Comics artist, illustrator, community artist Hukkanen Sanna ja työryhmä (ZORAS, a fluctuating collective )

Rooting Hope: Artists and activists explore ways to build hope, as the root system for social and ecological change

ZORAS collective explores interconnectedness between practices of individual artists and activists as a catalyst for change. We exchange our interviews with activists and share sketches (audio, text, image) to research how this can become a method of dialogue. We want to take time to deeply understand how sharing our practice in proximity to each other can connect artists and activists in the way we build social and ecological change. What role do listening, openness to vulnerability, sharing unfinished fragments of texts and sound recordings, sketches and thoughts play in envisioning change? How to move beyond the binaries of hope/lessness, in/action to develop a complex, multiple and collective practice? We want to research in an embodied, sensuous way, what reciprocity means in the doing. What is the difference between reaction and response? There is so much to react to or intervene in. To be response-able we need to learn to engage with our environment in the form of a profound dialogue, based on respect and curiosity. During the residency we aim to exchange practices, learn from each other's skills and create an archive of material. This archive will be the container, or ‘carrier bag’ for reflections and documentation of our process. The result will be a joint publication, exhibition and/or sound installation, enabling us to share what we have learnt. We set our dialogue in motion via online meetings and plan to meet in the summer of 2021 to exchange sketches and engage with our interviews. The timetable for the residency consists of four cycles/weeks, that are described in detail in the work plan. Our plans revolve around workshops, skill-sharing, and sensory-experimentations with the environment. Finland is a country with a strong tradition of animistic relationships to the land. We want to explore how being together in the Saari Manor environment, which is as much an actor in the process as we are, could spark transformations.