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. 

The Fallen Clouds project explores the metaphor of a cloud as a way to connect two contemporary issues: the growing expansion of digital infrastructures and the climate crisis, crossed by forms of historical extractivism in certain territories. The project locates the ethico-political tensions between technological development and the eco-social crisis in three critical digital zones and infrastructures in Chile: a submarine Internet cable extended in the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, the new Google data centre in Cerrillos, and the carbonate plants of lithium in the Atacama salt flat. In each territory, the project authors engage with different beings affected by the presence of these infrastructures: from crabs in the submarine bottom to an ecofeminist group in Santiago and Lickanantay women in Atacama.

The Fallen Clouds film

The Fallen Clouds features a film composed of images of these different beings and the diverse processes happening around the digital infrastructures. The film narrative starts with a submarine observation of a new fibre optic cable extending throughout the coasts of the Pacific Ocean in Chile. It then follows the activist actions of MOSACAT (Movimiento Socioambiental Comunitario por el Agua y el Territorio) – an ecofeminist group organised against the installation of a new Google data centre in Cerrillos that would use 169 litres of water per second to cool down its servers. Finally, the film observes the extraction of lithium in the Atacama salt flat from the perspective of a geologist and three Lickanantay women: a girl, a woman, and an elder.

The film sound is recorded using different sound artefacts, from direct sound captures to contact and hydrophone microphones. Experimenting with sound tactilities allows the creation of viscous and electric sound compositions that support the narration of different myths, as told by MOSACAT and the Lickanantay women. From these materials, a ‘cloud symphony’ is born. The symphony is played through floating sound sculptures created with the materials gathered around the three infrastructures explored, including a salt flat crust, water pipes from the lithium extractive sites, dried seaweeds from around the fibre optic cable, and a piece of a fibre optic cable itself.

Each piece is connected to a speaker or to a transductor, generating a vibrating sound composition of The Fallen Clouds. This visual, sonic and material experience allows viewers to immerse themselves in a trance-like journey to break the spell of the cloud, inviting them to take a different perspective on digital technologies and imagine other possible futures connected to circular temporalities as well as interspecies and intercultural affective relations based on mutual care.

Filming & fieldwork

Prior to the film shoot, the authors conducted fieldwork in the three main locations. In January 2022, the fieldwork research took place in Cerrillos, at the territory where the new Data Center of Google will be located. The group worked with MOSACAT on the scriptwriting process in order to better understand their needs, demands, and desires connected to the film.

In February 2022, the group traveled to San Pedro de Atacama to attune to the local territory and generate collaborative bonds with local communities (who were previously familiarised with the project). These encounters involved a meeting with Karenn Vera Tito – a Lickanantay woman and educational mediator, and Juan Carmelo – a traditional environmentalist educator and a fellow friend of Karenn from the same indigenous community. The Fallen Clouds authors made a ritual of asking permission from the land and the ancestors to start developing the project and visited the land of their ancient abuelos (great-grandparents).

In April 2022, the group worked at the Lickanantay school of Río Grande with Ashley, the only ten-year-old student of the school, and her teacher Isabel Tito along with the traditional educator Juana Anza and artist Andrea Vera. Together with Karenn Vera Tito who acted as the educational mediator of the process, they applied different ludic dynamics to create a myth connecting the idea of the ‘cloud’ and its local socio-environmental resonances with the Lickanantay cosmovisions.

The filming continued in the Atacama Desert, starting in San Pedro de Atacama, a town located 2,408 metres above sea level. The work involved members of the Lickanantay community of Río Grande in the Chaxa lake, a place characterised by a rich and unique ecosystem and a sacred site for the local indigenous communities (the site is currently administered by the Toconao community, who kindly allowed the access to film in this place). The filming then continued in the centre of the Atacama salt flat close to the lithium extractive sites.

Film editing & installation

In May, the group followed the installation of the new submarine fibre optic cable Prat owned by the local telecommunications company, GTD, and recorded sounds at the seashore of the Pacific Ocean to capture the audio textures of places around the submarine cable. The film editing started in June 2022 and was followed with the construction of the final atmospheric installation.

During the fieldwork and filming process, the different materials that make up the ‘cloud’ were collected – algae, salt flat crust and water pipes used for lithium extraction. Different sound artefacts were used to create the vibrant cloud composition, including speakers of different sizes and transducers, accompanied by diverse fabric materials and other equipment to hang all the objects and speakers to create the final immersive art installation.

The installation including the film was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (September 2022).

The first prototype of Commonspoly was created at the 17th ZEMOS98 festival in Seville in 2015, during a working session facilitated by Guillermo Zapata and with the participation of Vassilis Chryssos, Francisco Jurado, José Laulhé, Carmen Lozano, Rubén Martínez, Peter Matjašič, María G. Perulero, Virginia Benvenuti, Natxo Rodríguez, Igor Stokfisiewski, Menno Weijs, Carla Boserman and Mario Munera. The group decided to hack the popular board game Monopoly whose design principles prescribe land monopolisation, rent extraction and driving competing players to bankruptcy as a win strategy.

In contrast, Commonspoly invites players to collectively convert private spaces on the game board to public, and eventually into common holdings. It sets up a struggle between a Speculator – player character who wants to privatise everything at all costs – and the rest of the players, whose objective is to take assets into common ownership and fight against capitalist speculation. The game has four types of goods: environmental, urban, intangible or knowledge-based, and health or care-related – and cooperation is the only way to win. Commonspoly enables playful ways to mediate complex questions.

Focusing on urgently needed changes to existing social paradigms, politics and culture in relation to the commons, it celebrates what Adrienne Rich has called radical happiness: those moments of collective joy that bloom when a group of people share a common understanding of what it means to actively and truly participate in society. We can find radical happiness in an assembly, at a protest or at a party. It takes many forms, but there is always a common thread – people coming together and working as a group rather than as isolated individuals. Commonspoly feeds the players’ desire to cooperate and allows for free experimentation, discovery and learning around socio-economic questions that arise in real, everyday life.

Upon the collective creation of the first game prototype, the ZEMOS98 cooperative began coordinating and facilitating the development of the Commonspoly project. To encourage collaborative game development the game was made available for free, as a set of downloadable and editable files. The game is typically played in public sessions at cultural events where it engages diverse local communities, but it can also be purchased or downloaded for free in different languages as print-ready files and played privately.

New game versions created by players are then distributed under the Peer Production License and their creators are listed as authors, while ZEMOS98 stays listed only as the author of the game versions that they developed themselves. This peer-process ensures inclusion of diverse personal experiences of the commons and creates an open space for the development of a distributed authorship of the game. The emphasis on collective authorship is a key part of the Commonspoly project. The openness to ongoing re-negotiation is designed into the game, which then becomes a commoning artefact on its own. Through these playing formats and development strategies, Commonspoly has already reached people in 23 countries and was released in five different iterations and four different languages.

For instance, a Brazilian teacher adapted the game to the local context for her students; a UK-based Esperanto expert made a game translation. ZEMOS98 themselves has developed four game editions so far, with the latest one – the Commonspoly Green Edition – used in the CreaTures project. Initially, the Commonspoly gameplays within the CreaTures context were supposed to take place in-person in Seville, Spain. After the Covid-19 pandemic started, there was no possibility for physical game encounters and ZEMOS98 started experimenting with an online gameplay format (the first online game board prototype was released in June 2022).

To support game dissemination, ZEMOS98 initiated an international Commonspoly Network of socially engaged citizens interested in the game and its philosophy. A multidisciplinary team of social researchers and creatives were appointed as Ambassadors for the Network to support Commonspoly gameplays in various cities and countries.

Within the CreaTures project, ZEMOS98 organised a series of gameplays in cities across Europe to enable broad access to the project for different groups, including the scientific community and members of the public. These gameplays took place in Thessaloniki, Greece (July 2021), facilitated by Irene Kalemaki; in Helsinki, Finland (July and August), facilitated by Oula Rytkönen and Andrew Gryf Paterson; in Italy (September 2021), facilitated by Angela María Osorio Méndez; in Lisbon, Portugal (August and October 2021), facilitated by Sandrine Cristomo; and in Madrid, Spain (November 2021), facilitated by the Rosalia Gutiérrez.

All events were facilitated and thoroughly documented for CreaTures research purposes in order to look into the hidden transformative potential of such creative practices. The research work was led by the following questions:

• How does the game help players to reflect on commons in real life?
• How can the game stimulate cooperation?
• Can the game create new relations and a ‘ripple effect’ that would grow in
• the long-term, beyond the context of a single gameplay?
• How does this effect travel through conversations and experiences that
• people have after a gameplay?
• What kind of relations does it foster?

The final Spanish gameplay concluded with an intense debate on the difference between public and commons, on the realism of a society of the commons and on the role of the state in the globalised world. The Commonspoly Ambassadors were active throughout the duration of the CreaTures project, collecting data from gameplays, improving facilitation skills, and documenting various game experiences and processes. The Ambassadors Network is still active and new games are being organised beyond the CreaTures context.

Aside from the gameplays, the Commonspoly project was showcased at multiple cultural events, including the Gaming for the Commons Festival (online and in Seville, Spain; November 2020), the at FIBER 2021 festival (online; December 2021), and the CreaTures Festival (Seville, June – July 2022).

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:

The idea of DOMIE goes against gentrification; exposing the ‘ruin’ that resulted from the Polish transformation after 1989 – the rapid change of systems, neglect of memory and responsibility. In such conditions, there is a need to support the weakest groups and enhance ideas of solidarity. View from the Window focuses on building neighbourly relations across difference, by hosting picnics, creating an urban garden together, moving away cars and making a safer space to spend time together. The aim is to establish relations through social and creative exchange with an environmental focus.

DOMIE is a single standing house in the yard of Św. Marcin – the most famous street of Posnań city. After 1989, the building and the yard were abandoned and became a ruin. The building was previously an important cultural site: for instance, it hosted a Fotoplastykon or Kaiser’s Panorama (an early precursor to cinema). Since 2018, an artist collective has taken over the building, creating a social, artistic, economic and architectural experiment in collective and cooperative care. The artists and youth of DOMIE are considered a foreign element in the neighbourhood, a threat to the old order and regime.

The View From the Window project aims to help create a dialogue between the local neighbours and the new inhabitants of DOMIE, since they may not have the tools to acknowledge that they can gain something from each other. Both communities deal with traumas, poverty, and loneliness. Creative engagements in overcoming the obstacles together and treating them as opportunities can help build such bridges and cultivate a sense of trust. In 2022, the war in Ukraine has brought a new context to the project, as many refugees have become new members of the neighbourhood.

A series of weekly Sunday picnics in the front yard of DOMIE was started in March 2022, inviting all local neighbours to come share a meal, spend a Sunday afternoon together, and get to know each other. Printed posters and an online DOMIE group invited neighbours to spend some time together eating cake and drinking coffee. During the picnic meetings (March – May 2022) a conversation was started about the possible futures of the DOMIE yard, which is currently in terrible condition: it is a disorganised parking lot full of trash, with an uncontrolled toilet, and a place of daily alcohol use. It was discussed how to turn the yard into an urban garden together, move away the cars, and how to create a safer space for spending more time together. The neighbours brought in various ideas and engaged in work for the benefit of the common yard, helping to build the emerging community.

Six picnics at DOMIE

The first picnic gathering was attended mostly by elderly people and people in alcoholic crises. They brought their flatmates, family members and friends. Time was spent talking about the yard: telling each other who we are, how we ended up here, what is the status of the neighbourhood, and what do we expect from the Sunday picnics series. One neighbour came and brought sweets. Many people who came to attend – Janusz, Halina, Daniel, Bogusław, Felicja, Wilku and Maciej – kept coming back for further picnics throughout the series and stayed through to the end of the process. The basic bond was created during the very first meeting. 

During the first picnic, Martyna handed out postcards mentioning that she would be thankful if the neighbours could send pictures of DOMIE taken from their window/balcony, so that they could be used in a public exhibition situated inside of DOMIE. By collecting diverse local views of the ruin, the hope was to support the process of building trusted neighbourhood relationships.

This idea was inspired by the DOMIE’s unique architecture: When photographed from above, due to the unusual shape of its roof, DOMIE visually resembles the first photography ever taken by Nicephore Niepce in Le Gras (France). By playing with the visual connotation of DOMIE in relation to the local neighbourhood context, there was a desire to cultivate the feeling of something dear and beautiful: something connected to memories and storytelling, portraying the house as a place that should be taken care of and treated as a treasure that belongs to all in the neighbourhood. In the following week, Martyna collected several first photographs that were sent via messages and email. 

During the second picnic meeting, more people appeared, including those from Ukraine and other places abroad. Mirek, Daniel, Vasylj, Marta and others were there and took part in a mapping workshop led by Marta Węglińska from the KOBALT Migrating Platform. Together, they created a map of ideas, functions and needs concerning the yard.

For the third meeting, visualisations and plans for the yard were brought along. This had been prepared together with an architectural studio and reflected the ideas shared by locals at the previous picnic. During the picnic, participants shared reflections and experiences: Janusz told the group that he missed them, he claimed they appeared in his dreams over the week, Mirek spoke a lot about his brother in jail and he also offered to help renovate parts of the DOMIE building. Maciej proposed the idea of painting a DOMIE sign on one of the house walls; he was also very interested in the Fotoplastykon story connected to DOMIE – he had gotten himself a book about it and shared various interesting facts about the place and its history. We planted a rose together that was brought during one of the earlier picnics. 

Sadly, no one from the old group came for the fourth picnic but many new people appeared including new friends from Ethiopia, Abdi and Tebarek, and immigrant neighbours Ramzi and Rauf. During the fifth picnic, DOMIE was hosting an exhibition by 17 refugee girls from Lviv, Kharkiv and Kiyv (Ukraine). Neighbours who came for the picnic joined the exhibition, and the exhibition artists later joined the picnic. There were musicians from the DOMIE neighbourhood playing live music and the picnic lasted until late. New forms of engagement emerged, connecting the cultural production inside the DOMIE space with the picnic events.

The sixth picnic welcomed more newcomers from local cultural institutions and grassroots initiatives. Neighbours came to the picnic to grab a coffee and spend their time working on the forthcoming exhibition showcasing their ‘view from the window’ photographs of DOMIE. 40 pictures of DOMIE were collected altogether. These were taken from various windows and balconies: some by the local inhabitants, and some by Martyna as several locals (Rauf, Antonina, Michał and Ramzi) invited her to visit their homes and take pictures.

Exhibitions & Zine

Based on these pictures a map was co-created. This documented where the picnic participants live and helped to nurture and establish new relations. The map was presented as part of the DOMIE exhibition and in a zine publication that was printed on a risograph and released in Polish and English translations (100 copies in total, released in June 2022).

Along with all these activities, the View From the Window project helped to establish and maintain new, friendly relationships and bonds within the local neighbourhood – one that is commonly considered as a divided and ‘problematic’ area. The neighbourhood picnics and conversations about participants’ childhood memories of the place uncovered interesting moments from the history of DOMIE (such as those related to the Fotoplastykon) and provoked a collective repair of the ruined building. The project managed to create a sense of shared local space and shared neighbourly futures, where the local community enacts collective care. 

Aside from the DOMIE exhibition, the View from the Window project, including photo documentation and the printed zine publication, was also exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022).

Within the Hackcamp project, participating cultural organisations and communities conduct analysis of their internal environment and processes related to eco-social change. Based on this analysis, each organisation identifies challenges that appear as urgent, and core values that might be shared by other organisations operating in similar contexts. Examples of challenges identified in past Hackcamps include: the need for effective and fair incorporation of decolonial perspectives in organisations’ internal practices, the need to identify strategies to combat racism and structural violence against racialised people, or the need for internal strategies embracing ecological responsibility.

The Hackcamp methodology relies on five main principles

• Trust in collective intelligence and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing
• Consideration of all knowledge, avoiding distinctions between experts and non-experts
• Willingness to listen to each other’s ideas and to accept diversity as the intellectual basis
• Prioritisation of practices and experiences that care for and value the common good
• Use of visual and body languages in addition to oral and textual tools.

Collaborative production is key for Hackcamp. The co-creative activities are organised with the help of a facilitator who knows the subject matter of the particular event and guides the participant group with empathetic and non-invasive techniques. A Hackcamp meeting is concluded with a public presentation of results and a feedback session inviting external stakeholders who have professional experiences with the main addressed theme.

The ZEMOS98 team typically documents the entire development and process of the Hackcamp for subsequent evaluation. Previous Hackcamps include: Hackcamp Reclaim the Commons held during the ZEMOS98 Festival in April 2015 for activists, makers, thinkers and hackers from all over Europe; Expanded Education Hackcamp held at Fi2 Tenerife in October 2016; and HackCampIAAP organised in June 2017 with the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration (IAAP) – part of the Andalusian Regional Government.

The edition of the Hackcamp run within the CreaTures project was held in Seville, Spain and involved six participants from various cultural organisations. This Hackcamp was divided into two days (30th and 31st May, 2022) and focused on issues around eco-social and decolonial transformation of cultural and creative practices. The objective was to define a roadmap with tips that can inspire development within the participating
organisations and other similar initiatives. The first part of the session consisted of a transparency exercise led by ZEMOS98, showing the cooperative’s internal self-evaluation mechanisms, the status of their current projects and the strategic challenges they have faced throughout their development.

Inspired by the introductory session, participants proceeded to gather learnings, reflections and ideas on how to approach an eco-social and decolonial change within small cultural organisations. To map the possible pathways towards this change, participants compiled their thoughts into the following key areas: micro-policies (understood as non-technical and non-instrumental measures that can be implemented in an organisation in order to address structural changes), tools (understood as technical or instrumental solutions that can be used by an organisation to carry out such
a turnaround), and projects (other projects or organisations whose practices can be inspiring).

From the data collected at the CreaTures Hackcamp event, ZEMOS98 is currently producing an open paper both in Spanish and in English that will be published as an open-source document. The Hackcamp is an ongoing series of events and a format of co-creative gatherings that ZEMOS98 has been using in a long term. There will be additional Hackcamp events happening in the future. The Hackcamp organised within the CreaTures project helped us to expand and further refine the Hackcamp format and future events will build on these findings. 

Andrew Gryf Patterson, in collaboration with several other members of the Pixelache association, sought to explore how the association has developed and sustained its internal organisational practice. By engaging with organisational meta-data, the Pixelache office as a tangible memory device, and the production of two audio zines, they gathered perspectives from active members reflecting upon how the organisation has transformed internally over the course of its existence. 

The creative research process within the Pixelache project involved an extensive mapping of the association’s history and its internal organisational practices over the 20 years of its existence, which resulted in the production of two audio zines. This process consisted of several stages, including: background research into organisational metadata, a workshop focused on gathering materials for the zines, and a production of a project website to host the zines and other project outcomes.  

Background research into organisational metadata

The first stage in the process (January – February 2022) was a compilation of festival and member metadata over the 20 years as reference, followed by the production of a handmade Gantt-style chart of past and present association members. The compiled data was used to build a timeline of main Pixelache events, moments of internal transformation and a generational map of key members and their roles in sustaining the association.

While the existing Pixelache website and content management were a record and source of information to consider, so too were digital organisational documents and portfolio reports. This metadata was gathered as a backbone of factual information upon which narratives could be based or problematised. Throughout the process, the work-group focused on the available data as well as on the ‘gaps’ and what possibly got lost in the association’s history documentation over the time, asking: What could we gather to assist our memory? What was sustainable and what was lost in the process?

Tracing the participation of members allowed a glimpse into patterns on, and offered a reference point for personnel changes in the association. The internal movements in the association implied that roles like producer, board member, or artistic director were accessible to any member with the motivation and will to take them on. This information, of course, did not reflect intersections such as: who feels entitled to take roles, internal dynamics, or other intersections. It allowed, though, to see general changes, like the nationalities and gender of members and producers, and to detect general dynamics in terms of content, interests, and strategies.

From the metadata compiled in the timeline and generational map, the next step was to identify other artefacts (events, objects, narratives) from the association’s history that were useful in co-creating an overview of Pixelache’s internal transformations. This included consideration of the ways in which the association responded to these transformations, and what the impact was of these changes.

Audio zine material gathering workshop

As new association members from 2021, Irina Mutt and Sumugan Sivanesan were invited to lead a workshop with Pixelache members and other interested persons to focus on making collective ‘fanzine’-style audio vignettes or anecdotes capturing key moments from Pixelache’s history (March 2022). By choosing this method – recording situated audio narratives in a quick, unstructured way – these audio vignettes were aimed to encourage further in-depth engagements with Pixelache’s archival documents and online content management system.

The two-day workshop was undertaken as an internal ‘social association memory event’ in the Pixelache production office, in Suvilahti Cultural complex, Helsinki, on 25-26th March 2022. Pixelache members were invited (via members mailing list) to “meet, have some talks, organise materials and check what items, memories and resources we have in the office”. The intention was to consider the sustainability and internal transformations of the association over time, with regards to the things, artefacts or objects that carry traces of Pixelache’s key events and recall transformations in the organisation of cultural programming. 

Due to the length of time that the association has existed, this inevitably involved facing the fragmentation, density, non-linearity of, and of course gaps in, data. This begged a question on the type of stories that could be possibly told about arts associations with a complex and extensive history like Pixelache’s. There is the challenge of what remains materially of associational activity, and what members of an organisation remember or forget over time.

It was speculated that the Pixelache production office was itself an interface device, a container of objects with various usages at different times, a non-linear and non-organised archive, full of tangible data. Being on-site, it was possible to trigger memories relating to Pixelache, in a sort of ‘Proustian madeleine’ process, allowing a more playful approach to the idea of archive: objects as traces surrounded by different stories, where these stories are subjective ways to recall the past. This enabled reflection on, and questioning of, whether there is any objectivity in archives, data or statistics

Interview & workshop data analysis

Following the workshop, it was identified that the information gathered in the Pixelache office missed certain voices of recent producers and board members. Several additional interviews during April 2022 were conducted with the most recent generation of active members according to their availability, focusing mostly on Pixelache festivals and experiences between 2013-2019. Irina, Sumugan and Andrew then worked together to select and edit the workshop conversations and interviews into the audio zine format (May 2022). The editing process led to the arrangement of narrative themes around two main clusters, which was further complemented by a selection of related artefacts from the Pixelache office ‘archive’ that came up in the conversations.

The first thematic cluster was decentralisation, and its relationship to the festival production, its rotating co-directorship model, and related socio-economical aspects of cultural work. It was recognized that burn-out of social organisational energy, which paradoxically also allowed space for new persons to take on curatorial roles, was an important factor in why the organisation has kept going for so long in the past decades.

The second thematic cluster was community and the diversity of disciplines, practice backgrounds and experiences, and how this related to expectations of what the association has been doing together. Resulting from the thematic clustering are the two audio zines: Decentralisation, Burn-out & Hijack and Communities of Practices. 

The Pixelache zines

🔊 Decentralization, Burn-out & Hijack

This audiozine pastes together conversation around ET grilling, open camp model, festival activity in 2013-2015, decentralisation within the association, changing production teams, burn out, and the semi-serious ‘positive hijacking’ taking Pixelache forwards. Featured objects in the office include liquid smoke, a fabric scheduling device, a megaphone, and a hacked exercise bike.    

🔊 Communities of practices

This audiozine pastes together conversation around organisational labour, friendships and motivations, changing disciplines within Pixelache with the recent years, the festival in 2019, safer space ambitions, things left behind, and a need to collectively imagine future desires. Featured objects include the internal ‘pixel’ currency used to partially compensate association member’s work, a 3D printer, a bedside artwork, and safe space guidelines.

Dissemination

As a public dissemination platform to circulate the zines and other research documentation (images, links, text vignettes), an interactive page on the existing Pixelache’s website was created.

The Pixelache audio zines together with other creative and research artefacts 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). 

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.