Crafting Futures
embodied intentionalities
Art has to be understood in a whole new way: as a raising of creative powers by the senses,
that they become sharper, richer and much more potent;
that the inner creative powers advance the present thinking structures
through intuition, inspiration and imagination
and don’t end with pure intellectual understanding.
Furthermore the task of art is to develop emotion and feeling,
and ultimately to develop willpower.
— Joseph Beuys
Arts and crafts are at the heart of human cultures. Evolving alongside us and evolving us alongside them, since the beginning of times. Giving voice to experiences and feelings, shaping the material worlds of objects and homes, as well as the immaterial qualities of values and perceptions, communicating across space and time. In arts and crafts we see reflections of cultures and possibilities for reshaping of cultures.
How can we begin to move towards ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot imagine what the path feels like? asks Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass”. Merging the poetic and the practical, the Spring trail at Foresta Seasonal Academy is dedicated to sensing, articulating and caring for visions and intentions of your work, rooted in embodied awareness, ecological imagination and hands-on practices with vibrant matter.
It’s an ancient urge in humans to create worlds, willing to imagine and implement not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of possible futures. Creativity speaks through diversity of languages, materials, matters, movements. This trail invites to explore ways of thinking and knowing in reciprocity with materials, prototyping futures together, transcending linear time and disciplinary boundaries. At the core of this learning experience are practices of arts and crafts as ways of thinking and making, as threads that lead to the vital source within each living being, where knowledge and action come from a place capable of interrupting the current logic of instrumentalization, questioning stories we want to be living and telling through our work, from a place where creation is an act of care.
The trail is home to a diverse family of crafts workshops where we work with materials while they work with us. Every material is a vibrant matter, as Jane Bennett puts it. Every material becomes a research agent, a companion, potentially opening new perspectives through its materiality, as well as nourishing the maker in ways we can’t always explain. Crafts are also a form of active meditation, a possibility to connect to ancient cultures as well as own meaning-making. During the trail you will develop a gradually unfolding portrait of your work, project or idea, seen from various perspectives, as a composite woven from diverse media and materials, reflecting the learning and insights received during the impulses as well as in the fermentation time in between.
Trail flow
“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
This trail will invite experimentation with diversity of crafts, discerning your intentions and making visions tangible. It will offer to dive into cultures of artisanal movements, material and immaterial creative processes, engaging a variety of tools to open doors and support you finding insights meaningful for you. You bring the seeds of your projects to get to know them better and care for their growth and becoming throughout the trail.
Week 1: Re-story-ation
We begin with idea seeding, with mythologies from the kingdoms of forests. What can we learn from more-than-human beings as potential responses to the current crisis of imagination? How do we re-story our work in the world?
Week 2: Gestures into Infinity
Crafting Futures as a hopeful practice. World-making, forming of forms. Contemplating the landscape from a hill. Taking time, listening to the soil, the trees, the stones, discovering the path, the way in, into your work.
Week 3: Time and Place
Every project, any work is rooted somewhere, unfolding within terrestrial timescales. What’s your connection to a place where your work is situated? What helps you navigate within the pace of time? How far in time does the impact your work go?
Week 4: Dwellers and Companions
Who is on this journey with you? Without whom your work wouldn't be possible? Who will be the dwellers in the house you are building? Who is your work a gift for? Whom does it influence? Who influences it?
Week 5: Future Landscapes
Modern life rushes forward, at an exceedingly higher speed than our attentiveness and thoughtfulness live at. In honour of slowness as tempo but also as presence, we complete this trail as a meditative and slow process of feeling, connecting and envisioning future landscapes of our work.
Voices from the previous trails
Practical Infos
This is a self-paced learning experience. It begins with a personal live welcome session and ends with a contemplative closing session with one of the co-authors of the Seasonal Academy. If several participants wish to walk the trail together, we offer a possibility for both sessions to be collective rather than personal online meetings.
Every week recorded impulses and learning materials (including embodied practice and thinking-through-making invitations) will be shared with you on an online platform. Impulses are guided formats that try to be mostly screen-free and invite you for long walks and deep dives into practice. The online platform offers space for interacting with the team and sharing your process if you wish to do so.
All impulses will stay available for you to access at anytime also after the end of the trail.
Fees and Application
Daniel Wester (guest artist, previous editions of Spring trail)
Anastassia Zamaraeva (guest artist, previous editions of Spring trail))
Sérgio Lemos (guest artist, previous editions of Spring trail)
Evey Kwong (guest artist, previous editions of Spring trail)
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Cover images and illustration: Charlotte Peys
“The time I spent in and with and surrounded by Foresta Collective was - as the name suggests - like spending time in a forest. I felt carried, cared for and part of a space full of interwoven and reciprocal relationships. In that space, the connections present in my personal and professional environment that I want to give attention to became clearer and stronger. Foresta Collective made visible what was already there in the most profound and shapeshifting way and for that I am grateful without end. I hope to care and carry it with me into the future.”
- Charlotte Peys (Ghent, Belgium) - artist, illustrator