Personal Inquiry
Rooted in the traditions of critical reflection, phenomenology as well as our Woods in the City series, learning begins with personal questions, with finding an honest concern, with the process of identifying, prioritising, and deepening personal inquiries. Pursuing an honest inquiry invites us to move from comprehending something or being able to talk about it, towards a kind of understanding that extends towards and links with the demands of everyday life. We offer an ecosystems thinking framework as a tool to ground, expand and then focus attention; as a space for questioning, re-rooting, and creating a personal learning path in-tune with your inner drive. Landing into your own experiences and perception of things inner and outer, you learn more about yourself, what you resonate with, what feels foreign to you, what needs more attention and care in your lived and perceived worlds.

Thematic Impulses
Impulses are structured around a concrete subject (such as food, wellbeing, work, education, habitat, and other) and are designed to share knowledge, inspire and engage, to question the dominant discourses of unsustainable societies and seek to offer alternatives that support human and ecological wellbeing. You will meet an invited guest contributor offering an impulse on the session’s theme, and will explore subjects of your interest in small group conversations with other participants. Impulses are brought by artists, researchers and practitioners: people from a variety of walks of life, whose work unfolds within the context of personal and societal renewal. Forms and formats of these transdisciplinary impulses vary depending on the focus of a session.

Art Thinking & Making
Creativity is the key in any process of change. It gives space to imagination and experimentation around the question of how do we want to live. Art has transformative power. We involve art thinking and making as ways of re-inventing learning processes, acquiring and organising knowledge differently, accessing subjectivity and intuition, inviting more poetry and curiosity into learning, claiming freedom and openness to experiment, embracing diversity and the unknown, empowering creative confidence, and identifying connections that allow to understand the world better, and participate in a process of conscious creation of culture. We understand creativity, arts and crafts as ways of finding expression to the immaterial, as practices of transformation through material, as tools of perceiving, thinking and expressing inquiries, as ways of questioning the established narratives and creating own stories that are not only verbal, and that involve the use of imagination and hands to create artefacts of personal meaning.

Embodied Culture
All sessions are rooted in what we describe as embodied culture, as part of our continuous inquiry into ways how bodies as subjects of experience rejuvenate our awareness of the world, inner and outer, and enhance our abilities to transform it. We can’t shift habits of thinking and change our minds with our minds alone. As part of every session, in a nuanced way, we reconnect to the body and its multiple intelligences through subtle and simple exercises of paying attention, in order to arrive towards a more holistic presence, and to explore interconnection between body, mind, perception and thinking, as well as the power of a more embodied presence to expand our awareness, reveal new perspectives, refresh creation of meaning, and allow fresh ideas to surface. Bring the body back into the center of cultural conversations is a continuation of our research-in-public series Body Matters, as well as an inquiry into a metaphorical, archetypal and poetic layer of human embeddedness into the earth body.

Opening (a homey-ceremony)

Come and join our home-style opening party of ‘Ecologies’ program!

Just a day before the first session, you will meet our co-creators, authors and co-authors of this series, and some amazing musicians offering a mini-concert live!

What we think might happen:
* We’ll ring the gong to celebrate the launch of Ecologies of Attention. We’ll share our vision for this program and disclose some of its highlights (but won’t spoil any surprises).
* You will meet the contributors - a wonderful group of artists, thinkers and change-makers from around the world - you’ll have a chance to say hi and hear them say a few words about their sessions.
* The wonderful Danielle Friedman and Hervé Salters (General Elektriks) will join us to contribute music language into the conversation.

Can’t wait to see you all! Stay safe…

Date: 14 May 2020

Time: 19 - 20 CET

Making Sense of Space in Relation

This module offers an inquiry into relational ecologies, an investigation of the everyday surroundings, and a journey towards expanding attention to the resources it takes to maintain our worlds. We invite you to explore the seemingly invisible implications of many familiar processes in our daily lives, like writing an email, ordering a product, eating a dinner, or watching a house being built. This module contains 2 sessions that invite to question the established worldview we tend to take for granted, and offer to explore the manifold relationships with our daily life objects and processes, to articulate their physical connections, and to map the convergence of fragments and relations.

Dates: 15-22 May 2020

Food Landscapes

Our world is shaped by food. As Carolyn Steel puts it, “the way we eat shapes our sense of community and identity, while the way we produce, trade, consume and waste food influences everything from our bodies, habits, politics and economics to our cities, landscapes and climate”. This module contains 4 sessions: an impulse, an inquiry, an art thinking, and a food making session. Dedicated to questions around how by revaluing food we can go a long way to building healthier and more resilient lives, adding such subjects as food transparency and implications of different food production systems on human and planetary health, this module invites to re-think your basic ideas around food.

Dates: 25-29 May 2020

Interspecies Choir

This module is about expanding our perception of animals and plants. It invites to question our perceptual and discursive approach to other than human life forms, and to engage into manifold reflections through art thinking and making sessions, in a way that bonds us back into the tissue of direct embodied experience. Sessions of this module invite to move away from abstraction and objectification of other species, through and beyond the ecological consciousness, towards instinctive empathy, connection, and multi-species perspectives that encourage reciprocity between the human animal and the other life forms inhabiting the planet. 

Dates: 2-5 June 2020

Personal Ecologies: Knowing through Being

This module contains several sessions that are meant to be nourishing the soil and roots of personal ecologies. In a kindred spirit with Donna Haraway, we too find that it matters what stories tell stories, what thoughts think thoughts, what worlds world worlds. The module will offer a space to expand perception and attention to the body, to question the basic assumptions we have around human perception and questions of agency, as well as the wisdom of the body and its connection to human integrity. It aims to think and articulate the present grounds, to imagine and envision the future gardens. The module will culminate with a weekend of weaving your own tapestry of inner gardens.

Dates: 8-14 June 2020

Pedagogy Otherwise

This module is dedicated to re-thinking education and contains several sessions held in close collaboration with Free Home University (Lecce, Italy), as a pedagogical and artistic experiment focused on generating new ways of sharing and creating knowledge. The name of this pedagogical initiative shows the desire to be a non-vertical, energy-liberating, insurgent environment (Free), within a protected and intimate space (Home), committed to creating a temporary autonomous community of learners (University).

Dates: 17-19 June 2020