Thinking
through Making

Thinking-through-making is the framing and an inquiry within Foresta Collective into ways how arts and creativity enhance and support the raising of creative powers to re-imagine this world, to advance the present societal structures through intuition, imagination and making otherwise. These practices involve a variety of experiences, exercises and experiments that invite to reconnect to creative intelligence, claiming freedom and openness to experiment, embracing diversity and the unknown, where arts jump off their pedestal into ecologies of everyday life.

Embodied
Culture

Embodied culture stands for recognition of human embodied and embedded nature. It's a practice into ways how bodies as subjects of experience rejuvenate our awareness of the world, inner and outer, and enhance abilities to transform it. It invites to deepen attentiveness, sensitivity and presence, while exploring a variety of nuanced ways to reconnect with the body. Bringing the body back into the center of cultural conversations is an inquiry into a metaphorical, archetypal and poetic layer of human embeddedness into the Earth body.

Transdisciplinary Researchpractice

Researchpractice holds the idea, as its name suggests, that research and practice are not separated from one another. Theory and practice are inherently intertwined. This thread in our methodology turns to texts and invites into readings, it brings in artworks and offers to ponder on some of the great pieces humanity has produced across the globe in the past centuries. Our research evolves within cross-pollinated field, and mainly goes into art history, literature, science, philosophy and humanities in general. It then flows in with the practices that are offered by art-thiking-and-making as well as embodied culture.

In 2022 dojo sessions took place once a month on full moon.

December:
Ritual

Ritual is a container. It's a power of intention. A symbolic act for making oneself feel at home in the world. A re-awakening of a relation with a dimension of life. To complete this year of Dojo we celebrate the end of the year together, offering ways to honour small everyday life rituals, and to re-invent personal rituals in order to attune to the changing energies of the yearly cycle.

November: Horizons

In 1790 Xavier de Maistre was in house-arrest for 42 days. In that time, he took a brave voyage – around his room. His new way of travelling made us aware of the type of mind-journeys people can take nowadays – deep and slow, broadening their already formed horizons. What do we mean when we articulate the need to broaden our own horizons? Can this broadening lead to what Hans-Georg Gadamer called fusion of horizons? And is constant movement as such necessary for achieving this goal? We will consider these questions through phenomenological and hermeneutical points of view, reading, embodied awareness practice, deep observation of our surroundings, and writing.

August:
Play

Can you imagine that you have a twin that lives within you? A bright, shiny, timeless part of you who is able and willing to create at at any time? Do you know this part in you? The part that falls over in the playground and stands up laughing? Do you see this part as dusty, lost, covered in cobwebs, stifled, in a cage or perhaps running free, but too fast for you to catch up and join in? Or maybe you already know them so very well - but as they are infinite and splendid - why not come and spend more time with them. This part of you is you! That part of you that feels connected to people, to the land, to all things seen and unseen. In Play there is space to listen to our bodies, listen to our curiosity, listen to our 'Yes' within. We are all in a play all of the time, the play of our lives - can we liberate ourselves to play a different role? To play with our full self, our foolself.

May:
Nourishment

Nourishment is a rich subject. We will begin by approaching it from the perspective of interspecies support: foraging, gut nutrition and mental health, combining practical and theoretical approaches to nurturing a relationship of abundance and reciprocity with plants and other nonhumans, focusing on improving gut nutrition and mental health, using observation techniques and critical thinking exercises to decarbonise, diversify and decolonialise our diet. We will then continue with Touch as Nourishment. We touch, as if the hands are small sensors that can go beyond the surface and touch landscapes that are in deeper layers of the body. We will create a common space where we can be in touch at a distance, and listen to each other’s voices and to the images accumulated in the layers of our bodies. Experiencing forms of communication that are vulnerable and fragile. A collective cacophony and a contradictory and incoherent collective body.

October:
Wild Geese

Potentially Life and Death are more than friends. They are mutual processes of a single being. Where the spiritual and the material are not separated, there is also no separation between forces of life and death. However, injured by modernity and the “disenchantment of the world” (as analysed by a sociologist and philosopher Max Weber), rather than seeing life and death as mutual processes, we drove them into an antagonistic position. Now as the seasons are shifting, some plants are dying, animals preparing for hibernation, wild geese forming packs to leave the northern lands, we will engage into personal and collective reflection around the subject of farewells. 

July:
Song

In the middle of summer, in a time when the generous sunlight is inviting many of the Earthbeings into the peak of their outward energy and expression, we invite you to join us in the Song: an outdoor practice, investigation, experimentation, listening, sounding, cacophony, polyphony. Following the groove and fluttering, discovering that which may be waiting to be expressed. Song is one of the ways of how we humans try to make sense of the complex world, changing moods, emotions, dynamics of relationships. Searching for a voice of your own is a continuous process of listening and staying attentive to where you come from, what is present and who you are becoming. What rhythms do we live to, and what impact do the rhythms we expose ourselves to have on our way of thinking, feeling, being? Rhythms we hear, rhythms we see, rhythms we pulsate with. How do you find rhythms that wake you and move you, melodies that spark and speak, words that are real and expressive? Song is weaving a tapestry from these elements.

April: Metamorphoses

We live in a world of constant unfoldings and becomings. Everything is always in the process of turning into something else. Change is perhaps the most powerful force in the living world. For this month in the Dojo, we meet during the expansive transformations of Spring to explore the ideas of metamorphosis within our inner and exterior landscapes. Through creative writing and embodied meditations, we seek out stories within our shared mythologies, questioning the established narratives and exploring how we can see them from new perspectives. We attempt to rethink the human-as-assemblage in relation to other species and feel our way through how our own histories transform through oral storytelling. Resting in a state of flux, creating spaces for change; Daphne, Narcissus, and the awakening world will guide us towards embracing the power of metamorphosis.

February: Togetherness

February's theme of Togetherness proposes a state of being in constant flux, and an awareness of our existence as part of an interconnected network of time, space, experience and memory. Each session will embrace togetherness as inherently collaborative, and so each of this month's inquiries will lead us through varying paths of collective thinking, questioning, making and imagining - towards the (re)creation of new, connected strands of our shared network. For the human body togetherness is manifold. It involves personal ecologies — living as a holobiont and inner reciprocity —, as well as relational space and our togetherness with other beings, human and not only. During the month of February through embodied practices we experiment how the awareness of a continuous flux of being multiplicities in conversation contributes to vitality of our everyday experiences as well as to human and beyond-human co-evolution and mutual co-creation.

September: Rhizome

Our work as Foresta Collective is possible thanks to visible and invisible collaborations. Rhizome is a subterranean body of a plant, a stem of interconnected living fibers that has no central point, no origin, and no particular structure. This is also a concept carrying multiple cultural and philosophical meanings, due to the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on our thinking about non-hierarchical structures. How learning from rhizome can we find new ways for being together differently? Rhizome offers us to think of poetics of interconnectedness, of a structure without a center, of a fundamental openness to new connections, respecting multiplicity, heterogeneity, and a process that is defined by the ability to form symbiotic connections.

June:
Eros

How can love and desire be experienced as qualities for entangled relationalities? We invite you to explore together the role of desire in the processes of decolonisation, as well as dive into an inquiry around love as an attitude to life, human and more-than-human, as a force that drives relationalities, longings, creation, and emergent qualities in the fabrics of existence. We engage in an exploration of a mythological context of Eros and its field of experience, in order to re-connect with knowledge as intimacy, where theory and practice are inherently intertwined. We also examine the process of embodying desires that are not one’s own, based on how Taiwan, a land endow with feminine figure and metaphor, that has been colonized multiple times, and is now trapped (what feels like) by the desire of the coloniser, and how this situation can be seen in the contemporary art in Taiwan. An invitation is to trace lost and foreign desires in our own living contexts.

March:
Soil

Soil is complex and multi-layered. It’s a skin, a surface we live on. A home to many life forms and multitudes of species co-existing in its depths in known and unknown ways. It’s a place of rootedness, belonging and being home. A place of primordial silence and little light. A site of regeneration, where the cycles of nutrients care for life to compost, transform, renew and flourish. It’s layered with time, resources, history, potentiality. This months we invite you into experimental contact with clay. To feel its texture, smell, moisture and make a few pieces with the techniques of pinching, coil and slab, creating a vessel. We will also explore clay not only as a modelling or sculpting material, but as a paint, sensing its manifold qualities, such as texture, colour, opacity, etc. We will also explore the different layers and textures in the human living form. With a wish to observe them with wonder, to dive into them if possible, without guarantee to what we will find inside. Choosing to explore the body like this, words become secondary. We sense what is there, and start to connect to the layers from which we rise. These layers nourish all that we do in this world, and we do not want to take them for granted. What they are, how they function, where they start and where they end, each must find out for themselves, again and again. What is the soil of your body?

January:
Breathing

In times of Corona the subject of breathing seems especially relevant. Through the shared air we realise how connected we are. How do we breath in these challenging times? We will explore breathing as a capacity for grounding, dealing with uncertainty, focusing, and rejuvenating, and offer practices for cultivating breathing capacities. We will also engage with practices for self-healing and wellbeing, inspired by the Taoistic approach of Mantak Chia. We will be working with the power of a smile technique, unfolding structurally throughout the body, and explore self-care as an intention. We will touch on self-care as an approach, the loving smile technique and bringing it into the body’s frontal, median and dorsal fields.