The Yarmouth Springs Eternal project was originally born out of the context of Covid-19, a more-than-human reminder that we are not just people, but vessels for viruses, bacteria and microorganisms to thrive within and on. The project was centred on the season of Spring, while acknowledging that the predictability of the seasons is becoming more disrupted as a result of the climate and ecological emergency.

Yarmouth Springs Eternal came to life along with a community programme of artist-led walks and workshops with adults connected to the Herring House Trust group for single homeless people, and the GYROS group supporting migrants and culturally diverse communities. The workshop programme was accompanied by a six-week public exhibition and various free events including a conference, a series of artist-led walks, a printed pamphlet, and a resource booklet on creative walking activities.

In 2022, supported by CreaTures, the project took a different approach and started focusing more on the internal co-creative processes within the Yarmouth Springs Eternal community and nurturing of its community roots. The project contributors noted that the CreaTures support particularly helped them to deepen the project’s themes and engage with people in a more equitable way. A new group of facilitators was developed to build a space for unheard voices and for those with an interrupted connection to ‘home’ or place. This group grew out of long-term relationships with people connected, and returning to the project, as well as a group of new participants.

In March and April 2022, the group led by Genevieve Rudd and supported by project assistant Moyses Gomes took part in four workshops facilitated by three visiting artists and a visiting ecologist: Ligia Macedo, Holly Sandiford, Jacques Nimki and Tiffany Wallace. The workshops took place in the Great Yarmouth outdoors and in PRIMEYARC – an arts space, gallery and affordable art studios located in an ex-department store in a shopping centre.

Each of the workshops included an outdoors walk around the local neighbourhood and engaged participants – members of the community with lived experience of homelessness, migration, isolation and mental ill health – through questions about ‘nature’ and what it means to them. The goal was to explore tensions between internal and external perspectives on natural worlds: how are our inner landscapes informed by external environments, what emotions and meanings do we attach to ‘nature’? The visiting practitioners brought in their own perspectives on engaging with the natural world through arts, science and well-being approaches. 

Following the workshops, the Yarmouth Springs Eternal community participants were then supported (commissioned and paid or provided with vouchers as a reasonable expense, if accessing Universal Credit) to design and lead their own events for the public that were organised during the Creativity and Wellbeing Week in Great Yarmouth (May 2022). Four events took place and each of these was free and open-to-all, and leveraged diverse creative and walking practices to highlight the many aspects of the Great Yarmouth springtime and its ‘nature’.

The event’s activities involved slow conscious walking and breathing to notice various patterns in the local environment, mindful eating, collective writing of poems, music appreciation as well as the drawing of diverse shapes and forms to capture participants’ sensory experiences throughout. The group also engaged in ritualistic exercises of ‘making-sharing-offering’ at the local cemetery, and collected multi-lingual words of noticed feelings and objects in Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian, Afrikaans and English. This exercise helped to capture and reflect on the cultural differences present in the group: for example, Ligia Macedo noted that in her home country of Portugal, cemeteries are serious and sacred spaces to honour the dead, so she was surprised to see that, in Great Yarmouth, people have picnics in the cemetery.

These events followed a particular rhythm; opening and closing each session with reflective conversations, which were noted down and recorded. A common thread throughout all events was the link between the natural environment, health and wellbeing: the group often spoke about connecting with ‘nature’ as a self-nurturing act, mentioning that it helped them feel calm or energised. Some participants mentioned their concerns about the climate and worries about the future, sharing their observations of plants flowering early or at unexpected times and feelings of anxiety about the depletion of resources.

The group did not come up with a universal definition of what ‘nature’ means to them, highlighting that such definitions might be too exclusionary. Instead, they explored the differences between the local gardened and wild spaces; between valued and neglected areas, focusing on how these distinctions mirror particular local, social conditions. The relationship between participants’ life stories and various self-seeded plants noticed around the town became a symbol of their respect for diverse journeys that we might end up taking as part of our livelihood.

At their closing session and a celebratory picnic in June 2022, the group had a conversation about vulnerability and how it can bear a powerful energy but also many uncertainties. While being vulnerable and without necessary resources and support, it can feel very exposing to step up in a social or another hierarchical system; and many members appreciated the support provided by the Yarmouth Springs Eternal project that enabled them to transition from their involvement as participants to become facilitators. The shifting of roles and hierarchies was key to the overall project dynamics: most of the contributors, including Genevieve, were involved both as participants and facilitators, sometimes even simultaneously. 

Holly Sandiford, one of the visiting artists, reflected on the deliberately loose and fluid project structure:

“As artists we often talk about ‘co-production’ and ‘collaboration’ as a way of working, but that’s often offered up as a limited choice by the facilitators. Yarmouth Springs Eternal is not just co-production, this is simply production! It is brave and bold, and puts people at the core of the project.”

The project has helped to uncover what living and working in Great Yarmouth might mean, to whom. It also enabled reflection upon the symbolism of plants growing in neglected, overlooked, bleak places, and how such places can become beautiful sites of abundant life. The Yarmouth Spring Eternal experience has been turned into a short film produced by the filmmaker Becky Demmen of Supporting Your Art:

Leading Yarmouth Springs Eternal is also tightly connected to Genevieve’s perspective of living and working in her hometown and her own lived experience of episodes of severe mental illness. From these experiences, she has drawn the strength and compassion to support the development of others facing similar challenges, acknowledging that it is a complex area of work, where generosity could push boundaries and challenge identities while, at the same time, being rich and rewarding. As pointed out by Genevieve, resources are really key and this work cannot just appear overnight, it takes a lot of time and care.

In June – July 2022, documentation of The Yarmouth Springs Eternal project was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain, along with other CreaTures experimental productions. 

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.

Under the mentorship of different invited artists and experts, participants delve deep into the possible uses of fungi as organisms that provide a viable alternative to unsustainable materials such as plastics. Fungi may well represent a revolution in the field of new biomaterials and can be also seen as a live, widespread wetware that humans and art can interact with through signaling. The community gathered around MyCoBiont workshops and events – including students, permaculture and fungi enthusiasts, researchers, and designers – is invited to learn from artists and other professionals who have been working with mycelium in diverse experimental ways.

The initial workshop in the series was led by Rok Zalar and Bojana Rudovič Žvanut from Gobnjak, an initiative for urban mushrooming and Kersnikova’s partner organization. The workshop consisted of 7 parts and introduced participants to the lifecycle of fungi and the basics of their nutrition and reproduction. Together with the skilled tutors, participants explored suitable substrates for mycelial growth and learned about the preparation and sterilization of vessels and microbial cultures suitable for fungi cultivation. They also built a mini cultivation chamber, providing suitable conditions for mycelium growth, and crafted their own molds for mycelial bricks. Mycelium was further explored as a commonly-used material for food, packaging, and building material.

The second workshop titled Radio Mycelium (July 2021) was led by the artist Martin Howse and focused on constructing a series of experimental situations examining a new wetware imaginary of fungal mycelium in relation to local, global, and universal electromagnetic signals. Participants built DIY radio receivers, tested the reception of signals, and further explored 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. At the final gathering they were able to sonify resistance modification in an electrical circuit by fungi.

At the third workshop Becoming-with Fungi (September 2021) led by artist Mary Maggic, participants explored the detoxifying properties of fungi to imagine new cross-species toxic entanglements. The workshop started from the recognition that industrial petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical activity has permanently altered the planet through the widespread presence of xenoestrogens or endocrine-disrupting compounds. Participants were asked to bring a household product containing a xenoestrogen ingredient (plastic bottles, cosmetics, soaps, or even their own urine) from which they extracted synthetic hormones and toxins using DIY techniques. Subsequently, they created a xenoestrogen cocktail and fed it to Oyster mushrooms growing on Petri dishes stained with Remazol blue, a synthetic fabric dye. For the following two weeks, they observed the mushroom growth over time to see how these respond to the toxic residues of human industrial capitalism.

Taro Knopp lead the fourth co-creative workshop that took place in February 2022. Tied to Taro’s long-term project titled ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus, the workshop invited participants to construct an installation consisting of transparent acrylic globes equipped with various technological sensors, radio transmitters and receivers. These closed and self-sustaining eco-systems combine different locally extracted organic materials and technological components. The electronic devices inside the globes sense the changes in the living mycelia and create a sound environment with radio waves, thereby creating a symbolic techno-organic machine. The mycelium globes have become a part of a permanent exhibition of artworks at Kersnikova and will enable continuous observation, research and creation of new combinations in the years to come. Artists and biohackers will thus have the opportunity to monitor this inspirational hybrid ecosystem over a prolonged period of time. The ml-iso|la|ti|o|nis|mus workshop, together with an accompanying sound performance, is also conducted as part of the CreaTures Festival in Seville.

The MyCoBiont was concluded with the exhibition Sound for Fungi: Homage to Indeterminacy led by artist Theresa Schubert (February – March 2022). The work began as a laboratory experiment in which Schubert played sinus frequencies to fungi mycelia that she collected in the woods near her home in Berlin. After several weeks of observing these samples, housed in custom-made soundproof boxes, most showed a positive response to the sound, growing faster and denser than samples grown in silence. Schubert then created an interactive video installation that simulated the experiment using a tracking sensor, where hand movements simulate the role of sound frequency and modify fungal growth in real-time.

In April 2022, Kersnikova produced a short film documenting the MyCoBiont project and processes in all workshops and exhibitions:

Refuge for Resurgence presents a four-meter-long table, hand-made in Didcot (UK) from the wood of a wild Surrey oak tree in collaboration with Gareth Huw Lewis of Classic Watercraft. Placed around the table are fourteen wooden stools, each one carefully customised to suit its intended occupant. As the viewer enters the space, they are beckoned by a bespoke soundscape, a chorus recital of a poem that brings the story of the banquet, and its mythological origin story, powerfully to life.

The banquet attendees represent a cross-section of life on a resurgent Earth; inclusive of species that were once domesticated, or might have been considered ‘weeds’, ‘pests’ or ‘vermin’ under human domination, but are now reclaiming their rightful place in the ecological order. Around this table, three humans – man, woman and child – join a fox, rat, wasp, pigeon, cow, wild boar, snake, beaver, wolf, raven and mushroom.

Each creature has a place set at the table, but only the wasp, mushroom and raven (in taxidermied form) physically join the installation. By exploring each place around the table, the viewer can infer the identity of the guests from finely detailed clues on display. These include species-symbolic cutlery, hand-crafted from materials foraged from a former world (avian bones, brake lights, twigs, a rusted circuit board or telephone wire); food offerings carefully catered for each guest; and ceramic plates meticulously illustrated by illustrator Nicola Ferrao with mythopoetic scenes depicting the species protagonists and their narrative journeys, from destruction to resurgence.

“We’re drawing on ideas of folklore, mythology, the transformative potential of ritual and ceremony. We want to open up poetic aspects of other worlds that might feel enigmatic – or even magical. This is an invocation and a prayer for a different kind of world.”

– Jon Ardern, co-founder, Superflux

The table sits beneath a trio of suspended LCD screens that form a triptych window onto the world outside. Created by designer Sebastien Tiew, the windows reveal a cityscape in the aftermath of catastrophe – streets are flooded, buildings lie in ruins, the urban fabric lies shredded – but the vision is far from dystopian.

Green plants and trees are creeping in to reclaim the city, and the wildlife that was previously barred from human spaces is finding its way back to the streets and making a new home. From the perspective of the creatures at the banquet, nature is building a new world from the wreckage of the old. Their task is to work together and find their respective places within it.

“Our proposal for a way out of this dilemma is to completely change the way we view ourselves and our relationship with nature. Instead of seeing humans as separate from nature, we need to understand that we are a part of it. By radically changing our attitude toward natural systems and the ecology of our planet, we have the best chance to reverse the damage we’ve done. How might we – humans and non-humans – truly engage in collaborative living?”

– Anab Jain, co-founder, Superflux

The Refuge for Resurgence installation and conceptual background were captured in a short film released by Superflux in July 2021. The intention here was to give remote viewers an immersive experience akin to being within the exhibition space. The film was showcased at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022). After its initial showcase at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Refuge for Resurgence installation appeared at the following exhibitions: Subject to Change, Droog Gallery, Amsterdam (February – April 2022), Weather Engines, Onassis Stegi, Athens (April – May 2022) and Our Time on Earth, Barbican Curve Gallery, London (May – August 2022). 

Invocation for Hope invites humanity to reassess its place in the natural world. To emerge from the ashes of fire-blackened trees into resurgent greenery – and a glistening pool with a surprise below the surface. The vast, immersive installation examines the complex interconnected relationships throughout the natural world, and raises the possibility of a more-than-human future – a post-anthropocentric planet in which humanity is just one part of a dynamic and multifaceted ecosystem. Audiences are invited to travel through a grid of burnt and blackened pines, salvaged from a recent wildfire, towards a resurgent living forest at its center, where multiple species living in harmony with humanity offer a promise of a new way of living.

In this cradle of biodiversity, you come to a freshwater pool, which reflects, not your own face, but another creature – a bison, an otter, a bird of prey – coming to the water to drink. The pool is surrounded by a cluster of nearly thirty different living trees, including oak, hornbeam, apple, silver birch, and mounds of biodiversity where mosses, grasses, lichens and shrubs grow symbiotically together over the course of the installation. These living ecologies are nourished by regular watering, grow lamps, and natural light from the large skylight on the museum ceiling.

Accompanied by a soundscape created by visionary musician Cosmo Sheldrake, the installation leads viewers one by one on a personal journey from the ravages of the climate crisis to the possibility of renewal and a deeper connection with nature. Wild maples, oaks, birches, and larches spring up and around mosses, ferns, and lichens. Sounds of bird and animal orchestras begin to fill the forest.

With the pool in its heart, this resurgent forest gives visitors the chance to reflect on their place in this more-than-human world – a part of the planet, not masters of it. Encouraging people to reflect on our fragile, interconnected relationship with the natural world, Invocation for Hope explores opportunities to create practices of more-than-human care for our climate-altered futures through ideas around resurgence, redistribution, reparation, and rewilding.

Superflux considers the climate crisis to be what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject – a phenomenon of such spatial and temporal scale that it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully grasp it. Invocation for Hope explores the complexity of climate change as a hyperobject, making it resonant and meaningful and finding pathways of hope amid disaster. The starting point for the installation is the idea that climate change is the inevitable result of a worldview that sees nature as an exploitable resource rather than a complex and interconnected system of life.

“Climate change is not a problem we can ‘solve’ but rather a predicament we must navigate with responsibility and urgency.”

Jon Ardern, co-founder Superflux

The creation of Invocation for Hope required the installation of more than 400 trees within the MAK. In collaboration with the forestry and fire departments of Austria’s Neunkirchen region, trees that had been burned in a recent wildfire were salvaged and transported to the museum. One of the main contributors to the spread of wildfires is an approach to forestry that prioritises monoculture as a means of maximising yield – single-species forests burn faster. As the result of a human attempt to exert control over nature, the fire-blackened forest serves as a synecdoche for anthropogenic climate change as a whole.

The trees in the installation are arranged in a symmetric grid so, as the viewer passes through them to the living oasis at the centre of the installation, they move from an imposed, rigid order to the organic exuberance of nature. The pool at the centre is surrounded by a cluster of nearly thirty different living trees, including oak, hornbeam, apple, silver birch, and mounds of biodiversity where mosses, grasses, lichens and shrubs will grow symbiotically together over the course of the installation. These living ecologies are nourished by regular watering, grow lamps and natural light from the large skylight on the museum ceiling. 

Superflux’s practice does not merely consider ways of avoiding climate crisis but looks beyond ecological collapse, into the more-than-human future. Invocation of Hope can thus be seen as a companion piece to the studio’s other CreaTures ExP and contribution to La Biennale di Venezia 2021: Refuge for Resurgence. Superflux explores the relationship and impact of man and the environment through its mytho-poetic framework: Instead of a direct representation of the dynamics of this relationship, the installation takes a more abstract and symbolic position.

“Our proposal for a way out of this dilemma is to completely change the way we view ourselves and our relationship with nature. Instead of seeing humans as separate from nature, we need to understand that we are a part of it. By radically changing our attitude toward natural systems and the ecology of our planet, we have the best chance to reverse the damage we’ve done. How might we – humans and non-humans – truly engage in collaborative living?”

Anab Jain, co-founder Superflux

In keeping with the message of the work and the theme of the Biennale, every component of the installation was designed to live on after the event, with the aim of neutralising the carbon footprint made during its development and implementation. Once the Biennale ended in October 2022, the living trees were donated to schools. The burnt trees were used as compost for a garden of contemplation in Vienna, helping to enrich the biodiversity of the urban landscape – a lasting reminder of the web of interdependence that underpins all life on earth. The hope of Superflux is that this space continues, in the same way as the installation did, to be a place for people to reconsider and reflect on their relationship to nature. 

Superflux also produced a short film of the exhibition, with the intention of giving remote viewers an experience akin to being within the exhibition space. The film was released in July 2021 and distributed widely. The film was also showcased at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain from June to July 2022. 

Acknowledging that human-food practices are key drivers of climate change, the workshop prompted participants to co-create scenarios and collages imagining alternative food practices that prioritise eco-social sustainability and consider more-than-human perspectives. The workshop outcomes were compiled into a collaborative More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook presenting eleven experimental food futures recipes that aim to provoke imagination and inspire critical thinking on how human-food practices could be different – supporting relational flourishing.

Taking place on July 6th-7th 2020 and situated at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference, the two-day workshop invited interdisciplinary exchange among food-oriented researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in working towards eco-socially sustainable food systems and practices. The aim with the event was to provoke co-creative engagements as well as long-term collaborations among interested participants within the ongoing FFF network program.

Each workshop day focused on a distinct theme. Day one – titled Fantastic(e)ating Food Futures: Reimagining Human Food Interactions – examined interdependencies between food, eating and social practices, and critically engaged with future flourishing through food-tech innovation. Technology is often hailed as a change-maker but it may have ambivalent impacts on food cultures. Food-tech propositions, such as cooking with smart kitchenware or high-tech farming, are contested areas navigated by multiple human and non-human stakeholders. Day one activities thus sought to examine:

• What changes do food technologies bring into everyday life?
• How might we incorporate more-than-human values into food-tech futures?
• How might we leverage imaginative design approaches to scaffold the development of fantastical and sustainable food-tech cultures?
  

Day 2 – Designing with More-than-Human Food Practices for Climate Resilience – reached beyond the food-tech focus to engage with more-than-human food practices in a broader environmental sense, exploring food futures as nature-culture entanglements. The day-two activities drew on a rich variety of existing projects tackling food sustainability, observing that many of these projects fail to acknowledge multispecies plurality. Participants were invited to reflect on these examples and imagine ways of including muti-species perspectives in sustainable food transformations. Through four hours of collaging and exchange of food experiences, critical reflections, imaginations as well as boundary objects, participants unearthed a rich variety of intriguing dilemmas:

• How can we rethink hierarchies in food systems?
• Why are non-humans not credited for their contributions to food processes?
• Can fermentation & human-microbe care provide a model for change?
• How would slugs design food policy?
• Doesn’t more-than-human also imply less-than-human?
  

While originally envisioned as an in-person event in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the workshop was shifted into an online space due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Moving the originally proposed – embodied, co-creative, sensorial – food activities such as foraging and cooking into an online, remote context brought about various challenges but also a chance to explore new ways of working together, while physically apart. The workshop authors used the Zoom video conferencing system and experimented with Miro boards as the main co-creative playground to connect all 33 participants who were joining from countries across Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia.

The custom-made Miro boards designed for the workshop include various interactive elements such as ‘picnic areas’ for collective reflection and ‘food pantries’ stocked with examples of more-than-human food practices across five food system areas. Together with a deck of Food Tarot cards and various food-based boundary objects brought by participants, these Miro components and artefacts served as ingredients for the co-creation of experimental recipes.

Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to record short videos introducing themselves and their food boundary objects that were compiled into a video loop and shared in one of the Miro boards. At the workshop, the loop served as a ‘shared table’ where everyone introduced themselves and the foods they brought along. Apart from working with (representations of) food materials in Miro, workshop participants engaged in foraging walks in their home kitchens to bring more ingredients to the table and worked in small groups to combine their food objects, experiences, and imaginaries and piece them together into the experimental, more-than-human food futures recipes.

The experimental recipes resulting from the workshop include a wide range of proposals: from slug-driven food governance to a picnic meal reimagining the human body as a resource. All eleven recipes were collectively turned into the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook. These recipes don’t provide exact ingredient lists or precise measures; they are not step-by-step guides for cooking up better futures. Rather, they reflect on existing food issues and present proposals for alternative approaches that embrace values of inclusivity, multi-species pluralism, and eco-social restoration. By voicing these intentions, they serve as a provocation to rethink human-centric hierarchies in food systems.

The collaborative Cookbook was released in an online, interactive format and as a downloadable PDF. The book was further published in the Responsible Research and Innovation Tools collection (April 2021), in the Aalto University publication series ART + DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE (July 2022) and as a printed zine booklet (May 2022).
In June 2022, the More-than-Human Food Futures Cookbook was awarded a Special Award of the Jury at the Umeå Food Symposium 2022.

The Cookbook zine and online website were exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022). A short 5-minute video presentation from the Seville event can be watched & endured here.

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 Nocturne project has unfolded as an experiment in care-taking and intimacy with the more-than-human world. The network of Nocturne altars operates as an economy of care – visitors to the interventions are responsible for upholding the integrity of the site, both in the more-than-human species that inhabit it, as well as in care-taking of the altars. The practice of generating new rituals with non-human species serves as a method of re-localization, de-emphasizing the human-human connection, and re-emphasizing the grounding impacts of more-than-human interactions. 

The Nocturne lanterns were created using an adaptation of the Akari process of bamboo paper lamp making in Japan: following the Akari tradition, the lanterns are made of foam-core, saran wrap, string, and painted beeswax. Combined into altars, the lanterns each spark a distinct sensorial experience: the way the sunlight backlights a native plant species at sunset; the sound of the birdsong at sunrise; the scent of jasmine leaves opening as the day cools into night. 

The first public showcase of the Nocturne altars within the CreaTures project took place during the Wild Altars: Radio Walk Stairs installation situated in the artist’s local neighbourhood in Silverlake, Los Angeles (March – August 2021). The work was presented as a ‘wild’ outdoors intervention inviting casual and serendipitous encounters. Near to home, such interventions slip into existing ecologies, opening a temporary space for new ceremonies and eco-rituals, beckoning humans to slow down and pay attention to the special arrangements of elements and lives around them. 

“This pause and break in their typical movement patterns and speed are meant to lead to a moment of deeper observation of the network of more-than-human species around them. Generating this embodied experience aligns with relocalization practices, and subverts the hierarchy of intellectual versus embodied knowledge present in Western epistemologies. To come back to our bodies is to come home, and in this case to come back to the more-than-human entanglements that we are a part of. “

– Isabel Beavers (2021)

QR codes at the site of the altars enabled members of the public to learn about the work, the artist, and reach out if they wanted. The received communication was positive and full of gratitude. The general response was an appreciation for having art in the neighbourhood, and an appreciation of the message. The altar stayed up on the stairs for about a year.

One of the original ideas that Isabel had was to undertake a daily or weekly ritual of visiting the altar and taking a few quiet moments to sit on the steps and listen to, and feel, the elements around her. The ritual evolved over time as she visited the altar less and less. As she prepared to create a further altar on a different staircase, it seemed that a new ritual might involve building a new altar each year, both locally and in more remote locations.

A critical part of the Nocturne project are the social processes involved in co-creating altars and eco-rituals together. There were two workshops organised throughout the course of the project: the first titled Nocturne Altar Hack: Wild Designs for New Eco-rituals workshop at the CreaTures Feral track at the 2021 Uroboros festival (May 2021, online) and the second Co-Creating Wild Altars organised at CultureHub’s ReFest: Reunification (March 2022, Los Angeles).

The Uroboros workshop was structured as a design hack: participants from many parts of the globe were broken up into small groups to brainstorm how they might create a wild altar: what materials they would use, where the altar be placed, what eco-rituals would emerge from the intervention. The workshop was accompanied by a Discord channel to encourage dialogue and communication post-workshop.

The second workshop at ReFest involved twelve participants creating their own small lanterns at the artist’s home studio in Los Angeles. Participants learned the process of creating these wax sculptures and took their creations to place in their own home environments, dedicating them to new eco-rituals they hoped to enact.

Following on the Wild Altars, Beavers created a multimedia installation Nocturne: Sea Altar incorporating audio, audio-reactive visuals, and seven light sculptures to honour the ocean, inviting visitors to engage in a practice of deep listening to ask: what are more-than-humans telling us?

The Sea Altar was showcased at the Atmospheres Deep exhibition at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (Monterey, California; May – July 2021), at Sui Generis: Debates about the Singular exhibition in the SOLA Contemporary (Los Angeles, California; January 2022), and at the Symbiosis: Sculpting the Art of Living Together exhibition in CultureHub (Los Angeles, July 2022). 

The Nocturne project was further exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland, as part of the CreaTures project showcase (September – October 2022). Accompanying the altars, the Cooler Planet exhibition also unveiled a short film The Sky Has Not Yet Fallen showing conceptual background of the Nocturne project:

As the first photosynthetic organisms that ever existed, cyanobacteria are responsible for allowing higher life forms to evolve on this planet. The Aztecs called them tecuitlatl and used them as an important part of their diet until the fall of Tenochtitlan, in the 16th century. Cyanobacteria are also known as “blue-green algae”, which form mats on the water surface that can produce harmful toxins to humans and aquatic life. We commonly know them as spirulina, which is now produced on a global scale and advertised as a fashionable superfood. Since it’s easy to grow and harvest, spirulina is an important element in a space crew’s diet. Actually, it is projected to become a nutritious source of food for the first colonizers of Mars.  

The project author, artist and scientist Aga Pokrywka, in collaboration with the Super Eclectic studio, developed an interactive vessel – a bioreactor – that monitors the growing cyanobacteria’s condition. It is programmed to combine this information with data from NASA’s yearly budgets, global gold mining and the subsequent production of carbon dioxide. The Cyano Automaton communicates by tweeting various information that shed a light on how these statistics are related to exploitation and colonialism; whether here on Earth, or in outer space.

“Through its life cycles, the cyanobacteria inhabiting the Cyano Automaton give us compelling insights on how these huge numbers are interrelated. They also help us realize that the damage caused by human activities, at a systemic level, cannot be just resolved with personal actions (…) There must be a systemic change.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

The Cyano Automaton website displays, in an intrepid style and with scientific accuracy, graphs and numbers of the reactor’s temperature, turbidity, and air pump. It also provides visualizations of statistics on NASA’s space exploration budgets; annual gold mining in terms of tons and profit, as well as the production of CO2 linked to these activities. A live stream of the reactor, sleek blueprints of its design, and an extensive description of the project are also part of the digital platform. The website is linked to Cyano Automaton’s official Twitter account.

Mining has a strong relationship to colonialism. Colonizers saw the territories they occupied as places they could use without any consideration for long-term consequences, exploiting local populations and natural resources. In many cases, it continues until nowadays. Gold, the symbol of wealth and status, has probably been one of the most sought-after minerals ever. Colonial gold enriched European powers and funded the slave trade. Gold is scarce and that makes it valuable, and extracting it damages the environment by producing excessive carbon dioxide. Its overexploitation, here on Earth, has raised speculations to look for it on other planets.

“Gold means economic value, and each year, a percentage of the gold mined worldwide is spent on space exploration. Sending rockets to outer space may give hopes for an interplanetary future, for some, but it’s damaging our planet now, for all.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

Inspired by the complicated history of microscopic cyanobacteria beings, the Cyano Automaton seeks to find connections between different scales of colonization: bacterial, terrestrial, and interplanetary. Together with cyanobacteria as protagonists and narrators of this story, the project knits a critical narrative about ongoing eco-social exploitation and conquest. In the end, whether it be on Mars or here on Earth, the mechanisms of colonization are strikingly similar.

“There is no way to explain our current ecological catastrophe without looking at past and present colonization practices.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

The Cyano Automaton project was publicly showcased at the Uroboros 2021 festival during the CreaTures Feral track as a co-creative workshop. Participants made their own experimental spirulina-based space food, following an experimental recipe and listening to stories of colonisation. Each step of the recipe performed together with the participants became the background for a critical discussion on terrestrial and interplanetary colonisation, of which cyanobacteria – as the first photosynthetic organisms on the planet – have been key players. Interaction with the Cyano Automaton remains available in the long term, via its website and Twitter profile.

In January 2022, Agnieszka Pokrywka and Cyano Automaton embarked on a mission and art residency at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah desert, US. From September to October 2022, the Cyano Automaton vessel was presented at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland as part of the CreaTures project showcase.

The Cyano Automaton project’s documentation and its concept were compiled together in the form of a video.

The Treaty project represents a major undertaking to do long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants.

“In The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025, we are catapulted several years into the future where all the species of the park have risen up to demand equal rights with humans. After much unrest, it has been agreed that a treaty will be drawn up, designating these rights, but first humans must learn to better relate to and understand non-humans so they can cooperate better together. Thankfully there has been a new invention – The Sentience Dial – which allows humans to tune into all the flora and fauna of Finsbury Park.”

– Ruth Catlow, Artistic Director of Furtherfield 

The project depicts a new era of equal rights for all living beings, where all species come together to organise and shape the environments and cultures they inhabit, in Finsbury Park (and urban green spaces across the UK, the world, and beyond). Like many urban parks, Finsbury Park is fraught with environmental issues from noxious gases and traffic noises to governance struggles and financial sustainability. If colonial systems of dominance and control over living beings continue, we all face an apocalypse. Yet, cities are more biodiverse than we often realise, and urban ecosystems engender more species diversity than some cultivated rural areas. So, what better place than a city park for humans to discover more about what role we can play in growing our understanding and promoting biodiversity where we live?

The Treaty invites participants to reflect on a range of realities and proposals concerning biodiversity and its role in climate change resilience. Highlighting the often ignored biodiversity found in urban settings, and the vital role that urban parks play in our futures, it raises questions about the role that different species play in a thriving urban park: How could our parks be managed differently? How can we better care for everyone? What is the role of culture in social justice?

Based around a set of interspecies assemblies and LARPs, the Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 is played from more-than-human perspectives to encourage the blooming of bountiful biodiversity and interspecies political action. Players act and think like a dog, bee, or even grass and help change the way we all see and participate in our local urban green spaces and significantly alter community relations with local biodiversity.  Larping was chosen as a creative format as it enables prefigurative experiences, utilising a conscious bleed between fiction and reality.

The Treaty project represents a major undertaking in a long-term work exploring how an arts organisation based in the heart of an urban green space can support a deeper understanding of that green space and ALL its inhabitants

There are 4 parts to the story and the wider project:

• Part 1. The Interspecies Assemblies – these are games where everyone gets to plan the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park 2023 – an event that will celebrate the drawing up of the treaty itself.* 

• Part 2. The Vote – once artists have had a chance to gather everyone’s input they’ll present 3 proposals for the Interspecies Festival and everyone will be invited to choose the one they want to participate in. 

• Part 3 – The Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park – all the species of Finsbury Park will be invited to join the festival in Summer 2023.

• Part 4 – The Treaty is drawn up and signed by park stakeholders in Summer 2025.

*The first part of the story is realised as part of the CreaTures Laboratory and has resulted in long-term local, national and international partnerships.

The Interspecies Assemblies and Voting 

In the public game of Interspecies Assemblies, human players are matched with a mentor representing one of seven non-human species found in Finsbury Park – a tree, a bee, a goose, grass, a squirrel, a stag beetle and a dog. The selection of these seven species as representatives of the park’s wider biodiversity was informed by Furtherfield’s extensive research and consultation with local experts including Finsbury Park’s own Park Ranger, Ricard Zanoli.

Following the LARP format, Assembly players perform a ritual to enter their mentor species characters and tune into the mentor’s needs and experiences. Throughout the whole Assembly, players only ever play as representatives of another species, wearing either digital or cardboard masks – no human face (or identity) is ever present in the game. This anonymity serves as an important tool for disinhibition and immersion of players. 

In order to achieve this immersion, a narrative device called the Sentience Dial was created to allow human players to tune into the experiences of another species. The Sentience Dial is a new fictional technology that supports communication between all living entities and allows humans to tune into all flora and fauna, to match them with a species mentor, and to then represent them in the game.

At the Assemblies, players learn about the different biodiversity habitats of Finsbury Park – the new forest, the old forest, the wildflower meadows – and represent their species to collaboratively plan the first-ever Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park. This involves choosing the Festival venue (a specific biodiversity habitat in the Park) as well as the activities that the Festival will feature.

At online Assemblies, the planning happens in Zoom breakout rooms, where players discuss the obstacles they face and how they are overcoming them together. Later, they vote for the festival proposal they would like to see further developed and discuss Festival logistics. The session ends with de-roling, debriefing, and reflection on how biodiversity can be best supported in urban green spaces. Minutes of the Interspecies Assemblies are then circulated with an appendix that documents the discussions and players are invited to continue to participate via a discord channel.

By planning the Interspecies Festival together, humans from the locality and around the world have a chance to build empathy pathways to other beings. They learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They explore what it would mean to truly acknowledge – to the level they expect for themselves – the equal rights of more-than-human beings. Together, they think about what it will take to prioritise biodiversity and take actual steps to achieve this.

The first Interspecies Assembly took place at the IAM Weekend 2021 Festival – Planet Earth edition and was hosted by Ruth Catlow & Bea Xu – full recording is available here. The Assembly was followed by a conversation among the Treaty co-authors Ruth Catlow & Cade Diehm and the CreaTures researcher Dr. Lara Houston, exploring the ideas and motivations behind the project. A live in-person Assembly in Finsbury Park was organised in January 2022; three online Assemblies followed in May – June 2022. Each online Assembly included a rehearsal session that took place a few days in advance, to help participants attune to their non-human roles.

The Interspecies Festival and the Treaty drafting

The Interspecies Festival is a gathering for all species showcases their cultures, their interests and talents. Like a World’s Fair or an Olympic Games, it is a place of discovery, marvels and broadened horizons. But it can only be planned if we help all the species of the park present their ideas. By planning the Interspecies Festival together, players learn about what matters to them and their habitats. They explore what it would mean to acknowledge the equal rights of more-than-human beings to the same range of freedoms they expect for themselves. 

Later, nearer to Summer 2025, project authors and participants will draft the Treaty and decide how to connect even more deeply with all the species of the park through the Festival. A treaty was chosen as a universal format for establishing agreements between conflicted societies, and for the formation of new configurations of human social relations. It resonates with historic agreements that go back millennia worldwide, while also speaking to the negotiations and signing of more recent climate change agreements. Centering the game on plans to sign a treaty also led to the creation of a scenario in which different species would need to extravagantly exhibit and share their different cultures as a route to multispecies understanding and justice. 

Treaty online portal and Interspecies Meditation

To support the recruitment of players and circulate the project widely, Furtherfield created a call-to-action video providing the Treaty’s context:

The recruitment is further facilitated via a project website with detailed information. On the website, players enter the gameworld where they meet mentor species, discover the Sentience Dial, learn about the Interspecies Assemblies, and are able to access information about technical requirements. They can read FAQs and are directed to Eventbrite to sign up for an Assembly event. On acquiring a ticket, players fill out a Mentor Species Matching form via the Sentience Dial. In this way, they learn about the species who they will represent in the Assemblies, in preparation for the struggle for interspecies justice and more-than-human equal rights.

As part of The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025 roleplay, Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield developed the engagement format of Interspecies Meditations to help build empathy pathways to other life forms. Meditation is used as a tool for character development and immersion: participants use their imaginations and engage in a bonding ritual guiding them to (metaphorically) enter the body and consciousness of a different species, to reflect on the nature of their existence.

Via the ritual, they get transported to the interspecies multiverse where they sit for a guided meditation. The meditation is followed by a sharing circle where everyone describes their experiences of their new bodies and sentience. Listening to each other, participants have the opportunity to learn and understand more about their place in webs of life.

The Interspecies Meditation was performed by Ruth Catlow at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at the Uroboros 2022 festival in Prague, Czech Republic (October 2022).

The Treaty project will have an extended afterlife. The Haringey Council London: People need Parks has asked to partner in the longer term on utilising The Treaty as a way to improve and measure impact on the biodiversity of Finsbury Park. After extending the project through 2023, largely due to Covid-19 related delays, it has been decided to run it until 2025 in order to keep up with growing local interest and give time to develop an actual treaty signing element. Haringey Council would then like to invite local residents to sign a treaty of cooperation with park biodiversity and monitor its impact.

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.