Stories Saari Residence 12.02.2025 Saari Residence – beyond sustainability Stories Saari Residence 12.02.2025 Saari Residence – beyond sustainability Who are the nonhuman residents of Saari Manor? Who are permanent inhabitants, who are only visitors? How has biocultural heritage and more-than-human co-creation shaped the landscape of Mietoinen? Beyond Sustainability 2.0 is a landscape architectural research project dedicated to noticing and making visible the living beings, more-than-human processes and choreographies of care composing the landscape around Saari Residence in Mietoinen Bay. Share: The evolving paradigms of posthumanist philosophy and multispecies thinking ask us to reorient our position in relation to the rest of the living world. Instead of being merely scenic views and passive backgrounds for human action, landscapes are themselves active. They are shaped by dynamic more-than-human processes, composed of myriad actors, lives and lifeways, which often remain unnoticed or invisible. These interdependencies and entanglements between humans and the rest of the living world are at the heart of Beyond Sustainability 2.0, a research project conducted in collaboration between Aalto University’s Landscape Architecture Research Group and Saari Residence. The project spans from 2022 to 2026 and aims to develop new ways of communicating about the temporal and multispecies layers of the landscape, while fostering a regenerative relationship with the living world. Saari Manor, serving as the case study site, has an exceptionally rich cultural-historical heritage, shaped by the long history of human influence on landscape formation and the species it hosts. This makes the area an ideal platform for studying and representing the complex interactions between human and more-than-human actors, such as animal and plant species living in the landscape, across different eras. To explore these interactions, the project adopts concepts drawn from biocultural and multispecies approaches, studying the agency of plants, animals and humans as co-creators of the living environment. These approaches will be discussed in more detail in the following sections, accompanied by graphics/images that showcase some perspectives on the diverse actors and interactions within the Saari landscape. The project aims to challenge our conventional ways of perceiving landscapes by offering insights into processes that extend beyond human time and scale. It encourages us to broaden our attention to the temporal layers and multispecies assemblages present at Saari Manor. By recognizing ourselves to become part of the landscape and its diverse network of actors, we create space to strengthen and reshape our relationship with the rest of the living world. Landscapes as living compositions Living landscapes can be thought of as everyday performances, events, happenings, ongoing polyphonic spectacles we have forgotten to pay attention to. And besides paying attention, forgotten that we ourselves are all performers, dancers and players in the spectacle. We are no longer spectators in front of a landscape, but rather actors among other actors, bodies among other bodies. According to several scholars, we need to learn to see the landscape as animated and inhabited, and notice the ways in which non-humans, plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms modify landscapes and make liveable worlds. Applying Anna L. Tsing’s concept of landscapes as polyphonic assemblages, as shifting gatherings of different non-human bodies and materialities guides attention to the non-human lives and the ways they come together in the landscape. Practicing what Tsing calls the “arts of noticing”, the attentiveness to non-human presences agencies, helps to see the landscape as inhabited, as coproductions of human and non-human ways of living. In the era of the ecological crisis, the grand task of society is to learn to see landscapes as spaces of cohabitation, populated by a myriad of ways of being alive. Architectural graphics as a visualization tool have the potential to reveal hidden entanglements of the landscape and make visible more-than-human ways of making worlds. Architectural drawing and cartography can serve as devices to communicate multispecies narratives and biocultural heritage. In this research project, these devices are developed and experimented with to create new possible visualisations about the living world. Biocultural Heritage: Revealing the Deep Entanglements In Western societies, the discourse surrounding humans and nature tends to be polarized. Humans and nature, culture and nature, human and non-human, or the unnatural and natural form a culturally constructed division that has shaped our understanding and valuation of the world. This prevailing dualistic thinking makes it difficult to perceive a reality where culture and nature—or wilderness—form an inseparable network of interactions and dependencies, a reality where this defining division does not exist, and they are instead parts of one and the same realm. This interconnected world is evident in landscapes which are not only or purely natural nor cultural but create a continuum of countless different compositions of human and more-than-human relations. One way to unfold and understand these entanglements in landscapes is to adopt concepts that recognize their human and more-than-human features and relations as a biocultural whole. One of such concepts is biocultural heritage, also known as biological cultural heritage. According to various scholars and institutions that have framed the concept after the turn of the millennium, biocultural heritage approaches natural and cultural heritage in landscapes as an intertwined whole. It is heritage that has resulted from diverse forms of interactions where human livelihoods and ways of living together with more-than-human actors and processes have formed a mutually sustaining relationship for decades, centuries or even millennia.In her research, Elisabeth Sjödahl writes about how the landscape encompasses much more than the perceived visual elements, incorporating both spatial and temporal depth. The same applies to biocultural heritage, which evolves constantly over time and space, alongside the changing dynamics of cultural and natural phenomena. Understanding biocultural heritage and the complex relationships between human and more-than-human actions requires exploring the landscape in greater depth, both temporally and spatially, to uncover its hidden layers. Connecting Past Phases to Present Multispecies InteractionsThe concept of biocultural heritage recognizes the landscape of Saari Manor as a rich, living, changing, and multilayered heritage shaped through the collaboration and interaction of both human and more-than-human actors. By offering insights into the events and processes that have shaped the current landscape, biocultural heritage helps us better understand how present multispecies compositions have formed. Moreover, biocultural heritage provides crucial information and perspectives for the future, encouraging us to align cultural actions and landscape management practices with the existing multispecies interactions within the landscape. In the case of Saari Manor, the biocultural heritage of the surrounding landscape is explored by constructing a temporal series of images, including map diagrams and sectional images. Map diagrams illustrate flows and movements of areas, revealing the overlapping, as well as hidden or imperceptible layers and locations of biocultural heritage. Sectional images, two of them presented here, are used as a means of representing and understanding the interdependencies incorporated in the landscape and its biocultural heritage. They illustrate the dependencies between natural processes, more-than-human entities and landscape management. The aim of the image series is to achieve a deeper understanding of the temporalities within the landscape of Saari Manor, as well as the interactions and phenomena that have shaped the development of biocultural heritage over time. Workbook as a guide to the landscape A work titled ”Notations. Saari Residence Landscape Workbook” has been published as part of the project. The workbook is a collection of illustrations, drawings, maps and texts, serving as a local guide to the landscape for residents and visitors. In the workbook, landscape is considered as a constantly moving, transforming, regenerating entity, a continuously unravelling dynamic process composed by many lives, lifeways, parts, actors and choreographies. Building on the work of thinkers developing post-anthropocentric language, the workbook examines the landscape of Saari Residency revealing the myriad actors cohabiting, composing, and shaping the landscape. The workbook responds to what Baptiste Morizot calls ”the crisis of sensibility”, the lack of different types of relations we are able to imagine and create with the living world and non-human beings. For Morizot, the ecological crisis, besides being both a crisis of human societies and other species and their living environments, is essentially a crisis of relations between humans and the living world. According to Morizot, the crisis of sensibility manifests itself in several forms, such as the lack of living beings in our culture, our inability to name or recognize species that cohabit with us and denying counting non-humans as subjects of societal and political attention. The purpose of the workbook is to increase the skills of reading the landscape among residents and visitors, and to gain sensibility and awareness of the more-than-human residents of Saari Manor and the rhythms of the living world. The drawings synthesize and communicate information about the local ecology and biocultural heritage, encouraging residents and visitors to attune to the processes and the species shaping the landscape. The workbook realizes the goals of the Beyond Sustainability 2.0 research project by creating and offering tools to practice ecoliteracy and to foster new connections between humans and the rest of the living world in Saari Residence and beyond. Sources Aït-Touati, F. (2024) Théâtres du monde. Fabriques de la nature en Occident. La DécouverteAït-Touati, F. & Latour, B. (2022) Trilogie Terrestre. Éditions B42. Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A., & Grégoire, A. (2019). Terra Forma: Manuelle des cartographies potentielles. Éditions B42. Bracke, B., Bonin, S., Notteboom, B., & Leinfelder, H. (2022). A multispecies design approach in the Eure valley: Three lessons from a design studio in landscape architecture. 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