Seeds

Central to the Open Forest project is a series of experimental walks with various forests around the world, where diverse local participants come together to observe the forests around them and share their experiences in the form of forest stories. In the project, walking is embraced as a way of becoming responsive to a place,… Continue reading Walking-with

The observations, experiences and sensory impressions collected via the Open Forest walks serve as an inspiration for forest stories. These stories capture diverse, more-than-human forest knowledge shared by project participants and are considered a peculiar kind of forest data that is messy, eclectic, colourful and – or, as we call it, feral. The forest stories… Continue reading Forest stories

To enable the sharing of diverse, personally situated forest stories, we experiment with speculative material practices and devices, including the online Feral Map – a collaborative dataset of diverse, more-than-human forest experiences and knowledge (with over 150 stories so far). Through the Feral Map, the project aims to entangle the currently available – mostly quantitative… Continue reading Feral Mapping

The Open Forest inquiry experiments with situated, embodied, spontaneous and multispecies – or what we call ‘feral’ – ways of sensemaking and co-creating. We explore feral as a quality to appraise open-ended, unexpected, more-than-human encounters that unfold beyond the bounds of human control, embracing uncertainty and surprise as both generative and critical elements. We use… Continue reading Feral Ways

Some Open Forest walks have been guided by a set of More-than-Human Dérives, or drifts. Inspired by Situationists International’s artistic strategy with the same name, the dérives invite walkers to take an unplanned journey through a landscape, drop their everyday relations and let themselves be drawn by chance encounters. The More-than-Human Dérive, as an online… Continue reading Drifts (Dérive)