Working artistically

In our research fields, we have employed different artistic methods in working with participants as well as in our own research practice. Our methods have varied according to, for example, the age and type of the groups (of humans) and situations with which we have been working.

We follow Charles Garoian (2012) in thinking that artistic activity has its own logic, in which essential is to explore, experiment, and improvise, and which is processual and enlarging beyond itself, opening temporal, narrative, and affective connections. We do not see artistic practice merely as a means to represent the world but as a provocator and force that has potential to activate new kinds of thinking, movement, and ways of experiencing, and to produce new subjectivities (see for example Bolt, 2004; Kontturi, 2018). We pay more attention to what “art can do” than to what art signifies or refers to.

We think it is also important to keep in mind that artistic practice is not always “useful” or necessarily produces knowledge that is easy to analyse or verbalise. Ambiguity and futility also are part of artistic practice (Varto, 2018) - experiments ending up in dead-ends, as well as running idle and wrong turns.

In the frame of our research, we have worked on learning how to attune with and delve in multispecies relations through artistic practice while diminishing the impact of human exceptionalism and the hierarchical categorisations typical of our culture. For example, we have made experiments in walking methodology, utilising protocol methods familiar from walking art (Ylirisku ym., 2024). In our workshop series at the Natural History Museum we combined natural scientific knowledge with art-based practices – for example with exercises of drawing from observation and writing poems. In urban environments we have been moving with a mobile NatureCulture Research Station, which has served as an open place for encounters in public spaces and events. At the NatureCulture Research Station we have offered people a possibility to try multispecies storytelling.

In this research, it has been typical of the artistic exercises done with the participants that working with materials and the affective, sensuous knowledge activated through it gather together. For example, in the multispecies storytelling exercises carried out at the NatureCulture Research Station, different everyday objects have served as stimuli: small toys, plasticine, stones, pieces of plastic trash, dying parts of plants and pieces of tools. Moving with a chosen object in the surrounding area and paying attention to the relations between species and materials often gave birth to stories in which memories, the observed, and the imagined combined in surprising ways.

Playful, experimenting orientation that encourages to imagine and speculate has been typical of our artistic practice. Instead of finished artistic results we have encouraged different kinds of experimenting and following directions that emerge in the process. By cultivating humour, carnevalisation and even wild ideas, we have aimed at creating space for making and thinking that could slip away from the stranglehold of the thought pursuing logic, rationality, linearity, predictability, and controlling situations. For example at the Natural History Museum, in the miniature future dioramas made by the young people participating in the research, the ingredients, partly randomly chosen from the material buffet, started to combine and transform in their experiments. In one of the dioramas, smashed parts of a broken printer, sand, plastic foil, miniature animals, and plastic decorative plants, together with playful jokes and ideas, transformed into a shore in some distant future where animals, randomly ended up at the same place, tried to escape the post-apocalyptic world.

This kind of artistic practice is fuelled by what if questions. It is process-oriented by character, like prototype thinking (Heikkinen, Kaverma & Ziegler, 2017), which continuously opens new possibilities to experiment and perceive otherwise.