Open Forest is an experimental practice-based inquiry into more-than-human forest ecologies and dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise: in situated, co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond extractivist renderings of forests as resources to serve colonialist, neo-liberal agendas.
The Open Forest activities – experimental walking, storytelling, dérive drifting, and co-creation of feral forest datasets – bring together artists, citizens, policymakers, Indigenous forest guardians, scientists as well as dogs and trees in experiential exchange of their diverse forest experiences and knowledge.
The Open Forest activities – experimental walking, storytelling, dérive drifting, and co-creation of feral forest datasets – bring together artists, citizens, policymakers, Indigenous forest guardians, scientists as well as dogs and trees in experiential exchange of their diverse forest experiences and knowledge.
The project has been initiated by the Open Forest Collective (Andrea Botero, Markéta Dolejšová, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and Chewie).
Role:
Open Forest Collective co-founder and researcher.
Year: 2020-Ongoing
Project Links:
Open Forest Catalogue
Feral Map
Exhibitions
Events
Publications
Talks
Open Forest Collective co-founder and researcher.
Year: 2020-Ongoing
Project Links:
Open Forest Catalogue
Feral Map
Exhibitions
Events
Publications
Talks
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. Walking is embraced
as a way of becoming responsive to a place, a perfromative bodily practice that can activate modes of situated, relational participation and facilitate imaginative knowledge production.
The experimental walks are centred around the elements of surprise and curiosity, inviting participants to walk-with each other as well as with the local forest ecologies around them. Local trees and other forest creatures are considered as active participants in both the walking experiences and the larger eco-social phenomena happening in and around forests, such as biodiversity loss and climate change. This more-than-human walking is guided by various navigators with good knowledge or sense of local landscapes, including Indigenous forest guardians and healers, forest scientists and data managers, as well as dogs and artistic strategies of dérive.
The experimental walks are centred around the elements of surprise and curiosity, inviting participants to walk-with each other as well as with the local forest ecologies around them. Local trees and other forest creatures are considered as active participants in both the walking experiences and the larger eco-social phenomena happening in and around forests, such as biodiversity loss and climate change. This more-than-human walking is guided by various navigators with good knowledge or sense of local landscapes, including Indigenous forest guardians and healers, forest scientists and data managers, as well as dogs and artistic strategies of dérive.
Multiple forest walks have been organised in various parts of the world. For example, in Finland, the walks are situated in the highly instrumentalized Hyytiälä forestry field station that is full of sensors collecting measurements of gas exchanges between the forest and the atmosphere, and in the Sipoonkorpi National Park near Helsinki.
In Australia, the walks explore Melbourne’s Urban Forest and its associated open data maintained by the municipality. The local Urban Forest offers a complex ecosystem of more than 70,000 trees each with unique IDs that provides a peculiar context for inquiry into open and alternative forest data.
.
In Colombia, we walked with forest patches in three different locations, including the Bëngbe Uáman Tabanoc – an ancestral territory of the Kamëntŝa people located in southern Colombian Andes, the Reserva El Palmar – an ecological reserve located in the buffer zone of the Chingaza National Park in the Andean Mountains, and the Cerro Seco – an informal housing neighborhood located at the southern urban limits of Bogota.
In the Czech Republic, the walks take place in Central Bohemia, in the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko and are guided by Chewie– a Collective's member of a canine origin who holds extensive sensorial knowledge of the local forest landscape and provides a unique other-than-human perspective. Chewie’s sense of orientation and interests define what is worth exploring and his sensory capacities become key. Human senses are present but their usual connection to rational decision-making is put on hold.
While walking, we try to observe and listen carefully to our surroundings. We record our experiences in text and audiovisual notes, and talk with fellow walkers about eco-social issues in forest ecosystems and beyond. These conversations, experiences and observations become an inspiration for forest stories. These stories capturing diverse, more-than-human forest knowledges are considered a peculiar kind of forest data that is messy, eclectic, material and sensory-rich – or, as we call it, feral.
The feral forest data resulting from the co-creative walking – whether woven into belts, generated through drifting or inspired by a dog’s forest interests and movements – can help challenge dominant epistemological framings of forests and cultivate an acknowledgment of the diverse, situated forest epistemologies defining what a forest might be and to whom. Through the feral stories and data that are shared by walks participants, we invite conversations about what can constitute a forest dataset, how it can be produced and by whom. Thereby, we aim to raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities that shape forests and their futures.
The feral forest data resulting from the co-creative walking – whether woven into belts, generated through drifting or inspired by a dog’s forest interests and movements – can help challenge dominant epistemological framings of forests and cultivate an acknowledgment of the diverse, situated forest epistemologies defining what a forest might be and to whom. Through the feral stories and data that are shared by walks participants, we invite conversations about what can constitute a forest dataset, how it can be produced and by whom. Thereby, we aim to raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities that shape forests and their futures.
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 – forest datasets and extractivist understandings of forests with more messy, colourful and eclectic inputs – or, feral data. The map makes the collected forest stories available for further reflection and asynchronous engagement outside of the walks’ scope, to reach broader audiences.
Apart from adding stories to the existing forest places and data points already documented in the Map, participants can also add new points of interest, or ‘new creatures’. Offering these creatures to the map is left deliberately open: participants can add creatures of various kinds, such as an animal or plant, but also more abstract ones such as an ambiance or a glitch. By adding these new creatures, they can propose what is missing from the forest map while drawing on their personal and locally situated knowledge, and help make visible what might not be visible otherwise.
The Feral Map itself experiments with an open curation and is left open to contributions in varied forms, including forest stories and new forest creatures. The feral forest data resulting from these collaborative activities – whether woven into belts, generated through drifting or inspired by a dog’s forest interests and movements – can help challenge dominant epistemological framings of forests and cultivate an acknowledgment of the diverse, situated forest epistemologies defining what a forest might be and to whom.
Apart from adding stories to the existing forest places and data points already documented in the Map, participants can also add new points of interest, or ‘new creatures’. Offering these creatures to the map is left deliberately open: participants can add creatures of various kinds, such as an animal or plant, but also more abstract ones such as an ambiance or a glitch. By adding these new creatures, they can propose what is missing from the forest map while drawing on their personal and locally situated knowledge, and help make visible what might not be visible otherwise.
The Feral Map itself experiments with an open curation and is left open to contributions in varied forms, including forest stories and new forest creatures. The feral forest data resulting from these collaborative activities – whether woven into belts, generated through drifting or inspired by a dog’s forest interests and movements – can help challenge dominant epistemological framings of forests and cultivate an acknowledgment of the diverse, situated forest epistemologies defining what a forest might be and to whom.
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 portal with a set of drifting prompts, was developed in parallel with the Feral Map through three co-creative workshops with scientists, designers, artists, researchers, and policy actors from Melbourne.
Over 200 creative prompts for drifting through the local landscape were designed as a result of the workshop and categorised into ten themes, including, for example, Becoming (To listen and attune to those less visible or heard), Space-time (To understand space and time differently), Decentering the Human (To not assume anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism), and Sensemaking (To feel, think, and know differently).
Our recent drifting event The Feral Drifting with Lonja Wetlands involved a 4-day performative investigation of multispecies relations and spatio-temporalities of care that shape the flow of life and death in Lonjsko Polje (or Lonja Wetlands), the largest protected wetlands in Croatia. The processes and outcomes of our wetlands drift were shaped as Feral Fragments of Lonjsko Pojle – an audiovisual installation exhibited at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the Croatian Pavilion – Same as it Ever Was.
Over 200 creative prompts for drifting through the local landscape were designed as a result of the workshop and categorised into ten themes, including, for example, Becoming (To listen and attune to those less visible or heard), Space-time (To understand space and time differently), Decentering the Human (To not assume anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism), and Sensemaking (To feel, think, and know differently).
Our recent drifting event The Feral Drifting with Lonja Wetlands involved a 4-day performative investigation of multispecies relations and spatio-temporalities of care that shape the flow of life and death in Lonjsko Polje (or Lonja Wetlands), the largest protected wetlands in Croatia. The processes and outcomes of our wetlands drift were shaped as Feral Fragments of Lonjsko Pojle – an audiovisual installation exhibited at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the Croatian Pavilion – Same as it Ever Was.
Beyond organising walks, maintaining the Feral Map, and publishing research texts, we regularly share our Open Forest processes as an interactive installation at exhibitions and festivals.
Compiled and made publicly available through these formats, we hope to help expand existing understandings of human-forest data relationships. For a full list of places and spaces where our installation has been planted, see our Exhibitions. Here, we offer a small sample: