Foresta-in-becoming

a platform for regenerative practice in Berlin and Asturias

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood. …
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
— Mary Oliver

Tomorrow
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

Walk to:

Introduction

Framework

Place

Areas of Attention

Areas of Activity

Participation

Where we are coming from

.this moment
What is real now?
What is worth dedicating time to?
How do we hold space for complexities of this moment?
Which dreams guide us in these gentle, turbulent, confusing, hopeful, unfurling times?

.dreams
What if ew took our dreams seriously? What if we took a possibility for world-making seriously? What if we would come together and dare to experiment living into a multispecies togetherness otherwise? What if we tried to do what we know we should do, and not do what we critisize when others do it? Can you imagine being part of co-making a tiny world together on a small scale?

.culture
What may be culture’s role within shifting societal landscapes, where outdated systems and worldviews pose challenges at different scales? Which delicate strategies could it offer? Which other ways of thinking? How do we collectively support imagining and birthing futures aligned with a culture of listening, collaboration and ecological renewal? What contours can be drawn by creative practices as forces of imagination?

.being human
What could it mean today to be human who is not on top of the ecosystem but an integral part? Which new meanings to these reflections are gifted by AI agents, that more and more begin to act on behalf of humans, but also to meet in social networks and potentially form societies of their own? In a shared world, where non-organic entities that never rest, are always quicker, know-more and are more updated than the cyclical living creatures that need daily rituals of care, is this a chance for us to stop running and think, feel and sense into the question how do we want to live, really?

.regenerative practice
What is regenerative? How are inner and outer forests intertwined? Is the outer regeneration a reflection of the inner and vice versa? Could a commitment to this intertwined motion offer a pathway towards a true enactment of a culture of care, for it to become real in ways that doesn’t promote mimicry rather than genuine culture? Where does the body stand in this process?

Foresta-in-becoming, as a platform for regenerative practice, is calling for an almost utopian transformation that requires massive collective effort. And at the same time, it ‘simply’ asks us to be real, to begin within personal ecologies, expand into relational space, craft futures together and make gentle steps into those spaces of the possible. How can we support each other?

Relating to the Living

The soil from where our aspirations grow is constituted by an inquiry into how we relate to Earth Beings, including rivers, plants, humans and other animals, air, insects, mountains, everyone. Our areas of attention, activities on the land, imaginings what a space for regenerative culture(s) could look like and how to make it vibrant, alive and sustainable for the diverse communities of life — all unfold within a hopeful practice of world-making towards potentialities for more reciprocal relationships of attentiveness and response, care and healthy boundaries, generosity and gratitude, symbiotic and sympoietic living, rooted in deconstruction of reductionist ideologies that are projected onto the diverse communities of life and may change our understanding of what it might mean to be human.

It is therefore crucial for us that at its core, Foresta-in-becoming is about practice — not (only) theory, not spectacle. Restoration of bonding is a planetary task that asks for situated practice. The inquiries we shared in the introduction, 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?” — offer us to think within a framework of a garden: a forest garden, a planetary garden, a garden of ecological re-story-ation. It’s 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, or to be grown otherwise, or from different seeds altogether.

Beside other possible components contained by the garden, we offer to contemplate this platform as a shared space for transdisciplinary research, learning, and living into new ways of togetherness, where re-story-ation responds to the deep need for challenging conventional ways of thinking, imagining new narratives that are more life-generative and developing transformative tools and processes that prioritize planetary habitability, well-being and re-enchantment.

This platform is something we envision with an intention to host, frame, and support cultural, ecological, pedagogical and other 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 multispecies commons and potentialities for collective symbiotic worlding.

Foresta has been demanding to begin growing as a real forest - not only as an invisible cultural vessel of intentions for living otherwise - since a while. Eventually we did listen. The search we couldn't postpone any longer began in 2022. After a few years of walking the meandering lines across eastern, northern, southern and western European territories (imagining time it took for plants to learn how to make seeds, for octopus to evolve tentacles, for earthworms to terraform — we were trying to maintain a slow pace of engagement with every place we visited, trying not to rush and trust the process) eventually we did find a new home for Foresta. Or it found us.

In a somewhat remote and undiscovered location in northern Spain the future forest of Foresta found us, pulled us, so that we sensed their pulse in our cells, and a dimension in space has opened — we have arrived somewhere where we felt a new sense of reciprocity. Since matter is not devoid of felt experience, subtle invisibilities are at least as important as what our eyes can perceive. We wanted to be there and felt invited by this place, where concepts and ideas could finally connect to the everyday reality of lived life, where we could connect to sensitivities shaped in and with places outside the current human-techno-urban imaginations.

So Foresta is now slowly beginning to grow in Asturias, where the valley, the hills and the mountains on the one side and the ocean landscapes on the other are bearing witness to the development of this international laboratory for spaces of the possible. At the same time, we are also interested in how such experimental material and cultural practices may be able to resonate across territorial contexts. We are thinking of a rhizome, whose living practice offers a metaphor for learning about a structure without a center. Rhizome offers us to think of poetics of interconnectedness, of a fundamental openness to new connections, respecting multiplicity, heterogeneity, and a process that is defined by the ability to form symbiotic links. We are therefore also looking to potentially become a distributed garden, connecting with other places (for example, a territory just outside of Berlin, Germany), where each place is offering a particular climatic expression and cultural imagination, thus building an intentional distributed geography, where every place is a living node of one shared process.

Our current and future activities, while being diverse and hybrid, are developing within the frame of the following main areas of attention.

Architecture(s) of Connection: infrastructures and stories

How can architecture support multispecies conviviality and contribute to cultivation of ecological futures? In which ways can it invite us to develop more attentive and complex attitudes toward the vegetal and animal 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 within that takes into account needs of diverse inhabitants? How to imagine and construct low-carbon built environment prioritising circular design principles, plant-based regenerative materials, adopting to the local context, and facilitating more-than-human alliances? More info: www.foresta-collective.com/architectures-of-connection

Agroforestry: planting for symbiotic togetherness

How can agricultural practices cultivate new possibilities for relating to the diverse communities of life and engage into landscape relations in such a way that we can work as part of an ecosystem in harmony with natural 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 for varieties of living beings, 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. More info: www.foresta-collective.com/forest-gardens

Foodscapes: towards more respectful and playful sustenance

Food is another portal for world-making, for more grounded convivial multispecies imaginaries towards planetary well-being. So how do we build connections and enact reciprocity with and within foodscapes? What if we bring food back into the centre of our thinking? If food is a world-making practice, how do we strengthen regenerative food ecologies? What and who are included into those ecologies? How to lay the foundations for food sovereignty and what and who are included into the local? We engage with food as both a cultural investigation as well as a more practical interest to implement regenerative agriculture and food production, with a wish to contemplate food also as poetry, friendship, memory, ceremony, energy, medicine. More info: www.foresta-collective.com/foodscapes

Mentioned below are some of the existing and potential activities at Foresta, ranging from more mature formats that have been developed by Foresta Collective over several years to prototypes and more recent visions.

Research

The platform offers space for experimentation in collective imagination and action, wishing to align and craft gestures with the agencies of the Earth. So researching imaginaries and practices beyond the hegemonic logic is at the core. How could notion of the planetary become our thinking tool? How does a culture that relinks to the living story the world differently and translate it into practice? Who is included in the coming together of diverse human and non-human entities? Sharing and pursuing honest inquiries within an aligned togetherness seed powerful alchemical workings.

Residencies

How can creative practices support imagining, birthing and growing futures that decolonize, rebuild and heal, responding to "injuries of modernity", such as disenchatment and loss of wonder? Residencies hold space for intimate encounters with natural environments, through gestures of attunement, nearness, and collective work, bringing together visible and invisible, ecological and metaphysical, poetic and practical, objects of daily use and artworks of symbolic meaning, claiming freedom and openness to experiment, making room for critical thinking and sensing, embracing heterogeneity and wanting the impossible.

Seasonal Academy

Seasonal Academy is Foresta’s main learning format, that offers online (self-paced) and onsite (in person) learning experiences dedicated to ecologies of human and multispecies vibrancy and restoration of bonding with the living world(s). Committed to supporting persons from diverse walks of life, who wish to strengthen their work or develop an initiative rooted in forest imaginaries, interconnected ecosystemic thinking, embodied culture, thinking-through-making, and collective practice, to deepen into the circles of ecological sensitivity and develop long-term strategies for envisioning and realising their work.

Multispecies Commons Walk

Contemplating ideas, potential meanings and practices for contemporary pilgrimage as a way to engage with personal meaning-making, we are envisioning a public pathway as part of Foresta space, where installations and objects will invite visitors to reconnect with the natural world. This cultural pathway embedded into the landscape offers visitors to engage into contemplative journey, connecting to the local landscape and its inhabitants. Communication partners on the walk will also be several site-specific artefacts, artistic objects or micro-architectural structures.

Food lab

Food lab extends an invitation 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. It shares a proposal to root practice in a place, to revisit cyclically, to participate in a longer trajectory of collective cultivation of a living system while being cultivated by it, to grow food from seed and follow its cycles, allowing relationships — ecological, human, multispecies — to unfold and deepen gradually. Potential directions for engagement range from growing and harvesting from a forest garden, experimenting with perennial plants, tea, or botanical drinks, as well as other forms of culinary practice in a garden of many gardens.

School without Walls

School without Walls is our long-term format for and with children, dedicated to ecologically, socially and personally sustainable futures, addressing learning as an embodied, affective, relational practice rooted in the territories. It has been existing in an urban setting of Berlin as an aesthetic research expedition that explores natural and cultural ecologies and that will also metamorphosize as Foresta will become more rooted on the land. Unfolding in a direct relationship with the world around, this School’s vision is to nurture perception and awareness beyond a reductionist view of nature, to expand sensitivity and ways of listening to multispecies communities of life, through personal and collective storytelling and artistic thinking and making.

Eco-tourism

We understand eco-tourism as a way to invite temporary dwellers into the project, to offer a possibility to experience it not just during a day visit, but potentially staying for a while, as a way to travel slower and get to know the place closer. We are still in the process of research and experimentation with the questions of form that this hospitality-related activity may take. How can structures have least possible impact on the terrain? Can they welcome interspecies living spaces, while respecting privacy of all at the same time? This possibility to engage with the place is also a way to contribute to the economy of the project and its long-term sustainability.

Something else?

A sanctuary, a festival, a summer school, a refuge,… what would you like to do?

People who feel resonance with this work and wish to contribute to its becoming are invited to become members of Foresta Collective association. There is no single way to participate. Members may:

• contribute time, skills, or knowledge

• take part in residencies, gatherings, or research processes

• support the association’s stewardship work

• help hold and evolve its values and governance

Members do not need to live in situ, unless this is something they may choose to do. We work through seasonal gatherings, remote coordination, and project-based visits. What matters is a commitment to attentiveness, responsibility, and care for shared vision.

Between 2015 and 2022, 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

In 2022 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 life-generating 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, where our work can be shaped in, by and with places that lie outside current human-techno-urban imaginations.

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 multispecies care, and to hold space for Foresta to grow as a real forest. In 2024 and 2025 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 :)

illustration: Violeta Lopiz