Friday 17 July
mustard seed stories
performance, collective playful rehearsal with mario framis pujol
remember the first time you tasted mustard? what is your favorite way of eating it?
mario framis pujol tends to the wild larder as ingredient curator for the forest kitchen – a being-with the land, currently planting seeds and mustering community through plants, animals and food in the hills of cataluña. come evening in Woods, he weaves the group into living stories around the fire, where every voice adds a thread.
Saturday 18 July
Sunrise Walk
Silent walk with Edith Jeřábková and Gediminas Venckus
Early morning walk focused on observing natural phenomena and local birds, mostly in silence and with attentive presence.
Edith Jeřábková is a curator of Woods – Community for Cultivation, Theory, and Art and the PLATO City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Ostrava. She lives here in Woods.
Gediminas Venckus studied cinematography at the Vilnius Academy of Music and Theatre and is currently working in visual arts, focusing mainly on woodworking. He also practices birdwatching.
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Why Grassland Socialities? Seen through the Lens of “Humans as a Keystone Species”
Lecture by Elisabeth Tauber
From place and land situated practices of Indigenous communities, we know: the question is not whether humans live on this planet, but how. Lyla June Johnston captures this principle precisely: "We did not follow the buffalo. They followed us." Through deliberate burning and grazing techniques, First Nations created and kept open grasslands — habitats in which a multitude of species could flourish. What does this mean for the European context?
Elisabeth Tauber is a cultural and social anthropologist whose research focuses on Romani communities in Europe as well as semi-natural grasslands. For several years now, her long-standing ethnographic research has found expression in ethnographic-ecological walks – a practice that brings anthropology into dialogue with neighbouring disciplines such as ecology and art.
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The Case of the Missing Herd
Collective investigation with the Pastvina group
A herd has gone missing, and all participants are invited to join the search—not only for the animals, but also for whoever or whatever is responsible for their disappearance. Through collective investigation, the presentation of evidence, and the making of arguments, we will trace not only the animals that keep the pasture from becoming overgrown with forest, but also the diverse relationships among the many communities that together constitute the larger society of the pasture. Avoiding frontal modes of knowledge transmission, we will learn through experience and engage in a shared sensory exploration of the pasture.
The Pastvina group is dedicated to mapping contemporary pastoralism in the Czech Republic and its neighbouring regions. The group consists of Alex Sihelsk*, anto_nie, Denisa Langrová, Edith Jeřábková, Kateřina Žák Konvalinová, and Ruta Putramentaitė.
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Spinning and Shepherd’s Notebook Creation
Workshop with Verpėjos – Laura Garbštienė, Ugnė Venckė and Milda Urbšytė
This workshop invites participants to create their own Shepherd's Notebook during the symposium. The process will include spinning thread from Verpėjos's sheep's wool using a spindle, sewing scrap paper sheets into a notebook, and creating a cover using the linocut technique.
(Special thanks to Hands on Press.)
Verpėjos will present a travelling library of Shepherds’ Notes at the symposium. Shepherds’ Notes are pocket guides and shared space for past and future shepherds, composed of fragments of experience and artistic insights from the world of sheep. It grew out of the Creative Pastures of the Spinners residency programme in Kabeliai, southern Lithuania (2022–2025), which is still ongoing.
Laura Garbštienė is an interdisciplinary artist and founder and curator of Verpėjos (the Spinners). Her work engages humorous institutional critique, ecological themes, and a critical approach to consumerism.
Ugnė Venckė works in the creative studio Less Table, developing feasting installations based on experience and knowledge of nature. She is also part of the Verpėjos team, where she contributes to curatorial work and leads workshops.
Milda Urbšytė focuses on rural landscapes and their transformation over time. Her practice includes drawing, painting, ceramics, and text, informed by contemporary anthropology and research methods.
Verpėjos curates an artist residency and gallery space in the Dzūkija region of Lithuania, focusing on rural traditions, ecological thinking, and cultural change. Artists develop their own research while taking turns as resident hosts, living on-site for a month at a time and shepherding a flock of Skudde sheep.
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Weaving on a Rigid Heddle Loom
Workshop with Michaela Hyklová
At the rigid heddle loom workshop, you will weave a decorative ribbon or belt from sheep’s wool and learn simple patterning techniques. Weaving on a rigid heddle loom is an ancient and straightforward craft that naturally calms the body and mind while awakening your creativity.
Michaela Hyklová was born in the Valašsko region and has always felt deeply connected to its landscape. She is dedicated to traditional crafts and offers courses, therapy, and shared creative experiences at Vlákna života (“Threads of Life”), a healing studio in Vsetín. She spent an extended period in France, which profoundly influenced her life. There, she met a woman who worked as a sheep shearer and who introduced her to sheep farming, cheesemaking, and the craft of sheep shearing.
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Collective Meadow Wool Tapestry
Wet felting workshop with anto_nie
anto_nie will introduce the basic technique of wet felting, through which a collective meadow artwork will emerge in the form of a wool tapestry. While working, we will become familiar with the story of wool – from the flock of sheep, through grazing, shearing, and washing, to the processed wool top. From the story of the Golden Fleece, we can learn a great deal about our relationship to land, animal husbandry, consumerism, tradition, and labour.
anto_nie is an artist, game designer, educator, facilitator, and member of the Pastvina group. Their work engages themes such as folklore, monstrosity, ecology, and herbalism. They work with narrative mechanics of role-playing games, 3D, game engines, immersive sound, and other methods of creating communal (non)physical spaces. They focus on miniature making and lead workshops and educational programmes.
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Wool Reels, a Collective Tapestry + “Felt Patches”
Dry felting workshop with Kateřina Žák Konvalinová
In this workshop, participants will first collectively create a large-scale tapestry using dry felting with a special felting needle. In the second part, each participant will be able to felt a small motif – a “felt patch” – onto a piece of clothing. You may bring your own garment or use items from the shared second-hand free shop. The workshop, along with the story of (not just) local wool, will be led by Kateřina Žák Konvalinová.
Kateřina Žák Konvalinová is an interdisciplinary artist and agroecologist. Her work focuses on sustainable and environmentally conscious artistic practice with an emphasis on local contexts. Together with theorist Tereza Špinková, she is developing an artistic-theoretical research publication on the story of local sheep’s wool.
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Sonic Walk with MCs Chiffchaff and Chaffinch
Workshop with Alex Sihelsk* and Denisa Langrová
Alex and Denisa will guide you into the depths of listening to the forest, the pasture, and their inhabitants, both real and speculative. Part of the walk will take place blindfolded, during which you will also learn about local legends and tips for recognizing bird calls.
Alex Sihelsk* is a multidisciplinary artist working with queer ecology and mythological narratives, the re-encounter and acceptance of monstrosity, relationships with landscapes and their inhabitants, as well as questions of identity. They are currently researching visions of solarpunk futures and are learning skills such as gardening and pastoralism.
Denisa Langrová focuses in her artistic practice on the intersections of human and non-human animal narratives. Through themes of friendship, storytelling, humour, utopia, and magic, she seeks ways to disrupt oppressive systems. In her film work, she often draws on direct experience of caring for both wild and domesticated animals.
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NORN
Sensory workshop – practice of wandering with Lise Hovesen – Nomadic Shepherd School
Caring for land is caring for people and caring for people is caring for land. We will join a shepherd on a sensory journey into our inner landscape. For this experience, Lise will bring objects from her herding work in Denmark and create a gentle and supportive space to ground and open our bodies in the land. Afterwards, we will sit together for an extended moment with a cup of herbal tea made with heather and other flowers.
Lise Hovesen is an artist and shepherdess working in close relation with the heathlands and fjord landscapes of western Jutland. Her daily practice of herding sheep in open landscapes contributes to the conservation of heathlands, the protection of cultural heritage, and the increase of biodiversity.
The Nomadic Shepherd School invites humans back into this landscape and trains a new generation of shepherds. Participants are invited to join the flock, practice presence, ground themselves in the land, and experience human–animal–plant symbiosis. Care for people and care for nature are inseparable in this relational practice of tending to one another, the land, plants, food, clothing, and comfort.
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Foraging Plants and Wool Dyeing
Workshop with Michaela Casková
Following the traces of the season, we gather wild herbs and plants from the surrounding landscape and transform them into natural dyes. Through foraging, colour extraction, and yarn dyeing, the workshop explores the intimate relationship between place, material, and making, revealing the hidden palette of the local environment.
Michaela Casková’s artistic practice explores art as a process rooted in the forest as collaborator, where walking, observing, and foraging shape the work. Using weather phenomena as both material and metaphor, she combines seasonal foraging, material experimentation, and sensory observation to create infusions, textiles, pigments, and educational tools.
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Arranging Didukhs, Spirits of the Ancestors
Workshop with Darja Lukjanenko using gathered wild and cultivated herbs
In Ukrainian tradition, a decorated sheaf of grain, wild herbs, and ribbons called Didukh is prepared during the harvest and displayed at Christmas as a tree of life and a vessel for ancestral presence. Its grains, preserved through the winter, are sown again in spring, making the Didukh part of a year-long cycle of renewal.
Darja Lukjanenko is an interdisciplinary artist working across text, performance, and gardening. Her practice explores the postcolonial condition with a focus on Ukraine, alongside themes of migration, identity, and collective memory.
Sunday 19 July
Becoming Fish, Becoming Ocean
Somatic exercise workshop with Barbara Gamper and the Children’s Forest Group
Barbara Gamper will reactivate a textile fish—over 20 meters long—created by Eva Koťátková during her residency with BAU in 2025 as part of the Pastoral Twilight project. Barbara will guide the participants through exercises attuned to the breathing of more-than-human beings. Taking the fish as a point of departure, the workshop will unfold into a collective exploration of how organs such as the heart and lungs pulse, expand, and contract in their own rhythms, inviting participants to inhabit these movements through small, shared choreographies.
Barbara Gamper is an Italian interdisciplinary artist from South Tyrol based in Berlin, working across movement, somatics, performance, moving image, audio storytelling, and textiles. Her research centers on the politics of embodiment, seeking to advocate for decolonial and queer feminist thinking and practices through somatic movement workshop formats in art, education, and activism.
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Designing and Making with Wool (and Sheep) of the Italian Alps
Lecture by Merve Bektaş
Exploring local wool as a vibrant matter through designing and making practices involving sheep, humans, mountains, technologies, and the more-than-human world, while attending to their plural ways of coming together.
This lecture invites an encounter with the sheep of the Italian Alps through storytelling and a sensory meditation practice. It presents the artistic and design research processes, tools, ethnographic fieldwork, material experiments, and newly emerging insights unfolding through the transdisciplinary Feral Wool and WOLB Wollelab projects within iNEST at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (2023–2025).
Merve Bektaş is a transdisciplinary designer, artist, and independent researcher based in the Italian Alps. Her practice and research unfold at the intersection of eco-social design, art, and culture, engaging relational, critical, and multispecies approaches.
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Pasture and Meadow Communities
Lecture and workshop with Barbora Lungová
The lecture part will focus on diverse grass communities which have developed thanks to different modes of pasture. The workshop part will consist of botanical observation of a section or transect of a meadow and/or pasture and will culminate in a concluding discussion.
How are meadows different from pastures? Which grazing animals are suitable for which purposes? What were some of the local historical modes of pasture? What are its contemporary forms and what problems can they bring? Is pasture always ideal for the management of endangered grass communities and species associated with them?
After a brief introduction to these issues, we will try to identify, compare, and describe different parts of a pasture/meadow.
Note: We will be using the PlantNet app, so you can download it to your phone in advance.
Barbora Lungová is an artist interested in plants, an amateur botanist, and a conservationist who enjoys learning from professionals in these fields.