Woods in the City
collective practice
“Tomorow
we shall have to think up signs, sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.”
— Octavio Paz
Woods in the City is a contact zone for cross-pollinated encounters and exchange transcending disciplinary boundaries, a temporary convivial experience breathing life into a relational space. This series of research- and learning- in-collectivity is dedicated to the unified field and an open exploration of questions around how do we want to live in the contemporary world in more conscious, regenerative and poetic ways. These woods in an urban setting aim to foster and deepen encounters between and beyond disciplines, creation and research, culture and society, and interspecies. Woods in the City for us is a metaphor for a life-sustaining ecosystem, a holobiont, a symbiotic togetherness. Each gathering from the moment of its idea through the process of its organisation and the happening itself is a lived practice from the inside out, a collaborative artwork, rooted in the embodied principles and elements you can read more about here below. For the upcoming and past editions scroll down.
PRINCIPLES
Complexity and Cross-pollination
The world in its entanglement is overwhelmingly, beautifully, vibrantly complex. To make sense of its processes without cutting the entanglement into pieces is possible as a collective practice, as a contextual collaborative creativity, as a powerful force to tackle world challenges of today. This can’t be done by one industry or one school of thought but is rather a process of coming together, engaging in conversations with openness for mutual learning and sharing knowledge, going beyond specialised ways of thinking and communicating, and being expanded through each other. Woods in the City is conceived as a space for experimentation in pursuit of more ecological ways of being, thinking, relating and experiencing, moving away from the colonial human towards human becoming, that is human “but not only”.
Interspecies togetherness
How do we explore formats of collective practice where co-creators are multispecies? What kind of acts of expanding awareness/perception and transitioning from the reductionist view of the world will it require from humans? In resonance with the way Lucia Pietroiusti, curator for General Ecology at the Serpentine Galleries, frames it, within the Woods formats we are exploring how can we expand thinking towards thinking ecologically. Combining the poetic, symbolic and imaginary abstraction that emerge from our perception of other-than-human beings together with their material and earthly existence, embodying their strategies of living and immersing within the physical ecosystems, as an attempt to bring together the symbolic and the ontological.
Composing a Gesamtkunstwerk
The experience of Woods in the City can be thought of as a collective relational artwork, born from poly-creativity and pluri-vocality of everyone involved, everyone is a co-creator whether through a direct contribution or through sharing their presence. Contemporary work is made collectively. The result won’t be a specific object or performance, it may rather take a form of experience of an atmospheric resonance, fertile air, deepened connection, renewed sense for future action, personal revolution, relational revelation, and other forms of shared experiences. Our vision is to create conditions for such experiences to occur, to work the soil, to prepare the tools and to be ready and available to be moved towards a new place, to create and be created. In resonance with Ann Hamilton, “we might have set out to make a sculpture and find that time is our material; we might have picked up a paint brush and find that our making is not on canvas or wood but in relations between people”.
Personal engagement
Woods in the City aim for 1:1 human scale as a counterpoint to the monumental and the scalable. Personal engagement for us is also about the meeting between theory and practice, immersion in an experience-research rather than staying at a distance of an evaluating observation, and thus speaking and thinking in a subjective capacity, being personally involved with subjects, connected to the felt and the visceral experience they bring up rather than staying on the intellectual level alone. This way any question becomes connected to the lived life and stops being an abstraction, it acknowledges the complex web of influences and one’s own embeddedness in the very world that one seeks to study. Personal engagement makes us poets and philosophers exploring life from a unique standpoint of honest perception.
Collective potential and Sense of community
As part of understanding ecologies beyond their biological meanings, Woods formats are also exploring intrahuman interaction and the significance of shared moments and social bonds, honest encounters and rejuvenation of real face-to-face community in contrast to a logic of alienation. We aim to create a “space of affection” that grants a permission to be vulnerable, fosters sense of belonging, care and responsibility for being in the world. We see this as a cultural shift toward deeper experience of personal and societal transformation as one process. Antidote to shallowness are deeper relationships that are formed within a community that is not homogeneous, not necessarily agreeing on everything but engaging in an open dialogue. Collective potential is an ethical practice that fosters both agency and solidarity as a means to arrive to new understandings and enable authentic encounters removed from hierarchies. The spaces of Woods reflect an emergent demand for new ways to think and act in the public sphere, and are therefore spaces of and opportunities for affection, potential action, and the multiplication of voices and narratives.
Exploring the unknown
Experiment is our mode of inquiry. Mirroring thinking of Olafur Eliasson, we also insist on a continuous generous interaction with reality, challenging the established norms by which we live and understand the world. Experimentation is a way to keep this interaction alive. Through a collective reflection and recalibration we invite participants into exploration of forms, rhythms and strategies of engagement as to what the ecological may mean in contexts of work, education, culture, and to cultivate an enhanced palette of tools and understandings with which to more fully embrace being-ness part of a complex interdependent world. The emphasise in on exploring the unknown rather than trying to confirm what we already know, finding questions currently alive rather than answers to questions others have asked.
Optimized for serendipity and poetry
Each Woods is a meeting between the planned and the unknown, impulses and reflection, silence and exchange. Leaving space for the unpredicted to occur and for Wu Wei to take over. Trusting the flow and paying attention to what wants to emerge, containing and directing through intentionality. It’s a balance and an interplay between knowing and not-knowing that support vitality of thinking and learning collectively. 無 爲 Poetry refers to a way of seeing the world that captures one’s lived experience not in linear discursive ways but rather as a symbolic articulation of embodied experience and understanding of the world that one wouldn’t be able to express in any logical form that would do the experience justice. Poetry is an antidote to cliches that shrink our worlds.
Liminal spaces and the Outdoors
Fascination and love for the living wilderness often brings Woods outdoors to the liminal spaces within the city. To learn from nature we spend time with nature, within and without, for which there is no boundary. Among other species and beings, human awareness deepens, attentiveness expands, senses enliven.
Nomadic nature
We are not settled in one place by choice. Nomadic lifestyle is a great teacher. Traveling and shifting perspectives physically one also shifts inner perspectives of how one sees things. When slow traveling one may access other ways of being and perceiving, thinking and feeling. We value multicultural cosmopolitan worldview and multitudes of ways of being in the world, especially in the contexts of shared identities and “othering”. And also — context matters. Places are contributors and co-creators. Each offers a unique experience. So we stay a roaming body of collective practice.
ELEMENTS
Collective Practice
Woods in the City merges cultural encounters, artistic interventions, multi-sensory food experience, embodied inquiry, discourses and conversations into one journey, fusing the subject and object, the situation and experience, into a non-hierarchical plurality of ways of expression. What is being born out of this encounter is a cultural, intellectual, physical, emotional, and culinary journey. These Woods are born from a collaborative synergy of all co-creators and participants, as well as the space and its other-than-human inhabitants. To give space to unique forms of expression to emerge for each journey a team of co-arisers comes together in a situated location to offer impulses and contributions, joined by everyone interested in participating and offering their presence and engagement, and so a Gesamtkunstwerk is born. It emphasises the experience of immersion rather than evaluating observation. Each such compositional experience contains a mixture between stories and food, conversations and embodied awareness, cultural layer and artistic dimension, impulses and silence, serendipity and the unknown.
Research in Public
Woods in the City are dedicated to unified human intelligence, its tangible and intangible nature. It’s a poly-creative, pluri-vocal, participatory research between people from different backgrounds and interspecies to exchange insights and practices, meet different perspectives, learn together and collectively create a space where true listening, inquiry and collaboration may become possible. During such collective inquiry, artistic expression is equally important as talks and conversations, as space and food, as objects and air. We search to build a space for collective intelligence beyond one-method-approach or an established school of thought, for sharing knowledge without the necessity to make others believe in something. We are driven by the wish to share knowledge and practices in ways that relate to direct experiences of lived life and that can be understood by anyone independently of their background. There are no secrets, just different perspectives, different things we notice and experiences we live through; so we come together to share them.
Making
Woods gatherings can have something in common with workshops. They often explore formats of learning where everyone is a teacher and a student, of which making something together is an integral part, as an interaction that departs from an open space where serendipity can take over. Making can be seen as sessions to support whatever is emerging from impulses, inquiries and intentions into bouncing and building on each other’s ideas for new clarity to reveal itself, horizons to become visible, undiscovered perspectives to come to life. Woods wishes to be a doula for this kind of meaningful experiences. We believe in the power of collective creativity and cross-disciplinary pollination to fuel meaningful learning and action.
ROOTS
Embodied Culture
Woods are rooted, as all that we intent and do, in embodied culture. In the context of contemporary Western society human body is usually looked at from the aesthetic, performative, or health-related angles. What drives us to create events and research labs dedicated to a more embodied culture is an interest in the intelligence of the body connected to lived life, in the relationship between physical states and states of mind, in the body as our perceiving, thinking, feeling, moving, and acting in the world. We look at the body as a process and a totality of our lived experiences, as a mediator between external forces: events, expectations, cultural beliefs; and inner forces: internal drives, conscious or unconscious desires, and invisible currents that move us. Body is an encounter between these socio-cultural, phenomenological, biological, intuitive and embodied cognitive conscious and unconscious phenomena — all taking part in orchestrating our engagement with life. To put it simply, we are interested in the body as a place where life happens and where we find out what is real and true for us, where our multiple intelligences meet (emotional, intellectual, somatic, intuitive, etc). During Woods we invite the body back into the processes it has been excluded from in the context of global contemporary culture and its crisis, into an embodied inquiry, that is higher level of sensitivity and attention towards the body.
Thinking-through-Making
Ways of thinking have a huge impact on how we perceive the world, place value and act in life situations. We involve thinking-through-making as ways of re-inventing processes of interaction and learning, acquiring and organising knowledge differently, accessing subjectivity, intuition and imagination, inviting poetic outlooks, working with live materials, nurturing creative confidence, identifying connections that allow to understand something better, and participating in a process of conscious creation of culture. We are interested in creativity that is closely linked to lived life and is not solely reserved for creative professions. We understand it as an inherent drive to experiment, inquire, ask questions, develop own originality, generate new ideas and apply them in practice. It enables people to respond imaginatively, to become more at ease with the unknown, to stay open-minded, to adapt, to find new ways for being and doing. Creativity as everyday practice is a way to we stay curious throughout our lives. Potential to engage with it is everywhere — in our homes and public buildings, objects we use and streets we walk, thoughts we think and relationships we engage in, it is in any detail of the way we choose to live.
Past Editions
Ecologies of Attention
researchpractice into ecological attentiveness
12-16 April 2021, Royal Institute of Art Stockholm/online
Ecologies of Attention researchpractice explores the phenomenon of attentiveness in connection with the contemporary ecologies we inhabit. Ecologies, in this context, designate interdependencies beyond their meanings in biology, and are understood in a broader and more inclusive way as co-existence and interaction between multiplicities of organisms, human and more-than-human agencies in plural contexts. EoA explores radical attentiveness to relationalities. Often habits of attention and established ways of perceiving and making sense of things shrink our awareness, presence and imagination. During the collective process we engage with questioning and re-imagining the established perceptual logic of current cultural paradigm, transitioning from the reductionist view of ‘nature’ to include multiple intelligences and pluralities of organic forms of sensitivity with which human existence is entwined and is inseparable from. This researchpractice is departing from a close connection with the natural environments, embodied awareness, readings, collective reflection, hands-on experimentation, and a process of self-discovery, with the wish to recognise relations as meaningful with intensity and nuance, in+out. It’s an experimental format to bring Woods in the City online.
Day 1 Retrieving Lost Seeds
Introducing Ecologies of Attention
Retracing the Path of Disappeared Seeds
Introducing Mapping
Day 2 Sensing in Silence
Sensing the Self practice
Sensing the Soil practice
Sensing More-than-human outdoors practice
Mapping experiences
Day 3 Making Sanctuary as Feelers of the Possible
Movement Stillness practice
She Un-names Them
Public Talk with David Abram
The Commonwealth of Breath: Climate and Consciousness in Animistic Perspective
In this talk, cultural ecologist David Abram discusses his evolving research into the experience and understanding of earth's atmosphere among several indigenous cultures native to North America. By listening close to the diverse ways that air, weather, and climate are spoken of by various place-based indigenous traditions, we begin to discern and perhaps even experience the elemental atmosphere in a fresh manner. The climate reveals itself as a sensuous yet enigmatic dimension of reality intimately bound up with human actions, with speech, and even with sentience itself – that is, with the full-bodied sentience not just of humans but of other animals, of countless plants, and of the biosphere itself.
Day 4 Planting as Perception and Language
Becoming Animal
a workshop with David Abram
Day 5 Cultivation
Listening to the Quieter Voices, Inner and Outer — a practice with clay
Cooking Session — Eating with Hands, Including the Discarded
Closing Ritual — Singing Maps of Attention
Ecologies of Attention researchpractice is conceived and coordinated by Sabina Enéa Téari, and realised (in this 2nd edition) in collaboration with David Abram, Amy Clarkson, Nicolas Couturier, Tony Karlsson Savci, Rona Kennedy, Becky Lyon, Charlotte Peys, Sina Ribak, Natalia Skoczylas, Egor Sviri and other guests from Foresta Collective. It unfolded as part of CPRC study group at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Body Matters
Research in Public Series
Body Matters series is a researchpractice into embodied culture and unified human intelligence, its tangible and intangible nature. In the context of contemporary Western society human body is usually looked at from the aesthetic, performative, or health-related angles. What drives us to hold this space for collective researchpractice labs is an interest in the intelligence of the body connected to lived life, in the relationship between physical states and states of mind, in the body as our perceiving, thinking, feeling, moving, and acting in the world, and in a movement towards a more embodied culture. We explore the body as a process and a totality of our lived experiences, as a mediator between external forces: events, expectations, cultural beliefs; and inner forces: internal drives, conscious or unconscious desires, and invisible currents that move us. We explore the body as an encounter between these socio-cultural, phenomenological, biological, intuitive and embodied cognitive conscious and unconscious phenomena — all taking part in orchestrating our engagement with life. We explore the body as a place where life happens, where multiple intelligences meet (emotional, intellectual, somatic, intuitive, …), which seems to be especially relevant in the context of global contemporary culture and its crisis. This series offer a meeting space for encounters and exchange around subjects of personal and collective importance, a space where listening and collaboration can become possible. We believe in collective intelligence beyond one-method-approach developed by an individual or an established school of thought, in sharing knowledge without the necessity to make others believe in something, whether in esoteric ideas or complex scientific concepts. This is a space for sharing experiences and knowledge in ways that relate to direct experiences and that can be understood by anyone independently of their background. There are no secrets, just different perspectives, different things we notice and experiences we live through; so we come together to share them.
Past Editions
Somatic Intelligence in Everyday Life
11-12 May 2019, Bard College Berlin
The everyday life matters. How we perceive, think, make decisions, act and interact, all these are rooted in the experience of the body. This event investigates various aspects of how somatic intelligence is expressed, developed and lived in a variety of material and immaterial circumstances of the everyday life. In Western culture, we often experience a strong dominance of the intellect and a primary appreciation of mental intelligence. The body is frequently treated like little more than a vessel to carry the brain around. This empiriocentric mindset often disregards the significance of subjective impressions. There is little more subjective than how one feels in one’s body. Somatic intelligence and ability to identify and relate to patterns in body related expression and sensation, is of course and necessarily a fundamental component of how any human interacts and conducts themselves. This event is open for everyone interested in or working with the body as not necessarily an exclusive but an essential point of access to the world and their own reality as well as those of others. Whether it is personally or professionally. It’s for everyone who has open questions and is willing to explore them in a collective inquiry, beyond ideologies, missions, or promotions. With this event we are searching to create a space for walking the unknown territory together and exchanging experiences and knowledge on the way. Programme is structured around impulses from the invited contributors, working with embodied culture in its various aspects, and participants-driven unconference format to collectively create a space for exchange, knowledge sharing, discussions and conversations. Contributors: Stephanie Maher, Adrian Iselin, Diego Agulló, Shelley Etkin, Zohar Ren Karni, Anna Krimerman, Peter Stamer.
Language for the New Era
3-4 November 2018, cocreation.loft Berlin
The incredible variety of different languages and ways of expression (those of different cultures and disciplines) created by humanity worldwide enunciate the variety of talents people have. Each language creates its own universe of values. Languages we communicate in provide a conceptual map, a lens through which we see the world. This map determines what we pay attention to, what is significant, what is taboo, what is “normal”, what is valuable. As Wittgenstein put it, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world". Any language classifies the world around, and selectively orders it in a particular way. It’s not only a representational tool — it also shapes our reality. So what different ways and means of communication can learn from each other? How can intercultural perspectives enhance our perception of language? What does embodied culture have to do with it, anchored in embodied awareness, sensory experiences and presence?
This event is about remembering our multi-lingual nature. About learning from ways of expression and communication other than our own. Without being shared languages run into danger of solidifying our perspectives, rigidifying and turning into a prison, only allowing us to see things in a specific way. This get-together is a creation of a contact zone that aims to contribute to the better understanding of oneself and more elusive aspects of our own experience, as well as other people, whose languages shaped their world in a way different from ours. The challenge then could be a creation of a new common discourse, a fresh paradigm, and a new system of its symbolic representation, where we could realize the potentials from these different cultural and disciplinary perspectives, where each could be contributing to a holistic progress in human development. Sources of inspiration: poetry, aboriginal languages, visual arts, body languages, cultural anthropology, music, philosophy (in particular the work of Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Chuang Tzu, and others). Contributors: Anita Jóri, Donna Stonecipher, Werner Linster, Einav Katan-Schmid, Philip Hellmann, and others.
Introduction to Embodied Culture
2-3 June 2018, CoCreation Loft Berlin
We invited thinkers and doers, academics and practitioners to get together and create a space for discussion, exchange, and reflection on the subject of intelligence of the body. A meeting between theory and practice. Beside starting a conversation with each other and an inquiry into body intelligence from different perspectives, we aimed to develop ideas that reach further and might give us a starting point to work together on bringing the body back into different areas where it’s been left out: classrooms, offices, museums, etc. On both days of the gathering various professionals presented their work, followed by an open space for contributors and participants of the gathering to engage in a deeper conversation on the subject of intelligence of the body, exchange ideas, come up with new formats to work in the future. Contributors: Michael Häfner, Eylam Langotsky, Liza Ostrovska, Nitsan Margaliot, Mauro Sacchi, Hanna Nordqvist, Pierre Goirand, Alice Baillaud. Partner: cocreation.loft
Education Mojo
learning for freedom series
Education Mojo is a participatory research and exchange of insights and practices for everyone interested in the change of paradigm in education and regenerative learning. In the context of current challenges that humanity is facing, from environmental and technological to ethical and cultural, we are interested in a fundamental question: which practices of education we need in order to co-create a healthy sustainable society in response to local and global challenges? We are interested in a holistic approach to the dominant cognitive concept of education, in supplementing it with aesthetic, emotional, physical, ethical, environmental and social dimensions. We are also interested in open honest engagement with these questions, not in a defence of any one particular methodology. This research- and learning- in-public consists of project presentations accentuating their practical implications (by creators, educators, artists, researchers, cultural curators, and activists), as well as of opportunities to experiment, work in smaller groups, develop ideas, and try out different practices and media in relation to a chosen subject. We aim to create a space in which knowledge is not consumed, but questioned, and where new forms of knowledge and methods can be created collectively. One of the goals is to formulate specific ideas on a new orientation in education and to design innovative approaches for educational work. Another important goal is to network the actors of different directions and to initiate transdisciplinary educational formats outside of this event.
What attitudes are guiding educational processes in the world of diversity and multitudes, and not homogeneity and monoculture? How can education open doors, so that people can choose their ways? What is sustainability mindset in a broader sense, and how is it reflected in educational practices? How can educational formats support the development of multiplicity and many-sidedness of people? What does holistic education have to do with the formation of an identity that is transcultural, the one that learns from different cultures and grows beyond? What do we need to unlearn? What if education was a work of art? What if it was a garden? How can generation and transfer of knowledge be expanded to include the corporal, sensuous and affective dimensions? How can education serve to reconnect the fragmented world? How can values be truly embodied by teachers and students alike? What is the importance of such aspects as time and rhythms, indoor and outdoor space, physicality and perception, ‘self’ and ‘the world’ (relationship between personal process of becoming and being part of a larger whole) within educational contexts? These are some of the question we dedicate this series to, and the questions we address in our long-term lines of research.
Past Editions
Inside/Out(side)
October 17-18, 2020
Bloom School, Paris and online
Which practices of education do we need in order to co-create socially and environmentally sustainable futures? During this edition of Education Mojo, participants are invited to explore the subject of Inside/Out(side), as a search for continuous balance and reconciliation of the opposites. Indoors and Outdoors. Landscapes and Interiors. Intrinsic and Extrinsic. Invisible and Visible. Inner and Outer. Inside-Out and Outside-In. Several questions will be addressed around the theme, such as:
* Why is the question of inside/outside important from the beginning to the end of life and how could it be at the heart of educational settings?
* How does one learn to build a strong relationship between their deep inside and the world? What spaces can be given to the invisible in a society where everything has to be tangible and measurable?
* Why create environments where the individual is fully respected and where relationships between individuals are fostered? What are strategies that nurture such practices?
* What is the role of art in these processes? What is the role of the body and embodied learning? How do embodied and artistic practices contribute to developing attention and listening, as well as creativity and genuine expression?
To explore these and other questions you will bring with you, not necessarily trying to answer them immediately, participants will be invited to live a variety of experiences around these themes. Experiences will be offered as opportunities to question, to live through, to exchange about, to understand. The programme of Inside/Out(side) will consist of several workshops connected to the above mentioned questions, created specifically for the event by artists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinarily. Last but not least, there will be time for Open Space format, where participants can become more active in this collective research, exchange ideas and experiences, and be creators of new proposals around the themes of this event.
In collaboration with Association Peekaboo and Bloom Scool. Contributors: Association Peekaboo, Zaz Rosnet, Cie Les Cailloux Sauvages, Marianne Clarac, Patricia Riverti, Les Pinceaux, Aurélie Bois (illustration).
Between Self and the World
ESCP Berlin, 18 May 2019
During the opening impulse we will share our vision of a more ecological education in a broader sense, that may encompass the cognitive, ethical, emotional, physical, aesthetic and relational dimensions. We will also share our inquiries, and open the day. Then Anna Hahn will share an insight into the educational practices at Schumacher College. What do holistic educational approaches and experiential learning look like in practice at the college? What role do places and spaces play? What is the craft of being, learning and working together in an organic way? How can values be truly embodied? What does embodied learning have to do with it?
Daniel Neugebauer will introduce his new initiative at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin — Corpoliteracy in Education. Holistic understanding of education includes corpoliteracy. What does it mean and what is the significance of the body in the learning process? How can the emergence of the embodied mind or the enminded body be supported? How can corpoliteracy foster societal change? Daniel shares insights from the programmes he has initiated at Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. How do we re-connect with nature and include learning from nature and attention to nature into educational processes, beyond it just being a break from the screen time? How does rewildening happen in a culture that has so much respect for the digital and so little for the wild? Learning from Nature module will welcome interventions by Ela Spalding, Estudio Nuboso, Berlin/Panama, and Naho Iguchi, NION, Berlin/Tokyo.
Finally in the third sprint of the Education Marathon we look into art practices as practices of a holistic approach to education. Contributors from different institutions that place art into the center of their work will share their perspectives. It’s about making art into a way to learn, to teach, to run a school, and to support transformative learning and social change. Josef Köhler, Peter Gläsel Schule, Detmold, will share insights into how artistic processes become learning processes, and how a school can build arts into its foundation. How to manage open processes? What is the right balance between structure and freedom in non-homogenous groups? Can creativity and fluid structures become a base of a school? How do these support personal learning experiences of every child? What is the bigger picture and what do this school’s practices have to do with a larger societal impact? Josef will also talk about the worldwide development of education and about the view of the child in the 21st century. Doris Koch, Büro komPleX, Berlin, will speak of the Finance(-ing)-System for Art-Dealing as a work-in-progress, that represents an alternative financing model for art-projects. It also also takes up, reflects, and transforms aspects of the global financial system. And Coline Irwin, Association Peekaboo, Paris, will speak about attention to everything: human relationships. Human relationships are at the center of most learning processes, both within a team working together, as well as between students and teachers. How to build trust and respect across different educational contexts? How is integrity maintained and nourished? What replaces traditional hierarchical structures and attitudes?
Graphic recording by Nadia Artemieva. In collaboration with Maryna Markova and Skolla.
WOODS IN THE SCHOOL
Woods in the School encourages transdisciplinary cocreation between kids and adults, as a collaborative space for research- and learning- in public within the contexts of schools. It’s a conversation in words, images, presence, sound, taste, action, walks, and other languages of expression around subjects connected to more conscious, sustainable, honest, and poetic learning cultures. It’s an invitation to find and engage with personal and shared inquiries relevant to a life of school as an ecosystem. The words we use to describe this project at the moment do not intend to capture a solid form, but rather speak to the liquidity and the number of ways, seen and unseen, imagined and not-yet-imagined, of what collective intelligence and multi-layered ecologies mindset may look like in practice.
SEASONS AND TRANSITIONS
A journey of attention to Being and Becoming
Cal Gras Residency, Avinyó, Feb 2020
Seasons. Seasons is how life happens to the world around and inside us - seasons mark the rhythm as things grow, yield their full power, wither and collapse and sleep a deep sleep. This rhythm is the pulse we can feel on every level of our lives, and recognizing this pulse is how we can make sure we don’t step on the feet of this beautiful stranger we dance with all the time. Each season offers to live its experience, to transform and to move on.
Transitions. Transitions are poetic spaces. Where something new becomes possible. Transitions from day to night, from winter to spring. Transitions in stages of life, in relationships, in worldview. Transitions from being to becoming. A dance between natural tensions, balance and ever changing dynamics between light and darkness, cold and warmth, width and depth. Through transitions we grow. We let the old skin shed, we let the new buds appear. We let go and bury, we plant and harvest something new with every cycle of our lives.
Earth is going through transitions too. In this time of human history we realise that we need to undergo a transition to continue living on this planet, a transition towards a culture of more attention, integrity and care, a culture of ecological mindset. How do we trust the unfolding of each moment of being and join the creative power of life’s transitions? In order to do this, how do we change our thinking and judgments, de-standardize the way we see ourselves and the world(s)? How do we learn to be attentive to what is present and what is emerging?
This Woods in the School edition unfolds as part of the residency Foresta Collective is engaging at Cal Gras, and is created in collaboration with kids and adults from the school Institut-Escola Barnola as well as other local agents from different walks of life as a Gesamtkunstwerk, where the subject of transitions is being looked at in its different facets, diverse perspectives and multi-layered expressions: from geological to culinary. Collaborators: Oriol Segon Torra, Olga Molina Jiménez, Pauline Bachmann, Quim Moya, Ignasi Vilarasau Alsina, Eva Quintana, the village of Avinyó, its people and pigs, local forest and its inhabitants, and of course, all the kids, teachers, and director of IE Barnola.
Forms of Love
Spacial Storytelling
9 November 2019, Berlin Journey2Creation
Forms of Love is dedicated to placing value, to re-appreciating diversity, to a growing sense that striving for an ever greater growth and profit, production and consumption, for being ever faster and more efficient, is depleting Earth and ourselves, and a more balancing act of understanding value is needed that would include more intangible qualities such as care, love, emergence and organic unfolding. We therefore wish to create a space for re-thinking and re-assigning value by bringing together people from different walks of life and engaging in a collective inquiry. In this inquiry we want to go beyond the hegemony of currently mainstream understanding of value inherited from the culture we live in, that doesn’t fit into the infinite diversity of the world. Such hegemony of value leaves many people (and other creatures inhabiting the Earth) with a sensation that they don’t belong, that they are dislocated from their talents, not seen or acknowledged. How can intangible values be accommodated in the rationalistic value system we have internalised? Can work be driven by love and yet find its place within the current structures? Can learning be based on trust in natural inclinations of children instead of assigning values top down? Can architecture support emergence of spaces of affection? How can we escape the dictatorship of established categories, social protocols and noisy conventions within human relationships? How will more-than-human world be included into our spaces of affection and care?
There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time, Jane Austen wrote. Philia, Eros, Storge, Agape, and all the not inherited and not yet named forms of affection. Love is expressed through the act of caring - for people, ideas, plants, objects, spaces, clouds, oceans, ourselves, or other living beings. Love as creativity can drive our most ancient urge to create, expressing itself through multiple forms, be it through carving an art object, writing a sensuous poem, giving shape to a new profession, making a home, a dinner, or a more humane business model. Forms of Love aims to explore the values we place at the core of how we work, live, and engage with each other and the different aspects of life. Love stories as impulses were shared by Adrian Schefer & Mascha Fehse, Construct Lab, Anke Strauß, Working Utopias, Ayşe Cansu Tanrikulu, Rodolfo Samperio, New North, Studio Manuel Raeder, Bom Dia Books, William Veder, Tom Kretschmer, EDITION IMPASTO. We also thank Hendrik Wantia for being our host. Video insight here.
Being Transformation
31 May 2018, cocreation.loft Berlin
It’s fascinating and inspiring to live in this time of human history. Cultural paradigms and values are shifting. There is an increasing sense that basic ideas we are guided by and those that shape structures we’ve built to make sense of the world are becoming outdated: the “factory model” of education, mindless overconsumption of planetary resources, intolerance to cultural pluralism, ways of production that lead to environmental degradation, superficial short-term economics-driven politics, neoliberal mindset, cultural integrities challenged by the rapid digitalisation and slow catching up of social and emotional development, and so on. Are we moving to a different era? At Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund, they are envisioning the new Era of Well-being. Wellbeing is a holistic concept, if we look at people as holistic systems within their environments. Physical wellbeing cannot be separated from the emotional, mental, social, or environmental wellbeing. Our wellbeing is inevitably connected to the wellbeing of the world around — the quality of food we eat, water we drink, air we breathe, the qualities of what we perceive, sense and interact with, including our relationships with other people. Those interested in intentional cultural change, and those who are involved in the process of contributing to this change will gather at this event. We invite people from different sectors (culture, business, education, science, arts and others) who dedicate their work to conscious co-creation of a new culture. What is this new culture about and what are the common denominators of it across and beyond different “departments” of society — that’s the question we set off to explore. Enriched by cross-pollinated viewpoints, we want to find common insights that cross disciplinary boundaries and make it possible for us to support each other in our own transformative processes.
Visual Strolls exhibition, showcasing works from our Museum of Seasons, will also be part of this gathering. As well as a dinner: a culinary experience that plays with the theme of the forest as a metaphor of a society we wish for: where cultures, creativity, curiosity, sustainability, awareness, and all the different fields of human activity and knowledge organically grow together into a mutually supportive global community. What will await you:
. welcome drink "a taste of forest"
. aperitif "sowing seeds"
. first course "making grow"
. main course "becoming a forest"
. dessert "the sweetness of belonging"
Being Transformation was organised in collaboration with cocreation.loft as cocreation.woods — video insight here. Contributors: Julia von Winterfeldt (new work, leadership, change), Hanzi Freinacht (culture, philosophy, politics), Maria Reich (music, voice, expression of the intangible), Liza Ostrovska (visual impressions), Alessandro Rovere and Johan Planefeldt (video documentation), Egor Sviri (photo documentation), Andrea Iannicella, Erin Lang, Inés Lauber, and Siobhan Dammert (a team of chefs).
Woods.Seasons Series at REH
Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter 2016/2017
Woods.Seasons is an experiment of get-togethers once every season that took place at REH, a GDR developed and manufactured wooden construction designed to provide a room on short notice. Reh is also a “deer” in German. So it felt like a perfect place to start our experiments with Woods in the City formats, as spaces dedicated to collaborative creativity and sustainable living, to the meeting and exchange between different worlds, through which new pathways may unfold. Initially Woods in the City was a cultural exploration salon for makers and change-makers, for seekers and life-long learners, for trailblazer and people who are interested in making a difference in re-integration of our world in a broader sense. Once every season people from different walks of life came together and shared some insights into their work and what drives them to do what they do. These interdisciplinary encounters were a process of discovering a golden thread that weaves people and ideas together. Its aim was to be a catalyst to inspire living connections across and beyond disciplines, to explore shared concerns and questions of how we want to live and create sustainable future. Wisdom is born in an encounter and synthesis. Through meeting the others we reconnect to something of value: a shared purpose, a forgotten wish, a spirit of adventure, or a new attention to life around. We met around questions of how we want to live in the future in the four main areas: how we work, how we learn, how we relate and how we create. Our backgrounds, professions, fields of interests shape our perspectives on common life experiences, so we come together to share them, to see a bigger picture. The practice of embodiment, as well as the arts and creativity in a broader sense were an integral part of the meetings. Collaborators: Katja Schneider, Ulf Geyersbach. Contributors: José Délano (designer, curator, creator), Andreas Weber (biologist, philosopher, author), Charlotte McGowan-Griffin (artist, film-maker), Adam Fletcher (writer, author), Elizabeth Debold (gender futurist, journalist), Anton Burdakov (artist, architect), Eyal Lovett (jazz musician, composer), and others.
Celebrating Seasons
As one state of being is continuously being replaced by another in cyclical circularity, every new spring, summer, autumn and winter we celebrate changing seasons of nature and of our lives. Every new season we invite artists to bring a new season into la Foresta (take a walk through Visual Strolls and visit Museum of Seasons). Every new season we also gather in a wild place, somewhere where senses celebrate the sounds, colours, textures, smells of the living earth, to honour the new time of the year.
