Podcast - Foresta Collective

In this episode we are meeting Xavi Luján, one of the founders of the initiative l’Alter de Vorasenda in the north of Valencia - an association for regenerative farming and a space for seeding and cultivating communities.

In this episode we are walking around a forest garden in Eastern France: "Une Figue dans le Poirier" - a space that is bringing ethical gardening, arts and pedagogy together - and speaking with its co-conceiver, designer, sculptor and blacksmith Lilian Didier.

In this episode we are visiting Wouter van Eck, a co-grower of the food forest Ketelbroek and one of the visionary pioneers of the food forest movement in the Netherlands.

In this episode we are visiting a food forest in Galicia, and talking to Jaime Otero Páramo, the founder of Proyecto Dispersor, dedicated to cultivating and spreading knowledge about regenerative agroforestry.

This month, exploring the subject of HORIZONS, we are offering you excerpts from conversations and practice recorded during our online dojo session on Nov 17th. Our guests contributors in this dojo were Aljaž Škrlep and Vida Rucli from the Robida Collective. We also want to thank all the Dojo participants for joining that session and letting us share your voices: Cindy Rinne, Ginelle Hustrulid, Jakob Köchert, Paula Bushkevica, Silvia Sfligiotti, Teresa Frausin, and Yvonne Kaiser. And also thank you to those participants who were part of this session but preferred to stay anonymous.

In October we contemplate wild geese forming skeins to leave the northern lands, and meditate on the subject of farewells. Potentially Life and Death are more than friends. They are mutual processes of being. Where the spiritual and the material are not separated, there is also no antagonistic separation between forces of beginnings and endings.

To contribute to this months podcast, we invited a transdisciplinary artist, educator and gardener Shelley Etkin, for a conversation around processes of decay and decomposition in the natural world,...

Steve Portugal, a comparative ecophysiologist, whose research deepens into sensory ecology and behaviour of birds, to introduce a western scientific view into the intricacies of the bird's practice of migration.

...and sandhill cranes, wild geese, ducks, woodpeckers, frogs and other voices of creatures that can be heard on an early morning on Madora Lake. The soundspace has been recorded by Tim Kahn from Portland.

Rhizome is a subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. It is also carrying multiple cultural and philosophical meanings, and we want to acknowledge the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in our thinking about rhizomes. However we are not interested in a purely philosophical discourse, we are rather interesting in thinking how learning from rhizome can we find new ways for being together differently.

Rhizome offers us to think of poetics of interconnectedness, of a structure without a center, of a fundamental openness to new connections, respecting multiplicity, heterogeneity, and a process that is defined by the ability to form symbiotic connections. We relate to an incompleteness and complexities of the rhizome metaphor and of learning from and with plants in general.

Play. That quality of connectedness and flow, imagination and capacity for joy. In play we are free to speak, to make, to be in ways where the intuitive flow takes over.

We invited Pied butcherbird, Claire Edwardes, Hollis Taylor and Jon Rose who make interspecies music together, a theatre practitioner at Fool Size Theatre Joanne Tremarco, and an improvisational musician Stephen Nachmanovitch, - to explore PLAY with us this month.