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. 

This social technology is based on the experimental care models developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. The result of The Hologram process is the construction of a robust multidimensional health network, collectively-oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive capitalism.

The Hologram’s protocol ensures that all caretakers are cared for, and regards properly supporting someone else’s well-being as therapeutic in itself. As the racist, capitalist and patriarchal world crumbles around us, participants are invited to design long-lasting systems for support and solidarity that can ensure that our species can outlast the ongoing social, economic and planetary emergencies.

The project aims to enact a functional system for non-expert healthcare based on mutualistic support and solidarity that works towards a speculative post-capitalist future where peer cooperation is an essential value. It aims to foster people’s personal transformations within small groups through a peer-to-peer healthcare system and enable the system’s viral proliferation in broader social and geographical contexts.

The Hologram Course

Within the CreaTures context, The Hologram started with the course We must begin again: Asking for help as a new world, in which people from all over the world were invited to meet online to study and practice what it means to ask for help. The course was run in Autumn 2020, following an incubation period and exploratory workshop organised at Furtherfield’s space, as part of Cassie Thornton’s artist residency.

“We believe that destruction is making space for new beginnings and that we have no choice but to begin again. We see asking for help as a way of coming into a new world with humility, curiosity and interdependence with all beings. We want to work together with you to remind ourselves what we have been forced to forget: how to be a cooperative, interdependent species. In this project, the person who articulates their needs and asks for support can take us to a whole new world.”

– from The Hologram course invitation

In the series of six online course sessions (Sept-October 2020), 26 participants were guided through a process to remember together why and how to ask for support, and how to ensure that our supporters are supported. Together, they experimented with how to organize and value the support they need to survive and thrive in the coming new world: they practiced and discussed the social skills, values, and priorities that are central to The Hologram’s model for collective peer-to-peer healthcare.

• Each session focused on a particular topic:
• Trust and questions of Bad Support
• Atrophy of the Sharing Muscle
• Failienation
• Learning to Trust Ourselves Again
• Wishes and Time

Participants also practiced Social Presencing Theatre and experimented with their first Hologram meeting. The last session was dedicated to building a Hologram Community of Practice. Each person left the course empowered to assemble and participate in their own Hologram group.

A CreaTures member joined the course as an embedded researcher and shared autoethnographic logs of their experience throughout, giving The Hologram facilitators an invaluable participants’ perspective. This provided insights into the complex tensions and interplay between personal/individual and shared/collective experiences across the six weeks. Their reflections on the appeal (or otherwise) of certain elements of the experimental practices employed also informed the development of future courses.

The Hologram team offers several courses every year, each shaped to fit common collective needs. Outside of the CreaTures scope, multiple courses took place including, for instance, a series of courses designed especially for healthcare workers or people who identify as men.

The Hologram LARP – We were made for this // 2050 Fugitive Planning

From inside the stillness of global lockdown, The Hologram’s viral healthcare system was used as a parafictional framework (where fiction is presented as fact) of radical planning “for the post-pandemic futures we wanted”. Through participation in this Live Action Role-Play (LARP) over two online events, twelve people made contact with who they would become, individually and collectively, by 2050.

The LARP had two related goals, offering participants an opportunity to:

“ make contact with who we want to become, individually and collectively, by 2050 [and to] see yourself as a powerful and supported being who will survive and thrive the coming emergencies and crises that await us…”.

– Cassie Thornton (2021)

The LARP was intended to provide the next level of learning and transformation through social holography.  In this immersive game, participants played characters based on the most powerful and well-supported version of themselves. They time-travelled 30 years in three weeks to enact their survival and thriving through multiple emergencies and crises. Human systems collapsed and reformed, in the wake of social upheavals borne of entrenched colonialism, racism and environmental crises. Capitalism ended.

The Hologram Community of Practice and Workbook

The Hologram Community of Practice meetings have been organised on a monthly basis via a Telegram channel and run online by community members. Connected to the community is a series of online, facilitated, two hour-long sessions called Minimum Viable Holograms (MVH). In these sessions, one of The Hologram peer-facilitators walks newcomers through the basic ideas of the project to explain how each part of the social holography process works, and how to have transformative and supportive conversations.

Eleven MVH facilitators have been trained so far to support people in their first Hologram session. The community has been collaborating on a full programme of developments and aims to sustain the practice and network beyond 2023, when Cassie Thornton plans to step down as the creative lead of the project. A summary video provides a glimpse into the MVH sessions: 

The Hologram Workbook (Starter Kit for Anti-Capitalist Futures) was created to provide easy answers to the question: What is The Hologram and how do you use it? This short illustrated manual (translated into 5 different languages) walks incomers through the first steps of starting their Hologram group and is intended as an accompaniment to the support received from another practitioner who is familiar with The Hologram protocol.

The Hologram Film

The Hologram film directed by Thornton and produced and edited by Jonathan Lee, attempts to model the Hologram practice and its use both online and offline. It also reveals the radical proposal underneath the practice, which is that many people can simultaneously create an expanding network of contributors who are healthy and stable enough to survive and thrive through the end of capitalism, and to make new ways of organising human cooperation with what is found in the rubble. The film consists of a simulation of the Hologram protocol performed by people who are a part of the large community of practitioners using The Hologram practice in their life. 

The Hologram film was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at an exhibition, workshop and video launch event at the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology as part of the Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (July 2022).

In the nine months following The Hologram course, numerous events took place. Community members ran two more Hologram courses, eleven people set up their own Holograms, while 35 people joined The Hologram Community of Practice on Telegram and 36 people joined a new, monthly Community of Practice meeting. 40 people also signed-up and participated in Minimum Viable Holograms (MVH) taster sessions that enable people to create their own care clusters. These MVH programmes were developed with a specific focus on diversity. The Hologram also received significant additional funding and support through other social and cultural organisations. A website and community forum were created and populated by networks of The Hologram participants.

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).

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:

The game aims to help players co-imagine a desirable future state of a collectively decided city in 2030 through fictional storytelling and design prompts and then back-cast ways to tackle critical challenges to reach the co-narrated future. As the story is co-narrated, the outcome of each game session varies depending on the participants’ interests and aspirations. This diversity of perspectives helps the players to find new opportunities and create novel pathways for reaching desirable futures.

The development of the game started from the motivation to foster desirable futures and feasible pathways towards them, while avoiding the production of disempowering dystopian or utopian narratives. Decision makers in business and public institutions were chosen as the preliminary target group for the game with the aim of influencing sustainable organisational transformations.

At the beginning of 2019, Hellon sought opportunities to contribute to social and ecological sustainability in partnership with other creative agencies and research institutes. Joining the CreaTures consortium in 2020 enabled Hellon to explore this endeavour in depth. The Sustainable Futures Game is inspired by Hellon’s two previous projects: Nordic Urban Mobility 2050 Futures Game for Nordic Innovation (2019) and the Opportunities for Finland Report for the Finnish Government (2018 – 2019). These experiences strengthened Hellon’s conviction on the need for novel processes to aid collaborative explorations of sustainable futures through creative methods and imagination. 

The Sustainable Futures Game can be played both physically and digitally, by eight to ten persons at a time. A game session starts with an introductory presentation by Hellon facilitators to prepare the players and introduce the key terms and concepts of the game. The gameplay occurs in two parts.

In the first part, players collectively imagine a fictional story set in 2030, which depicts a desirable near future state of a selected city. The fictional story unfolds through player discussions supported by various probing tools including. The main objective of this first part of the game is to facilitate a dialog on desirable futures and collectively imagine a fictional story that integrates multifaceted characteristics of this future narrative, such as personal desires, societal norms, and political structures.

In the second part, players identify critical challenges and barriers that restrict or hinder their co-narrated desirable futures from materialising. The game session results in concrete, action-oriented suggestions on what type of activities should be implemented today to overcome the identified barriers and move towards the co-imagined future.

The Sustainable Futures Game can be seen as an example of futures-oriented design games that help participants make abstract and ambiguous topics more engaging and personal by incorporating creative methods such as improvisation, fictional storytelling, visual prompts, and creative ideation.

From August – November 2020, the first game prototypes were tested in a series of pilot game sessions with partners from the CreaTures project and other stakeholders of diverse backgrounds, including sustainability experts, system designers, service designers, and business leaders. After each game session, Hellon’s design team reflected on the insights received from participants’ feedback to revise the game logic and elements.

The first public game session took place in November 2020 and invited members of the FIBS (Finnish Business & Society Corporate Responsibility Network– the largest corporate responsibility network in the Nordic countries. In May 2021 – 2022, four additional sessions were organised with diverse players including, among others, Laurea University of Applied Sciences service design students and members of the Finnish parliamentary Green Party.

In June 2022, Hellon created a short film summarising the game’s conceptual background, motivations and key principles. The Sustainable Futures Game board and film 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).

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.

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.