated forest experiences and impressions.

As a feral artefact, the map invites inputs and interactions beyond the scope of the Open Forest project. Aside from the walked-with forest patches, the map hosts various venues and creatures coming from other, similar creative inquiries – such as the Open Urban Forest garden and the Nocturne altars. The map can also support various activist and everyday-life endeavours: for instance, the waking guides in Colombia have been interested in using it to further disseminate their local activist, biodiversity preservation efforts.

The Open Forest Catalogue – a physical book presented at Open Forest exhibitions, workshops and other public events also allows for the sharing of stories. From the Feral Map and Catalogue, collected stories (over 100 in total so far) serve as forest data, capturing situated experiences and perspectives of forest stakeholders coming from diverse geographical, cultural, professional as well as biological backgrounds. This evolving, ‘messy’ Open Forest dataset can help raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities that shape forests and their futures and, by extension, help us to make better sense of complex eco-social phenomena such as climate change. 

Walking locations and forest patches

In Finland, the walks have (since September 2020) been situated in the SMEAR II – Station for Measuring Ecosystem-Atmosphere Relations in the historical Hyytiälä forestry field station in Juupajoki and in the Sipoonkorpi National Park near Helsinki. The walks in Hyytiälä have been performed under the guidance of two Collective members who previously interviewed several forestry researchers and data scientists working at the station to learn about its history and the research performed there over the past 30 years.

While walking through the highly instrumentalised SMEAR II forest, the guides share these anecdotes, showing details of sensors and other research instruments that gather data about various exchanges between trees, soil, and the atmosphere. Walkers are invited to reflect on what these forest exchanges can mean to whom, imagining, for instance, what did the cloud whisper to the forest canopy?

One Finland-based walk took place in the Sipoonkorpi National Park in October 202 and followed the guidance of local forest healers from the Terveysmetsä (Health Forest) initiative. The hybrid walk invited participants to join experimental forest activities such as plunging their faces into the moss floor, observing local forest creatures with a magnifying glass, foraging for herbal tea ingredients, and offering gifts to the forest. The aim with these activities is to get a more intimate knowledge of the local multi-species ecosystem. 

In the Czech Republic, an ongoing series of walks initiated in July 2021 takes place in Central Bohemia, in the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko, which presents a unique ecosystem with a mosaic of species-rich habitats.  

The Bohemian guide Chewie, a Collective’s member of canine origin, navigates the walks while following his extensive sensorial knowledge of the local forest landscape: walkers need to trust Chewie’s sense of direction and wait for what will come their way. This feral walking approach can appear, to a human researcher, without any purpose to arrive at somewhere specific – the experience of drifting through the forest becomes the goal in itself. Yet, the more-than-human guidance opens a space for new, surprising experiences, inviting the walkers to explore forest spaces and situations that they might never discover otherwise. It can help reveal what can we learn as humans if we give up on our control over our daily space-time movements and try to attune to a rhythm and interests of a local non-human creature.

Staring in July 2021, the Bohemian walks have been performed as an ongoing series (over 50 walks so far). A special walking event Walking with Feral Forests, Creatures, Stories took place at the Uroboros 2022 festival, where Chewie guided a group of festival participants through some of the Křivoklátsko paths and helped to provoke a co-creation of forest stories.  

In Australia, the walks took place in the Melbourne urban forest – a complex ecosystem of more than 70,000 trees each with unique IDs that provides a peculiar context for inquiry into open and alternative forest data.

The Melbourne walks (May 2021) were guided by a set of dérives, developed through three co-creative workshops with participants of diverse backgrounds, and inspired by the  Situationist International’s dérive strategies. The Collective incorporated these into their More-than-Human Dérive portal that explores new ways of sensing and mapping of local landscapes using expanded, multisensory ideas of data to include diverse more-than-human ‘voices’ and perspectives.

The first dérive drift through the Melbourne urban forest took place in May 2021 at the Melbourne Knowledge Week; the second one happened at the online Uroboros 2021 festival and invited participants to drift remotely, via the portal. 

In Colombia, the Collective walked with forest patches in three different locations, including the Bëngbe Uáman Tabanoc – an ancestral territory of the Kamëntŝa people located in southern Colombian Andes, the Reserva El Palmar – an ecological reserve located in the buffer zone of the Chingaza National Park in the Andean Mountains, and the Cerro Seco – an informal housing neighborhood located at the southern urban limits of Bogota (December 2021 – June 2022).

In Tabanoc, the walks (December 2021) were focused on local forest gardens, or chagras, and guided by Kamëntŝa women who tend the gardens as part of their common, day-to-day life. The chagras, planted and maintained according to the traditional Kamëntŝa ecological knowledge, served as a walking map: what grew there at the time defined the key points of the walking routes. During the walks, participants learned how vastly different the Kamëntŝa approach to forest caretaking is from the modern, western forest management strategies that rely on high-tech sensing and quantified data measures (as encountered e.g. in the SMEAR II walks).

In Reserva el Palmar, two walks (May 2022) were organised with students from the Universidad de los Andes and guided by Jaime and Cristina Avellaneda, local eco-tourism service founders who drew the walkers’ attention to the local páramo ecosystem and its history marked by extractivist industrial development and bio-conservation issues. Following the walks, the participating students engaged in a dérive drift to get a better sense of the local environment and captured their experiences as forest stories.

The Open Forest walk in Cerro Seco (June 2022) followed two activists from a local initiative drawing attention to illegal extractivist mining processes and land degradation happening in the area. Participants explored the local environment, which hosts one of the few relics of sub-xerophytic and high-altitude dry tropical forests as well as numerous sand mines. While walking, they learned about the complicated political history of the area and present bio-conservation struggles and shared their impressions via the Feral Map. The guides have been interested in using the Map to further disseminate their efforts to stop illegal extractivist mining processes in the area and reach a broader scope of audiences, beyond the local area. 

Two hybrid walks were organised in the Ouseburn Valley in Newcaste (UK) as part of the Participatory Design 2022 conference Situated Actions program (August 2022). The Collective members acted as guides and walked the conference participants through the Ouseburn forest patch, sharing trivia about the local history as well as their personal experiences with various forests around the world. Participants were invited to bring their boundary objects representing what a forest means to them and share the stories behind the objects with others.

Open Forest Installation

The Collective set up an interactive installation as another entryway to engage with the project that has been showcased at various public events. The first iteration was planted in an abandoned retail space A Bloc (Espoo, Finland), as part of a collaboration with the Baltic Sea Lab project. Here the Collective worked for six months (November 2020 – April 2021) and interviewed various forest stakeholders including forestry researchers, tree physiologists, artists, and forest data managers about their relationships with forests. The installation was further showcased at various exhibitions and festivals, including the Research Pavilion #4 Helsinki (June 2021) where it accompanied two guided walks with the SMEAR II station in Hyytiälä.

In November 2021 – February 2022, some insights from the unfolding Open Forest inquiry were showcased at the Data Vitality exhibition organised at the Dipoli Gallery, Aalto University.

In June 2022, the Open Forest installation was planted at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain; followed by the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet showcase in Espoo, Finland (September – October 2022). 

The project Open Forest is ongoing and it keeps walking – see the News section below for upcoming walks as well as documentation of past events.

In November 2020 – April 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab occupied a large abandoned retail space of the A Bloc shopping centre in Otaniemi (Espoo, FIN). The space hosted a multi-sensory seaweed structure named Hidaka Ohmu, originally designed by Julia Lohmann and the Department of Seaweed for the World Economic Forum in 2020. The sculpture made of Japanese kelp facilitates conversations and alliances by bringing the sea, its materiality, texture, and scents into a human-made environment. Fellow artists and researchers, including the Open Forest collective, were working inside and around the Ohmu for a period of six months and invited other interested creatures for one-to-one dialogues.

After moving out from the A Bloc space, the Hidaka Ohmu sculpture traveled to a new venue, the Glasshouse Helsinki, where it was exhibited in June – August 2021, as part of the gallery’s ongoing initiative to promote art-science dialogues.

The Baltic Sea Lab project followed with two co-creative engagement events, delving deep into the concept of ocean literacy to better understand the needs of the local sea. Partnering with local Finnish institutions like the John Nurmisen Foundation, the Hanaholmen, and the Tvärminne Zoological Station, the Lab invited conversations with artists and designers about various ways of engaging communities with local sea and surrounding environment.

The event at the Tvärminne station, which is situated at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, involved playful explorations of the local seascape including diving, gathering algae samples and studying tiny bubbles in the gut weed, as well as a panel discussion ‘Baltic Sea Lab: How creative practices can support sea health’ . The panel invited six panelists: author of the ECOtarot deck and Arizona State University professor Adriene Jenik; founders of the Ocean Confessional initiative Sam Shamsher and Pete Fung; author of the Selkie Skin project Gary Markle; researcher and artists Iryna Zamuruieva from Flood Risk Scotland, and the Baltic Sea Lab’s very own Julia Lohmann to reflect on contemporary themes and issues in ocean literacy.

The goal of the panel was to identify ocean literacy topics that need to be addressed from a scientific point of view and, alongside it, to understand how creative practices create engagements with relevant individuals and communities. The insightful conversations prompted reflections on the challenges of scaling and reproducing artistic practices and on the nature of an effective engagement.

Three interwoven and recurring topics from the events were developed into three pillars of ocean literacy. These aim at understanding how creative practices engage a community with ocean literacy through: Knowledge (awareness of ecological and cultural issues), Care (empathy, emotional and embodied connection), and Action (active participation, agency). A Baltic Sea Lab installation capturing the three pillars was showcased at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June 2021) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures showcase (September – October 2022).

In August 2022, another co-creative event A Moment with the Sea event followed with a less structured form of reflection, inviting individuals and communities to spend a moment thinking about and with the Baltic sea. In celebration of Itämeripäivä – Baltic Sea Day – the event called for messages of love, concern, gratitude, confession, and/or fear for the sea to be sent and written with chalk onto rocks along the Baltic shoreline.

The lead project author Julia Lohmann presented the Baltic Sea Lab project and related themes in ocean literacy at the New European Bauhaus Dialogues – Arctic Design Week event (March 2021) and later at the Bauhaus of the Seas conference, as part of the New European Bauhaus initiative – Roundtable ‘Transformative Economies: Ecosocial Wellbeing and the Politics of Participation’ (May 2021). In June 2021, the Baltic Sea Lab ExP team contributed some of their seaweed artifacts, including the beautiful KombuKamui dress, to the Archive of Vibrant Matter, as part of the Porto Design Biennale in Portugal. Another seaweed artifact, the large sculpture named Kombu Ahtola, was shown at the exhibition The World As We Don’t Know It, organised at the Droog Design space, Netherlands. The exhibition curated by Renny Ramakers features 20 international artists presenting their visions on the climate crisis.

In September 2021, Baltic Sea Lab authors unveiled the Seaweed Shrine – a collective sculpture documenting ongoing practice-based research and exploration into algae and seaweeds conducted together with students and staff at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. The Shrine co-authors connect their expertise in design, marine biology, and chemistry to engage audiences with themes in ocean literacy, material development, and the agency of seaweed. Exhibited as part of the Helsinki Design Week 2021, the Shrine aims to alter and foster people’s capacities to care for their surroundings while attending to more-than-human values and interests.

The spread of contemporary populist ideologies linked to national and ethnic boundaries has increasingly focused on issues of birth rate. Here, the female body is cast as the property of the state through legal and ideological means. Through their hands-on biohacking research & practice-based process, The reProductive Narratives authors aim to encourage strategic alliances employing hormones and bodily fluids as non-invasive (bio)technologies, and as narrative agents, via pharmacological and technological tools. A further objective of the reProductive Narratives project is to engage citizens in critical dialogue and knowledge exchange about reproductive politics.

Within their laboratory work, Maja and Gjino experimented with isolating differentiated cells from Maja’s menstrual discharge and cultivating those inside growth media containing hormones extracted from her urine. Prior to the laboratory phase, Maja collected her menstrual discharge for a period of 24 months (this biomaterial was stored in a Vitrification Medium at -20 degrees Celsius). Following this, the biomaterial was centrifuged and subsequently cultured. These cultures were inspected and a growth medium added before being placed in a bioreactor. Morphological alteration was then induced in the biomaterial via transfection with a synthetic follicular-like fluid produced using gonadotropin extracted (via chromatography) from Maja’s urine. These cells were then cryopreserved.

The laboratory work took place from November 2020 – February  2021 in the BioTehna Lab and Kapelica gallery (Ljubljana, Slovenia), and Universal Research Institute (Zagreb, Croatia). The laboratory procedures followed a research protocol published in 2016 by the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and collaborators in China. These procedures have shown the possibility of extracting somatic cells from menstrual discharge. The extracted cells may show egg-like properties (specific protein structure), raising a myriad of possibilities for speculation regarding the existing and imagined reproductive functions of the female body.

On the 26th of November 2020, Kersnikova organised an online panel discussion on the reProductive Narratives project, featuring the artists Maja Smrekar and Gjino Šutić together with a guest artist Margherita Pevere. The session was organised within Kersnikova’s Freaktion Bar series and moderated by the writer, philosopher and critic Mojca Kumerdej:

Open Urban Forest planted at ssesi.space is an attempt to start and facilitate a meaningful and relational inter-species interaction. Combining creative research, poetic speculation, focused presence and attentiveness to the situated genius loci of the Open Urban Forest site, the project team collaborators gathered images, meanings, scenarios, sounds and other sensorial impressions and arrived at rich, layered representations of the burgeoning forest and the actors that inhabit it.

The site has been a limitless source of inspiration – and occasional frustration – for learning about the feral and the natural, at the same time as learning about the human condition and its preconditions. Describing, understanding and justifying the team’s human motivations and deeds turned out to be just as challenging as it was to attend to the local forest and its non-human dwellers.

The Open Urban Forest research strategy was to approach the site and its actors through the prism of four expert teams with the leading author, Micha Mitro, providing additional guidance given his rich, day-to-day experience with the site over the past eight years. The group understanding of the space thus evolved in an inter-subjective and pluralistic fashion. In doing so, the group hoped to reflect the complexity of actors and dynamics that they were trying to understand.

The experts in the team – from the areas of forestry sciences, architecture, sound and performance art – were asked to use their distinct knowledge, tools and skills to elaborate on diverse aspects of the Open Urban Forest space. The research was thus structured loosely and allowed a space for subjective preferences, focus and attention to detail. The group agreed to openly acknowledge their active and transformative role in the environment rather than positioning themselves as ‘objective’ observers. Despite being rather personal and site-specific, many aspects of the research can be abstracted to other scenarios of human-nature interaction.

The first group of collaborators, the AVA collective – sonic enthusiasts re-searching and re-shaping environmental sounds – were working on the site from January 2022 to September 2022 to record detailed sonic footprints of the forest and its more-than-human agents as well as its larger sonic atmosphere.

Following the goal of bringing awareness to the sonic ecologies of the forest space, they have been freely floating between the documentary and performative modes of sound recording. The results of their experimentation include minute explorations of long unused gardening utensils, water interacting with metal objects, jamming with and over heavy machinery that is used to install a road tunnel on the opposite side of the river valley, as well as site recordings made by a drone.

These results were turned into a database of sonic footprints of the Open Urban Forest space and its various surroundings at diverse altitudes and times of the day, accompanied by AVA’s written notes and reflections.  

From March 2022 onwards, a group of architecture MA students led by Jan Kristek, current Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Brno University of Technology, have speculated on various construction scenarios for the forest site and explored possibilities of more-than-human co-habitating.

Following the questions: How can we, as human designers, sensitively re-purpose existing structures to accommodate both human and non-human needs? How to design with natural elements and genius loci in mind? The group was split into pairs to approach certain functional elements at the site from diverse perspectives: fire and food, air and wind, earth and sleeping, water and washing, sunlight and shade.

The results of the groups’ four-month effort were novel and site-specific, yet they remained undoubtedly anthropocentric: their construction scenarios involved materials such as acrylic, polystyrene and concrete although there was one that embraced up-cycled wood planks to create a gateway connecting ‘the wild’ with ‘the cultivated’. 

As a follow-up to the presentation of students’ proposals, one more visit to the forest was arranged (June 2022). The aim was to spark the students’ imagination and try to bring their attention away from the human and towards what and who surrounds us. This re-framing of the situation was a huge lesson for all involved: the students were positively challenged; Michal discovered how difficult it can be to explain why one should care, design and cater with more-than-human perspectives in mind in a concise manner. All in all, the conversations yielded some interesting additions to what was originally proposed, and sparked curiosity about every site involved.

On 14th and 15th of May, the post-dramatic theatre company d’Epog conducted on-site research and consequently a three-hour-long performance titled d’Epog exists at the green fields. The five-member group explored how human and more-than-human bodies co-exist, co-act and inter-act together in the intensified reality of extended focus.

The group managed to create a very convincing metaphor connecting the subjective and corporeal, physical, geographical and political: their physical struggle navigating the seemingly ever-rising, steep and sloped ‘forest-turned garden-turned forest’ resonated with ever-increasing acceleration, progress and reoccurring socio-economic and personal crises. 

On the 2nd June 2022, Associate Professor of forestry Radek Pokorný and his team from Mendel University’s Forest Department visited to create an ortho-photogrammetric model of the whole site and discuss the possibilities of its re-wilding. Acknowledging the upcoming ‘dry century’, Pokorný proposed that the rocky surface recently unveiled due to road construction on the slope opposing the forest will reflect even more sunlight and heat on the Open Urban Forest site – something to be considered when planting or cutting the local vegetation. 

Some of the most prominent and recurring features that emerged across all the expert groups and their research visits have less to do with the exploration of the space itself (its actors and its dynamics) than with reflecting our very human nature, our habits, preconceptions, imperfections and failures – in a multitude of shapes. We were constantly reminded that it is us humans conducting the research on the forest’s non-human inhabitants and not the other way around. That the motivations are ours, the egos are ours and the failures are ours too.

Emerging outcomes of the Open Urban Forest project were showcased at various public occasions, including the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and an on-site exhibition at the Open Urban Forest space itself.

As the project has a strong thematic alignment with the Open Forest Collective’s work, the site has been included as a patch to the Feral Map. Here, stories sprouting from the Open Urban Forest project were added to enable a further exchange of forest stories.