Open Documentation – CreaTures https://creatures-eu.org Creative Practices For Transformational Futures Sat, 11 Feb 2023 21:31:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 Gaming for the Commons – Commonspoly https://creatures-eu.org/productions/commonspoly/ Sun, 06 Dec 2020 19:36:45 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=58 Commonspoly is a non-profit, open-source board game that encourages a culture of cooperation and questions the hegemonic, extractivist model of neoliberal privatisation. The game design principles draw on insights from commoning practices, encouraging players to pool their resources and act collectively rather than competing to accumulate goods. The challenge is to create a society where working together furthers the common good. Commonspoly works as an educational artefact supporting peer-learning and critical discussion about commons by collectively envisioning socio-economic systems based on collaboration, mutuality, and solidarity – rather than exploitation and extractivism. In the long term, the Gaming For The Commons – Commonspoly project aims to build a trans-local community network of stakeholders interested in critical discussion and education related to the topics of commons and socially sustainable economic models.

Commonspoly version 3, a 3D view of the box (image credits: Pep Domenech)

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.

Commonspoly at the CreaTures Festival in Seville (image credit: Julio Albarrán).

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).

Commonspoly at the CreaTures Festival in Seville (image credit: Julio Albarrán).

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CreaTures Glossary https://creatures-eu.org/productions/glossary/ Sat, 05 Dec 2020 15:26:25 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=866 The CreaTures Glossary is a set of tools for giving meaning to a lexicon of terms related to creative practice and transformational change. The Glossary includes games, a website, workshops, and other interactions that facilitate language as a social practice. It aims to give meaning to a lexicon that is particular to the field of creative practice and ecosocial transformation, but which might also work more broadly. Here, language is understood as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate.

Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though the language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate, and there are several public invitations to do so. 

The Glossary author, artist Amira Hanafi, brings a radical understanding of “common” to the project. They understand language, as part of the commons, as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. Rather than produce fixed definitions, the Glossary distributes power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it. 

The Glossary tools – games, a website, workshops, and person-to-person interactions – capture the drama of everyday acts of linguistic co-creation. These tools are built to facilitate and document continuous linguistic interaction: Meaning becomes plural and fluid, and the lexicon is constantly changing. The tools are also metaphors, which enact some of the processes of change that the lexicon is meant to describe.

The website includes open-source, real-time text editors and games that request input from users who can contribute words or definitions, edit existing ones, or remove definitions entirely. Every contribution is meticulously documented via a real-time database, and users can witness each other making meaning simultaneously. Equally important, histories of these interactions remain freely accessible to any user on the site. The database feeds into the interconnected parts of the site, creating a hidden web of linguistic interaction that resembles real-life language acts. The website makes these interactions visible, which under other conditions might remain hidden.

The games that exist on the site are also played at workshops and other co-creative occasions. Examples include a Glossary workshop organised at the Uroboros 2021 festival as part of the CreaTures Feral track (May 2021), a workshop organised in the context of the CreaTures Plenary including researchers from the CreaTures team (September 2021), and a workshop with a group of experts in climate change and sustainability organized by RMIT Europe (November 2021). Three additional workshops took place in April 2022, inviting diverse public audiences including high school students. The Glossary project was also exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022).

Glossary games at the Uroboros festival workshop (video credit: Amira Hanafi).

The Glossary has multiple interactive functionalities:

Build vocabulary: A game played in workshops and on the website, adapted from the Rapid Word Collection method developed by linguist Ron Moe. Moe’s method is intended to assist language communities in capturing the words and meanings of their languages. It uses a series of semantic domains and related questions. This project utilizes the semantic domain of change and associated prompts, such as, “What is a word used to describe a big change?”

The game also generates questions that align with the research aims of the CreaTures project, about the practices, tools, feelings, and impacts associated with transformational change. The terms generated by the online game feed into the Playground feature of the site – a free space where users can organize words and create word communities, which later appear elsewhere on the site as ‘related terms.’ Users can click on words in the communities to navigate through the glossary. The user-generated vocabularies can also be read as short narratives.

Interview with a word: This game asks players to become words, to embody and speak as them. When played in person-to-person interaction, an interviewer asks the word questions, becoming a collaborator in making meaning. In digital play, the computer asks interview questions selected from an array of questions that were developed during interpersonal play.

Print the glossary: A function to allow users to produce a text version of the glossary, containing definitions as they exist on the site at a particular moment. The glossary is open, fluid and changeable, both in its definitions and in the set of terms that it defines.

Real-time collaborative text-editing: The website dynamically produces a real-time collaborative text editor for each term that is added to the platform. Users can see the existing definition for a term; they can also choose an ‘edit’ button that allows them to add to, change, or erase part or all of the existing definition. For users who are hesitant to disturb existing text, a simple input box asking, “What does this term mean to you?” offers a straightforward, additive way to make a contribution.  

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MyCoBiont https://creatures-eu.org/productions/mycobiont/ Fri, 04 Dec 2020 16:27:00 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=2330 The MyCoBiont project involves a series of workshops where participants learn about the lifecycle of fungi, engaging in co-creative experimentation with various practical and speculative uses of fungi as a climate-friendly biomaterial. The project aims to provoke a reflective discussion about the more-than-human entanglements surrounding the life of fungi and catalyze a shift in human perception of non-human organisms that surround us: from their perception as materials or resources to be used exclusively for human benefits, towards organisms with which we co-exist.

Gliva je nova njiva! (Image credit: Gobnjak)

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:

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Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures https://creatures-eu.org/productions/food-futures/ Mon, 30 Nov 2020 19:08:35 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=223 Experimental Food Design for Sustainable Futures was a two-day workshop organised as part of a long-term design research practice of the Feeding Food Futures (FFF) collective. It experimented with food as a biodesign material and socio-culturally potent, sensory-rich starting point from which to reflect on social and ecological uncertainties.

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.

The ExP presentation at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain.
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Cyano Automaton https://creatures-eu.org/productions/cyano/ Mon, 30 Nov 2020 12:58:52 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=901 The Cyano Automaton is a multidisciplinary project on bacterial, terrestrial, and interplanetary colonization. The co-creative project activities are centered around an interactive bioreactor that cultivates cyanobacteria (Arthrospira platensis) and “gives voice” to this species, helping them to tell a long and multifaceted story – of exploitation, space exploration, and colonialism.

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.

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reProductive Narratives https://creatures-eu.org/productions/rn/ Wed, 04 Mar 2020 20:26:46 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=241 The reProductive Narratives project uses an artistic metaphor to describe social phenomenologies related to the recognition and appreciation of the female body as a production facility of new life. In the art project, which is situated in a laboratory setting, the project co-author Maja Smrekar experiments with her menstrual blood – a socially stigmatized female excrement – as material for artistic expression and later for reflective conversations, which take place after the laboratory work, in a public setting. In collaboration with scientist and artist Gjino Šutić, the aim of the project is to open a space for reflection and speculation on the existing and imagined reproductive functions of the female body.

A reProductive Narratives video discussing the project’s scope was produced by Kersnikova in 2021. 

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

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

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

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

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Hackcamp https://creatures-eu.org/productions/hackcamp/ Sun, 01 Mar 2020 13:05:00 +0000 https://creatures-eu.org/?post_type=productions&p=1868 The Hackcamp is a live methodological intervention combining peer-to-peer mediation and collective research. Each Hackcamp event lasts from two to three days and is centred around a co-creative gathering encouraging participants to identify challenges in their local communities and organisations, and work together to generate prototypes exploring feasible solutions. The project uses the values of open innovation, learning-bydoing, prototyping and situated, collective knowledge. The Hackcamp setting is designed to hack established power relationships and generate inclusive and democratic ways of participation.

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. 

The CreaTures Micro-Hackcamp in Seville (image credit: ZEMOS98).

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