The scale of human impact has been so profound that talking about pristine and untouched nature is more of a romantic and colonial vision of the savage than a meaningful abstraction. On the other hand, we tend to forget that our own bodies - flesh and bones - are not less natural than they’ve been millenias back. The natural and the artificial are intertwined like the rhizome of the moss that covers the walls of our houses and the barks of the park trees.

An Open Urban Forest at ssesi.space is a six month research project that aims to explore how the human and more than human work around each other. We will specifically examine that in a context of nature-reclaimed communal garden on the steep hills of Svratka river in Brno, Czech Republic. The research seeks to pave path for a meaningful communication and co-habitation of various agents that occupy and utilise this specific space. This bourgeoning forest is being shaped by multitude of human initiated contexts such as the traffic infrastructure extension, drought and municipal urban planing, while at the same time is becoming increasingly feral. Throughout the upcoming months, a guests experts from fields of architecture, forestry, visual arts, field recording and performance will visit the forest and conduct their research. Our guests are invited to observe, analyse, abstract and speculate meanings and datasets that the forest conveys to them or to which they happen to incline. Equipped with their unique tools, knowledges and viewpoints we hope to jointly shape an inter-subjective representation of the forest that would reflect its stacked and multifocal nature. We hope that by doing so, we can set an inviting and supportive base for the interspecies dialogue and to reinforce the dynamics that would make the space open, urban, and forest.

The project is supported and co-organised by CREATURES - Creative Practices for Transformational Futures.