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). 

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.

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.