Foresta-in-becoming

a platform for regenerative practice,
attentiveness towards and inquiry into
the living and liveable world(s)

Introduction

Foresta on the land is a young metabolic body in becoming, contained within a larger organism of a forest garden. Foresta is also a cosmolocal cultural ecology, a collective experiment in common worlding, where arts, architecture, food, land care and pedagogy are participants in an ecology of practices that become emerging senses and vital functions within this forest organism. Together with the plants, soil, humans, weather, and other agencies and lifeways, they form a practice-oriented cosmology for restoring meaningful relations.

Entering through the canopy, we ask: What is real now? How do we hold space for complexities of this moment? What may be our role within contemporary sociocultural landscapes, where certain stuck postures, stagnated worldviews, outdated protocols and inattentive behaviours pose challenges at different scales? Which delicate strategies, which other ways of thinking and relating could emerge if collectively we join forces to imagine, birth and practice futures aligned with cultures of listening, collaboration and ecological renewal?

We are aware that connecting discourse and practice is an enormous task that demands collective commitment, asks for re-connecting inner and outer work, and requires multilayered thinking that includes economy, governance, maintenance and other structures of support, where bridging fragmentation and relating differently needs our unstoppable determination. We need each other’s support here. Not only here on the canopy level, where we can contemplate the beauty of horizons together, but also moving through the understory, the shrubs, the herbaceous layer, towards the forest floor and the soil of this naturecultural ecology, where the actual nutrient transformation takes place.

Forest garden as a framework

Restoration of bonding with and within the living worlds is a planetary task that asks for situated practice. The forest of Foresta is a cosmo-local organism, which is both a thinking-feeling-sensing collective body (working with forest as a metaphor) and an actual growing forest (becoming a real land-based ecosystem). The inquiries into renewal within relational fields we shared and those that we do not yet know how to formulate, along with the question at the origins of Foresta Collective “how do we want to live as a multispecies collective?” are born within this cosmo-local context. They offer us to inhabit a framework of a forest garden as a tangle of relations that thinks itself as a planetary garden, a garden of cooperation, a garden of ecological re-story-ation, a garden as sanctuary, a garden of many gardens.

We offer to contemplate this platform as a shared space for undisciplinary research, learning, and inhabiting ways of togetherness in response to the deep need for challenging conventional ways of thinking, narrating, relating, and making. With an intention to move together towards what feels more life-generative, prioritizing planetary habitability, well-being and re-enchantment, the platform of Foresta extends an invitation to gather in a garden, outside of the ruins of “the world” as we knew it, and to listen for what is real now, what wants to live, to be grown otherwise, or from different seeds altogether.

It is crucial for us that at its core, Foresta-in-becoming is about practice, not (only) theory, not spectacle. This platform is something we envision with an intention to host, initiate, think with and support cultural, ecological, pedagogical and nourishment-oriented practices, wishing to bring together affine companions, to move forward joining forces mycorrhizally, to cultivate and slow-grow (with) a place for regenerative culture(s), honouring potentialities for collective symbiotic worlding. Generously, in gratitude. Our vision for this garden is to be a home for many, for those who dwell here temporarily or long-term, since home is first and foremost a feeling, a refuge, a belonging, an internal ecosystem of places we care about.

Foresta land and neighbours (photographed by Emmanuel Delaloy)

Place and displacement

In a somewhat remote and undiscovered location in northern Spain, the future forest of Foresta began growing a couple of years ago, where the valley, the hills and the mountains on the one side and the ocean landscapes on the other are bearing witness to the birth of this international laboratory for spaces of the possible, connecting to sensitivities shaped in and with places outside the current human-techno-urban imaginations.

We are also curious how such experimental material and cultural practices may be able to resonate across territorial contexts, as not everyone dear to Foresta lives on this land or nearby. So we are thinking with a rhizome, whose living practice offers a metaphor for learning about a structure without a center, poetics of interconnectedness, and a fundamental openness to new connections, respecting multiplicity, heterogeneity, and a process that is defined by an ability to form symbiotic links.

A rhizome at heart, cultivating belonging that is not only territorial but relational, Foresta is also a distributed garden, connecting with other places (for example, a territory just outside of Berlin), where every place is a living node of one shared process, offering a particular climatic expression and cultural imagination. Our main question at the moment is: can we create enough physical, legal, relational, financial and emotional safety for Foresta to unfurl? What ethical coalitions may we wish for, and who may be searching for us as we are searching for them?

Inner and Outer

From its birth Foresta has been dedicated to forests, inner and outer. If life journey is a pilgrimage, the inner and outer paths we are walking are intricately interwoven. Our selves continue beyond the membranes of our skins. We are cultivating our gardens while they are cultivating us. For the wellbeing of everyone involved, the outer and the inner work need to go together, sustained through quieter gestures, through deeper listening, attentiveness before interpretation, and mutual discernment within relational fields between us. It is with much humility that the hopeful practice of Foresta is unfolding.

The inner work is held by the connective tissues of embodied practice, inviting to re-inhabit the body as a shelter, as a challenge, as a compass, as a map, as a garden, as well as by our inquiry into ancestry and lineage (also expressed by an emergent space within Foresta you can read about further down), reminding us that this charge within relational fields did not begin with us, and asking to stay present with what is here without demanding immediate resolutions. We are not just multiplicities, we are indeterminacies. Over the years of Foresta’s existence we’ve designed some structures of support to gently hold space for exploring those territories through embodied perception, where nothing is nor can be forced.

 

Areas of attention

Our current and future activities, while being diverse and hybrid, are evolving within one of the following containers or dimensions of relation and their ecotones.

Relating to the Living: an inquiry into culture

Our soil is an inquiry into how we relate to Earth beings, including rivers, plants, humans, animals, air, insects, microbes, mountains, everyone. It unfolds within the multilayered now-time that does not necessarily cut between past, present and future, but tries to reconnect this moment and what came before us, has made us possible and continues to act through us (ancestry), as well as what asks something of us, the not-yetness, the possible, the becomings (also contemplating how we relate to childhood, transmission of knowledge and experiences). What pulls us onto this path of inquiry is a desire for discernment within relational spaces that make us possible, for more attentiveness, for new alliances, unexpected hybridities, and surprising solidarities.

 

Agroforestry: planting for symbiosis

How can agricultural practices cultivate new possibilities for relating to the diverse communities of life and engage into landscape relations where we can work as part of an ecosystem and its processes? In this inquiry into working with regenerative approaches to land care, cultivating Earth-based wisdom, fostering biodiversity, serving the needs of multispecies inhabitants, we are in continuous apprenticeship from the forests. We are in the beginnings of planting a forest garden, putting into practice what we are learning from these complex symbiotic systems: to slow-grow food, as well as habitats, to facilitate conditions for biodiversity, to transfer passion for nature, and engage with many other ways in which forest cultures offer frameworks that enable change.

 

Foodscapes: towards more sustainable sustenance

Forest gardens lead us into foodscapes — another portal for world-making, another door towards exploring potential for more grounded convivial multispecies imaginaries. So how do we build connections and enact reciprocity with and within foodscapes? What happens when we bring food back into the centre of our thinking? How do we strengthen regenerative food ecologies? What and who are included into those? How to lay the foundations for food sovereignty? We engage with food as both a cultural investigation as well as a more practical interest to implement regenerative agriculture and food production at Foresta, with a wish to contemplate food also as poetry, friendship, memory, ceremony, energy, medicine.

 

Architecture(s) of Connection: infrastructures and stories

How can architecture support us in this wish for conviviality and cultivation of ecological futures? In which ways can it invite to develop more attentive and complex attitudes toward the vegetal, animal, elemental and soil worlds, and frame our process of becoming more sensitive to other–than–human subjectivities? In which forms can it support building with the landscape and can it be a continuation of natural environment embraced by respectful intervention that takes into account needs of diverse inhabitants? In very concrete terms, it is our wish to imagine and construct low-carbon built environment prioritising bioregional circular design principles and regenerative building materials, adopting to the local context, and facilitating more-than-human alliances.

 

First gatherings at Foresta (photographed by Csilla Hódi)

 

Areas of activity

Activities we currently engage into evolve around research, land care, hosting, collective learning, and holding space for situations in which certain ways of relating may be practiced. Mentioned below are some of the existing activities at Foresta, ranging from more mature formats that have been developed by Foresta Collective over several years to more recent initiatives.


Research inquiries

We attune and choreograph attention in order to notice what in our lived and perceived worlds needs discernment. From this process inquiries are born. Attached to the demands of everyday life, they express a wish to research imaginaries and practices beyond the hegemonic logic, to adopt the planetary as our thinking tool, to ponder how culture that relinks to the living can story the world differently. Research practice takes form of a video book or in-person gatherings.

 

Forest and Tea Garden

It might be in a garden where critical reflection and symbolic practices come closer to the lived life, where planetary tangles of interdependencies, feelbacks, sensitivities, and co-flourishings can be experienced. It might be in this garden, where our inquiries, imaginaries, artistic practices, tea and food cultures, are finally coming together beyond theories, fragmentations and abstractions, and become lived and shared with many.

 

Residencies

How can creative practices support imagining, birthing and growing futures that decolonize, heal and cultivate joy, wonder and re-enchantment? Residencies hold space for intimate encounters, gestures of attunement, collective work and nearness with this place, bringing together visible and invisible, ecological and metaphysical, poetic and practical, objects of daily use and artworks of symbolic meaning, claiming freedom, openness to experiment, critical thinking and sensing, embracing heterogeneity and wanting the impossible.

 

Foresta Learning Ecology

Seasonal Academy has been Foresta’s main learning format, that offered online learning experiences dedicated to ecologies of earthly relations and restoration of bonding with(in) the living world(s). Now this format is changing. But as the wish to support persons from diverse walks of life wanting to root their work in forest imaginaries, stayed alive, we are now in the process or re-attuning our learning-related offers and finding new forms to continue this work.

 

Foresta Kids

Foresta Kids have been based in an urban setting of Berlin, offering learning experiences, workshops, aesthetic research expeditions and other invitations to explore naturecultural ecologies for and with children, addressing learning as an embodied, affective, relational practice rooted in the territory. Foresta Kids’ vision has been to nurture children’s perception and awareness beyond a reductionist view of nature, to expand sensitivity and ways of listening to multispecies communities of life, through artistic thinking and making, personal and collective storytelling. As Foresta is becoming more rooted on the land, these formats also metamorphosize.

 

Foresta meadow (photographed by Sabina Téari)

 

Connective Tissues

Connective tissues are orientations and approaches moving through everything we do.

Collective practice

Collective practice grows from an interest in shared potential: human and not only, intimate and ecological. It is an ethical practice of learning together, where uniqueness and solidarity are not opposites, and where honest encounters can emerge beyond fixations or hierarchies. Everyone is a teacher, everyone is a student. Collective practice is how Foresta learns to be more than a sum of individual gestures. Rather than producing single objects or conclusions, we compose conditions for shared attention — a living field where knowledge is exchanged, vulnerability is respected, and something none of us could do alone may become possible.

 

Thinking through making

Making is a way of entering into a relation with matter, place, time, memory, land, conflict, with the vastness of multispecies worlds. If we think of arts as attention and intention materialising, and of making as care in movement, thinking-through-making can be understood as a relational learning practice, where materials think through us while we make through them. Thinking through making is a vessel for personal and collective reflection — a way to hold questions, multiply voices, and allow meaning to take form.

 

Embodied practice

Everyone lives as a bodied being embedded in worlds. Embodied practice, as we understand it, is related to listening, digesting, learning and letting go, as a process of honouring the body through attentiveness and embodied sensing. Body is a process, a subject, a membrane, a container of lived experience, a mediator between social forces and inner life, an antenna that registers the conditions of the world. The body is also shaped by power, trauma, gender, class, coloniality, ableism, exhaustion, family systems, media, labour, and ecological damage. Embodied practice is a situated practice for discernment, (un)learning, contemplation, where embodied attention can be trusted again.

 

Pavilion at Foresta (photographed by Roman Joli)

 

Emergent Spaces

Spatial cosmology of relations we envision at Foresta, embraced and permeated by the forest garden is connected through a meandering pathway we call Multispecies Commons Walk. It begins with Landscapes of Childhood and ends with the Temple of Ancestors. The meandering lines in between take you to the food lab, structures for hospitality and collective learning spaces. This spatial imagination creates situations in which certain ways of relating may be practiced and sustained over time.

 

Multispecies Commons Walk

MCW is a cultural pathway embedded into the landscape. Attuning to potential meanings for contemporary pilgrimage as a way to engage with personal sense-making, it invites to visit different areas and projects within Foresta on the land, learn about the cosmology of our work, and reconnect with the living world, inner and outer, through a contemplative walking journey. Communication partners on this walk will be several site-specific artefacts, objects, and installations, as well as the natural processes of the territory itself.

 

Food lab

Food lab is at the heart of edible experimentation within the forest garden. It includes a kitchen, ingredient transformation facilities, collective dining space, as well as all the necessary land care infrastructure. It extends an invitation to food practitioners to engage with Foresta as a site of ongoing practice, where food as connection, relationship, nourishment, ceremony, memory, friendship, medicine, or poetry, can be experimented. Potential engagements range from growing and harvesting from the forest garden, experimenting with perennial plants, tea, or botanical drinks, as well as other forms of culinary practice in this garden of many gardens.

 

Landscapes of Childhood

While Foresta Kids has been offering guided learning experiences, Landscapes of Childhood is its extension into spatial practice. It’s an ecology of spaces, playgrounds, invitations, rhythms, and affordances, shaped by human imagination and intervention as much as by natural processes, where the space itself, the built elements and the landscape, become collaborators and actively care for the child who comes to play here. It’s a constellation of micro-worlds that hold space for play, learning and connection. Landscapes of Childhood also hold sheltered pockets of time for grown-ups to reconnect to our beginnings, to qualities we came with before categories domesticated our perception, to nearness and trust that were companions to that time, or to whatever wants to be remembered, held or taken along on a pilgrimage.

 

Temple of Ancestors

Bonding needs a sanctuary. Temple of Ancestors is a sanctuary for remembering. It’s the most mysterious place at Foresta. A site of compost, a place where language thins, where the living acknowledge the dead as ecological, cultural, and spiritual co-presence (not as disappearance). Its intention honours ancestry beyond family lineage, as ancestors are human, plant, animal, microbial, elemental, cultural, unnamed. Ancestry may be all that has made us possible, continues to act through us, and asks something of us. This sanctuary as a symbolic temple manifests and protects the intention to acknowledge our multiple, layered and contested roots, as well as to discern and restore relations with something that might have been excluded from the present.

 

Structures for Hospitality

Structures for hospitality hold space for inviting temporary dwellers into the project, whether it is for Foresta learning ecology participants, artists in residence, kids and families, or someone just wishing to experience the place not only during a day visit, but potentially staying for a while, as a way to travel slower and get to know the place closer. This latter possibility to engage with the place is also a way to contribute to the economy of the project and its long-term sustainability. Guests will be invited into a temporary participation in a living place, not consumption of a destination. Structures for hospitality also include spaces for convivial learning, togetherness, and an atelier.

 
 
 

Where we are coming from

For 10 years, being based in Berlin, Foresta Collective understood ourselves as an urban trans-disciplinary collective working at the intersection of ecologies, arts and education, with an intention to research the multifaceted notions of the 'ecological' and reframe how we relate to multispecies communities of life. Our activities revolved around the following areas (you can find more details to each available on this website):

Forestamorphosis

Following a longing for our work to be shaped by, in and with places that lie outside current human-techno-urban imaginations, we have set on a search for ‘spaces of the possible’, looking for ways to land with Foresta in a wilder place, to initiate the process of bringing critical reflection, research and symbolic practices of the past years closer to our lived life, to the everyday, to generative processes with the land, embracing the question at our origins — “how do we want to live as a multispecies collective?” — in very direct non-abstract materially-engaged ways, where all flourishing may be mutual.

Time of a long search and Forestamorphosis began......𓆱⚘𓃦𓍊𓋼𓍊𓅫↟𖤣𖥧𓆑....

In 2024 we became guardians of a 3 ha piece of land in Asturias, northern Spain, with an intention to co-create a place for regenerative culture(s) and to hold space for Foresta to grow as a real forest. In 2025 and 2026 we began planting the first couple of thousands of trees, made paths and terraces, tried to co-facilitate processes for soil regeneration, hosted first residencies, and built the first structure on the land - an agropoetic pavilion - a vessel for the future unfolding processes. That’s when we meet and potentially continue together :)

 

all illustrations: Violeta Lopiz

context:
our collective subjectivities are shaped, on the one hand, by and within our mixed roots coming from Eastern and Western European heritage, and on the other — emerge in affinity with many other voices, informed by a wide range of knowledges, intuitions and influences, fluid and unfinished by nature, as well as by our being with the land in Asturias and in Brandenburg.