Wild Stories
an outdoor spatial storytelling journey
Cultures are rooted in stories. Through stories we inherit a mentality, like a map that guides our lives, shapes our values and forms the scope of our perceptive capacity and the ways in which we pay attention. How do we tell stories that support the emergence of an ecological mindset? Wild Stories is part of School without Walls format and invites participants onto a spatial storytelling journey, to notice and listen to the multitudes of creatures inhabiting the more-than-human worlds, to awaken sensitivity to magical qualities of living landscapes, to tune-in and share imagination for new ways of multispecies togetherness. At the center of this workshop series are encounters between children and vegetal and animal worlds, and an invitation to explore unknown potentials within these encounters.
The series aims to assist kids to sense, feel, perceive their relationships with other beings in ways they might not otherwise be familiar with, to move away from instrumentalising other beings or reducing them to facts and functions. As Robin Wall Kimerer writes, when we open our attentiveness to the surrounding living worlds, the boundaries between us and other species “get pushed back with sudden clarity, an experience both humbling and joyful”. What it asks from us is slowing down, looking closer, listening wider, sensing deeper, and a different way of meeting can open, a whole new world can be revealed.
In gentle attentiveness to life at all scales, Wild Stories invites to engage with more-than-human worlds in ways that cannot be told by scientific data alone, that can rather be thought of as connectivity, reciprocity, vulnerability, embodied experience, nourished by various indigenous traditions, where all beings are recognized as non-human persons.
Wild Stories unfurl as a three-fold process:
Listening
Whose home do we enter when we step out of our home? Wild Stories begin with listening and paying attention to the nuances, rhythms, tiny creatures, quieter voices, subtle tones of the living landscapes that ask for our deep attentiveness and careful observation. Inner listening is also part of the experience.
Language
Language is about finding ways of expression. Humans are of multi-lingual nature. Words are one of the languages we can be fluent in. But actually, in Goethe’s words, language is feeling (and the name is but a sound). Language can be movement, images, sensations, sounds, rhythms, textures.
Stories
Finding the right language, we can hear and record stories. Stories surface as we go deeper, as we spend more time with the varieties of life forms - creatures inhabiting the surface of the Earth, or that live inside the soil, or those that feel at home on a tree or in the air - their ways of being, their relationships to one another, their habitats, their mysteries.
“The experiences during the three workshop days felt like spent somewhere far away from the city, a break from all other experiences, very intense and beautiful!”
Wild Stories Books
As support for explorations, we make custom books for gardens, museums, and other institutions we collaborate with.
Past Wild Stories
Wild Homes
a 3-day journey in the wild
In Japanese culture in addition to the 5 senses that we usually identify as senses, there is another one. MA. A sense of place. Keith Basso, a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, writes: “As places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed”. We experience places as inherently meaningful. Places can feel like home, like passages, like invitations to stay, to leave, to come close, some might feel alienating, others might re-connect us to something long forgotten.
What makes a place? Who makes a place? Who participates in a place? Who inhabits places we enter? Whose home do we enter when we leave ours? What intangible invisibilities embrace us when we land in a place? Marisol de la Cadena describes a “sense of place” as a phenomenological event, which results from a relationship between humans and more-than-humans, who together make and inhabit places. Visiting a living landscape, finding ourselves within communities of “expressive presences that are also attentive, and listening, to the meanings that move between them” (as David Abram puts it), do we take time to really be there while we are there?
This 3-day workshop, invites participants to explore the natural landscapes, discovering multitudes of creatures and how they inhabit those landscapes, as well as reflect together on how we dwell in places, how we care for places and whether a generous, attentive and nourishing co-living with other beings is possible, once we liberate the land and her inhabitants from our expectations or any instrumental relational frameworks.
Impressions from Weaving Homes at Biotop Hahneberg Berlin, lead by Sabina Enéa Téari, Georgina Espasa. Commissioned by Bastion Kunstschule in 2021
Vegetal Dreams
2 days visual storytelling experience
How do plants live? What’s the journey from seed to sprout, to flower, to fruit, to decay and compost? What is regeneration? Who dwells within the multispecies worlds of soil? Why for a healthy soil we need to take care of the plants? How can we imaginatively inhabit vegetal perspectives? This workshop takes a journey into learning from and with flowers, trees, herbs and other plants, while exploring the lives of plants and their shared history with humans.
Impressions from Vegetal Dreams: Seeds Bombs at Biotop Hahneberg Berlin. Lead by Laura Savina, Elena Rucli, Sabina Enéa Téari. Commissioned by Bastion Kunstschule
Animate Landscapes
spatial storytelling workshop
This workshop explores the relations between humans and other animals, insects, birds. Together with children we ponder on how animals and other creatures were imagined in the past, and what implications do these imaginaries have for the future. What can global indigenous ways expressed through stories and fairy-tales tell us about the more-than-human worlds and ethical ways of being, dwelling and sharing the planet with other creatures. The experience invites to transcend anthropocentric views and to explore interspecies kinship.
Animal Theatre. Lead by Sabina Enéa Téari, Cynthia Alonso, Zhang Qiang. Biotop Hahneberg Berlin, Floating University Berlin.
Cover image: Carolina Celas and Sabina Enéa Téari
Photos: Foresta Kids at Botanical Garden Pankow, Kinder Künste Zentrum, WerkStadt Arts Union, and outdoors
Books: Violeta Lopiz, Carolina Celas