Foresta Seasonal Academy

cultivating ecological futures

Seasonal Academy invites into online and onsite learning experiences dedicated to ecologies of human and more-than-human vibrancy and restoration of bonding within this world of many worlds.

Committed to supporting persons from diverse walks of life, who wish to strengthen their work or develop livelihood rooted in ecosystemic thinking, attentiveness and care, responsive to each particular context.

Seeded within embodied culture, thinking-through-making, and collective practices, Seasonal Academy offers you space and process to deepen into the circles of ecological sensitivity and develop long-term strategies for envisioning and realising your work, while taking care of yourself and the world(s).

Currently learning trails are on pause, while Foresta is searching for a place to land and become trees.

Seasonal Academy unfolds within 4 learning trails during 4 seasons. Offered in independent yet interconnected ways, each trail is taking place as a consistent step on the path towards starting your own initiative, or strengthening your existing project. Each trail lasts for 1,5 months.

1. Autumn: Personal Ecologies. This trail is a more intimate journey, understanding inner and outer paths we are walking as intricately interwoven, since our selves continue beyond the membranes of our skins. This trail aims to offer a nourishing soil to support you in growing your forest, whatever it is for you. Gently touching such subjects as care, discernment, wisdom of the body, finding own anchors, dealing with history, wounding, healing, working with personal mythologies, and other delicacies belonging to inner forests.

2. Winter: Relational Space. Walking outwards, towards a deeper understanding of interconnectedness, of what and who’s around, towards weaving sustainable relationships with friends, partners, clients, the manifold stakeholders, companions and dwellers across species, towards generative capacities for intra-relational becoming, and a larger sense of self as an imperative for the emergence of an ecological mindset. Both in relation to making kin across species as well as regenerating bonding among humans, and thus overcoming distance to the world and restoring resonance.

3. Spring: Crafting Futures. Joining forces of spring that hold space for births, in this trail the focus is on intentions, on initiatives you want to bring into the world or deepen the currently existing, while thinking through making. As a journey from the buds to the leaves, this trail offers sessions for envisioning and describing your projects in imaginative and material terms, thinking through hands-on arts & crafts practices as a form of research and raising of creative powers to pursue your visions.

4. Summer: Gentle Steps. In the spirit of summer, this trail offers time to expand, make ideas more concrete, and act on the practical steps for realizing your intentions, to land livelihoods on own terms, delving into such subjects as re-thinking value, commoning, organising relations, involving more-than-human into the structure of your decision-making, and landing your work in the way that feels right for the multiplicities of you.

You can join either the full year or any trail separately if you gravitate towards specific subjects only. During the time of your engagement you will be invited to join an online platform for sharing your work, networking with peers and interacting with the team.

We dedicate these learning experiences to diversity and wellbeing of inner and outer forests: to a more sustainable, attentive, and poetic world-making, and to every person seeking a more balanced being and finding an organic place in the web of life. We are first and foremost interested in holding a space and offering invitations for broadening participants’ experience of themselves and the world around, rather than teaching a skill. However, the ultimate wish of the entire year is to support you in landing your idea/project into livelihood, so it is also practical. Journeying into natural and cultural ecologies within which we live, Seasonal Academy aims to respond to the crisis of imagination, to invite participants to engage with questioning representations and narratives that are coming from hegemony of placing value, and to find ways of telling own stories, personally and collectively. It offers a framework for learning that involves unlearning and re-imagination, based on holistic qualities of attentiveness and embodied culture. Scroll down to find out more about the context, structure and root elements of the Seasonal Academy.

Context

In the contemporary entangled world of ecological imperative there are multiple narratives offering perspectives on the status quo and suggesting new pathways to move forward. Some call for activist action, for abolishing post-colonial mindset of domination, capitalism and industrial models of education and work, often with a certain degree of aggression. Others suggest practical how-to’s for personal wellbeing, new educational and work models, or address environmental problems while keeping the rest of the system(s) largely intact. These narratives, in our view, aim for new horizons, but are themselves often based on the old grounds that incentivise polarisation, fragmentation, competition, commodification, often overlooking complexity, other ways of knowing, and the need for balance of the opposites.

Yet there’re other stories, or maybe those are songs. They tell about the interconnectedness of personal and collective changes, multiple intelligences inside and around, love as an ecological process, the importance of creativity in everyday life, the dance between poetry and reason, as well as a more consciously embodied and embedded earthly being. Many people hear and resonate with these chants, striving to grow and nourish futures that are regenerative, poetic, collaborative, and alive. We find ourselves amongst them too, and are co-creating Foresta Seasonal Academy as a learning space for cultivating kindred spirit, and supporting those who want to make change on personal, relational, collective levels.

Multi-layered care, understood as an ecology of personal, relational and environmental ethics not separated from one another, is the soil of our work. The vision of Foresta Seasonal Academy is to raise attentiveness and affection for nature, inner and outer, and cultivate nearness and care. Physical wellbeing cannot be separated from the emotional, mental, social, or environmental. Human wellbeing is inevitably connected to that of the living world. Seasonal Academy offers hybrid practices to integrate this mindset into the everyday life for a long-term commitment.

Seasonal Academy is a learning space for polymaths. You can think of it as a forest school, a wellbeing institute, an art space, a personal development initiative, a food course, an entrepreneurship school, an awareness dojo, a mosaic of practices for an interconnected world. Because life is not divided into departments as a traditional university is. After graduating you will not become an architect or a professional chef. You will become more of yourself, and we don’t know what it means since there are no models, but we do know that it is linked to feeling more at home being you, broadening and deepening your sense of self, your capacities to navigate waters of contemporary world, your attentiveness, wonder and care, inner and outer, and a clear(er) vision, intention and alignment.

Learning experiences at the Seasonal Academy are structured around 4 learning trails during 4 seasons. Currently all formats take place online, 1,5 month-long, with a rhythm of weekly live meetings, embodied practice sessions, and self-paced offline work based on learning materials. Whenever it will become possible again, onsite get-togethers will take shape of a convivial learning and living practice, also being impulses for the natural fermentation process happening in the time in-between, held by the online space. Onsite gatherings are held at liminal locations of our collaborators, aligning their work towards the ecological: from respectful land treatment and food sustainability to affective atmosphere and other intangible factors that contribute to the spirit of a place.

Learning sessions, meetings and workshops are facilitated by the core team of Foresta Collective and the invited contributors, and unfold within a held space outside of productive thinking and instrumental logic, dedicated to the contemporary ecologies we inhabit — personal, relational, cultural, natural; restoring friendship with the physical and the imaginative, symbolic and material, abstract and earthly.

Roots for the kind of learning processes we offer are: personal and shared inquiries, group conversations (both in live voice and in written form), embodied presence practices, exploration of natural environments and cycles of seasons, as well as thinking through creative making. We weave these elements into one learning journey, with a structure that is flexible to accommodate diversity rather than serve mono-cultured ways of being, that gives space for individual paths as well as collective learning, for making as well as reflecting, for the emergent as well as the planned, for silences as well as impulses in various media.

Inquiry-based

Seasonal Academy is rooted in honest, open, alive, curious, compassionate inquiries. Personal learning begins with own questions, with finding an honest concern, an inquiry offered by one’s life at any particular moment. We attune and choreograph attention in order to hear, sense and find such an inquiry, to open perception to what is going on around us and within us, to notice what (our) world needs or demands, and to choose how do we want to respond. Responding not in terms of serving, or as a duty, but in terms of sensing the call for finding an honest path, that is also free to change, evolve, transform, and offer new inquiries. Landing into own experiences and perception of things inner and outer, we learn more about ourselves, what we resonate with, what feels foreign to us, what needs more attention and care in our lived and perceived worlds. Pursuing an honest inquiry invites us to move from comprehending something or being able to talk about it, towards a kind of understanding that extends and links to the demands of everyday life.

Embodied culture

Embodied culture stands for recognition of human embodied and embedded nature. It's a practice into ways how bodies as subjects of experience rejuvenate our awareness of the world, inner and outer, and enhance abilities to transform it. Embodied Culture links large scale thinking to the immediate reality of everyday life, as a practice where wellbeing is emphasised, transgressing the classical categories and oppositions between theory and practice, thinking and sensing, learning and making. It grows around questions like, how do we embody our environment, our upbringing, education, current structures of power? What if the different symptoms people suffer from are ways in which bodies speak against ways they are being neglected, commodified or exploited? Embodied culture communicates its essence quite literally, by freeing the body, a spacious, creative, intuitive, emotional, intelligent being that we are, by connecting to something ancient, millions years old, we engage with unlearning and releasing colonial attitudes (e.g., objectification, extractivism, oppression) embodied without a choice, that affect our wellbeing, joy, sense of self and reciprocity. Embodied culture also offers an inquiry into a metaphorical, archetypal and poetic layer of human embeddedness into the Earth body.

Thinking through making

We understand arts as ways of perception, cognition and care, as ways to investigate and form intimate relationships with anything we engage with. In a larger context of art and creativity, we contemplate them in a broader sense as forces that change our states of attention. Crafts are also a form of active meditation, a possibility to connect to ancient cultures as well as to personal meaning-making. Seasonal Academy participants engage with thinking-through-making as ways to find own narratives and visions, reflect and shape ideas into forms, supported in their personal inquiry to deepen the intuitive, experiential and holistic understanding of the living world as well as of their own sense of self. This allows for each person to approach the subject in a way that is imaginative and suitable to them, enlarging perception of what art-making or crafting can be, understanding the practice as a vessel that is capable to home ideas and questions, thinking and writing, making and shaping, to become the means for personal and collective reflection. The materials think through us while we make through them, offering ways for finding a form, deepening and expressing own inquiries and stories, contributing to multiplication of voices.

Collective practice

The initiative of Seasonal Academy grows from the interest in collective potential, human and interspecies, as an ethical practice that fosters both uniqueness and solidarity, as means to arrive to new understandings and enable honest encounters removed from hierarchies. Collective practice includes interspecies nearness. Interspecies nearness is fostering encounters for ecological learning and healing, inviting people into an eco-systemic inquiry with the natural world. Collective practice also reflects an emergent demand for new ways to think relationalities between teachers and students as a microcosm that is a living web of relationships. Whether someone joins the academy because they are searching to learn something, or because they were invited to share their work, it’s a living web where different backgrounds, ways of being, thinking, engaging, communicating, sharing knowledge and experiences come together with openness to learn from one another. It’s a web of fluid identities, eye-level communication, and potential partnerships, based on listening, engagement, and courage: poly-creativity through pluri-vocality and multiplication of narratives, where everyone is a teacher and a student.

Core Team

People joining these trails come from very diverse walks of life. Seasonal Academy is based on resonances, shared interests and intentions, rather than disciplinary divisions, or other ways to assign identities. We especially encourage to apply cultural change-makers as well as people who are starting or wanting to start something new in their lives, who feel the urge to change things, personally or professionally, to re-catalyse their reflexivity and awareness of the ‘now’, to begin a path that would reflect their being in the world more truly and powerfully.

Seasonal Academy potentially offers a longer-term engagement, where Foresta Collective supports you in your becoming and in landing your intentions. This program is made out of steps, attuned to what is unfolding from one meeting to another, it is made in continuous listening and communication with participants. In more concrete terms, the trails aim to support people with tuning-in to and aligning with their personal path, intentions in life and the impact in the world they wish to make, as well as connecting deeper with nature and the physical world. It also aims to offer tools and experiences that will translate into the everyday life after the trails are over. So if you are interested in experiencing something not commonly available in the world today: a unique learning experience, directed by your personal questions, supported by transdisciplinary impulses, arts thinking and making, practices within natural environments, and rooted in embodied culture, we look forward to hearing from you! We know these trails are not for everyone, so if any questions come up, just drop us a line.

Library

Illustration: Carolina Monterrubio, Laura Savina, Armando Fonseca, Charlotte Peys