The Assembly of the River Mustjõe
2024
In collaboration with Siiri Hänninen and Ella Prokkola
Photos: Siiri Hänninen
“As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action, they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds. (--) Can I show landscape as a protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?”
-Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
The Assembly of the River Mustjõe – Connecting with more-than-human agencies as a designer is a one week workshop in Estonian Art Academy researching the river Mustjõe in Tallinn 3.–9.6.2024. The workshop examines our relation to the more-than-human world by acknowledging many commons such as the atmosphere, clean water or healthy soil as products of more-than-human processes. Can we identify and pay better attention to those who produce the living world that sustains us? The workshop is based on research questions, which are both general and site-specific: How to better connect with more-than-human agencies as a designer? Who and what are the materialities, actors, and co-habitants that together create the assemblage of a site? How to make these actors (human and non-human) as well as their ways of inhabiting and shaping the urban landscape visible?
The workshop builds around the act of identifying, mapping and representing the more-than-human stakeholders of Mustjõe creek. In this process we are exploring their relations and roles in the production of shared living world. This work will consist of fieldwork around the site, where we’ll be examining the processes and spatial negotiations between human-modified areas and non-human species. The workshop process will eventually lead to the construction of an assembly installation, which makes visible the non-human actors of the river Mustjõe. The installation will include the found actors and artistic production examining actors’ relation to the site. The main activities cover theory sessions and discussions, fieldwork, object gathering and writing exercises. The participants gain knowledge on the emerging topics of more-than-human cohabitation and design in a multispecies world.
Participants will gain an understanding on
Non-anthropocentric design - how to better connect with more-than-human agencies as a designer.
An introduction to more-than-human thinking and its applications in spatial arts.
Building the assembly as a method to notice non-human agencies and practise multispecies storytelling.
