Multispecies Commons Walk

Contemplating ideas, potential meanings and practices for contemporary pilgrimage, we are envisioning a public pathway as part of the physical space at Foresta. This cultural pathway embedded into the landscape and strongly connected with local ecologies, will be a part of the educational and cultural activities at Foresta.

Such a walk will offer 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, that symbolically embody Foresta’s ecological and regenerative philosophy, communicate meaning, and support a more playful approach to understanding some of the key ideas and practices we are working with and towards.

We envision an outdoor installation, as part of a publicly open pathway, that will be dedicated to the subjects of ecologies, planetary habitability and multispecies togetherness. Its intention is to support the change in how we relate to multispecies communities of life, to support movement from a more reductionist and anthropocentric view towards a more symbiotic and respectful togetherness. 

On this symbolic pilgrimage through a landscape of natural regeneration that bears the traces of human agricultural activity, we want the curated artistic and architectural impulses of the invited artists and architects as well as the natural impulses emanating from non-human actors ("nature") to blend strongly and sometimes perhaps even to become indistinguishable, thus stimulating visitors' heightened awareness and active imagination.

Context

In our curatorial work we address fundamental questions concerning the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Our starting point is related to de-centring of a human – that is a conscious questioning of worldviews that place humans at the centre of an ecosystem and treat other life forms as accessories or resources. Instead we seek ways to make multispecies living beings visible and tangible in all their diversity.

For us this is linked to reconnecting with what we call ‘the living’, to qualities that have been lost in many social contexts, such as wonder, respect, a sense of connectedness. Foresta Collective brings poetic and senses-based perspectives to this – through texts, learning formats and spaces for experience that open up new ways of perception and relation.

We understand our practice as a practice of resonance. We are not concerned with representation, but rather with contact – with listening, contemplating, perceiving, experimenting with forms of attention rooted in sensitive awareness. Creation of spaces for experiencing multispecies relations is a central concern of our work. What might spaces or landscape installations look like in which the attentive and respectful coexistence between humans, animals, plants and other beings is not only theoretically conceived but is also experienced through multiple senses?