Living-with Feral Ecologies. A Festival.
The festival takes place in Puutarhapiha at Lapinlahden Lähde. The park has good accessibility. There will be signs that guide visitors to the festival. Outdoor event (indoors in case of rain).
Living-with Feral Ecologies is a one-day, more-than-human festival exploring feral ways of knowing, caring and relating that shape the flow of life and death in more-than-human ecosystems.
The festival explores feral ways – open-ended, multisensory, spontaneous, beyond human control – in the context of everyday practices, rituals, and relationships emerging around the encounters of human and other-than-human life. An international group of art and design researchers will present 20 experimental works ranging from interactive light installations inviting participants to walks with the heartbeats of various animals, to co-creative explorations of human-AI relationships through the medium of sourdough.
The festival is situated in the green and creature-rich environment of the Lapinlahti park in Helsinki (Finland) and offers a 12-hour long program of co-creative outdoor activities happening both during the day and at night. After dark, outdoor lights in the venue and the whole Lapinlahti surrounding will be switched off for a proper nocturnal experience. Events such as nocturnal walks, dérives (drifts), rowing trips with algae creatures, multispecies cabinets of curiosities, soil sensing workshops, open-air cinema, multispecies karaoke, and other experimental engagements are accessible for free, to humans and other-than humans from all walks of life (dogs & kids are especially welcome).
Participants are invited to spend the whole day and evening or attend only selected parts of the program. Most events run continuously throughout the entire festival duration, some have a timed schedule (no pre-registration is needed). The full program is available below.
The festival is organized as a collaboration of creative practitioners and researchers from Aalto University’s Department of Design (Nodus , Encore & Inuse research groups) and the Uroboros Collective.
Time & Place: September 16th 2023, 11am – 11pm at Lapinlahden Lähde outdoors green yard (Lapinlahdenpolku 8, 00180, Helsinki)
Festival curators: Markéta Dolejšová (marketa.dolejsova@aalto.fi) and Gloria Lauterbach (gloria.lauterbach@aalto.fi)
Full program: see festival website
