A process-led course for Contemporary Design students (MA) at Aalto University, Finland. Organised in Autumn 2024, in collaboration with the Uroboros Collective as the main course partner.
The Experimental Design course Feral Ways of Making Sense with Multispecies Otaniemi provided a co-creative space for practice-based explorations of multispecies ecologies and relations, using the Aalto University campus in Otaniemi as the main site of inquiry. Throughout the six course weeks, we moved and designed with the Otaniemi multispecies environment and its creatures — ranging from dust, slugs, birds, mushrooms, tree stumps, reeds, reindeer and more — to form new relations and make sense of and with each other. As we navigated this journey, we questioned who holds the power to produce knowledge about everyday realities, whose concerns are seen, heard, or noticed, and who remains invisible or unacknowledged.
Inspired by feral ways of sensemaking and growing from the 2023 course edition Feral Helsinki: Making Sense With More-than-Human Urban Ecologies, the course invited open-ended and sensory-rich investigation that was guided by our shared intention to get acquainted with the local landscape, as well as our personal intutions, curiosities, and various chance encounters. Through performative, sensory, and imaginative methods – walking, drifting, listening, storytelling, crafting, noticing, remembering, and more – we gathered experiences and co-created feral artifacts in many forms and media ranging from glass, metal, wood, ceramics, cat tail fluff, reed, and leather to stop motion animation, sampled forest sounds, spoken word, and diy ink. These inquiries were captured as 16 experimental videos that you can watch below. The course processes and outputs were showcased in the Aalto Space 21 at the exhibition Too Feral, and presented at the Uroboros 2024 festival, as part of the Alter Eco/s Nest: Un/learning From Lost to the River program.
Course participants and projects
Boer Ling: The Birds We Meet Again
Robert Hedengren: Love Horror
Daniel Kohvakka: Birdhouse
Marcelo Guajardo Davila: Phragmi Tripudium
Anna Leeman: Who Captures Whom?
Vala Boucht: Reed the Room
Ene Rönkkö: Reeding Marks
Hailey Robinson: The Path
Mai Fujisawa: May I One Day Ebb Away
Mirva Kosonen: Boazu / Poro / Reindeer
Henri Timperi: Sculpting for Life
Seo Young Lee: Stories of Your Life
Rosa Helenius: Horse
Iines Lahtinen: Liminal Home
Shiho Komai: To Be Forest
Nea Paavola: Letting Go of Frustration
Course teacher: Markéta Dolejšová
Teaching assistant: Zoë Robertson
Course partner: Uroboros Collective
Guest teachers & tutors: Gloria Lauterbach, Ville Hyvönen, Enrique Encinas
Thanks to: Jason Selvarajan and Space 21
If you’d like to know more about the course, reach out to marketa.dolejsova@gmail.com
Markéta Dolejšová
Markéta Dolejšová is a practice-based researcher working across participatory art and design to explore the shapeshifting dynamics of more-than-human coexistence and the changing relations among humans, nature, and technology. She is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral research fellow at Aalto University - School of Arts, Design and Architecture (FI) and has co-founded several art-design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the Fermentation GutHub. In 2020-22 she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures EU project where she led the Laboratory of experimental artistic productions.