I spent last week at @joya_air doing some more material research with esparto grass. A plant specially relevant in the context of arid ecosystems. Being in Joya has allowed me to approach my creative process with a renewed sense of curiosity, I will develop my work further and hopefully will show some outcomes soon!
Fieldwork Fictioning uses design to explore how humans can perceive the relational intelligence that exists within biodiversity. It proposes an individual and intimate “situated speculation”: creative acts that remain grounded in ecological realities yet are individually felt, imagined, and understood.
Fieldwork Fictioning is also a tool for activating tacit knowledge; the kind that lives in the body, in imagination, in presence. Knowledge without embodiment cannot become wisdom.
As Vandana Shiva reminds us, “The monoculture of the mind is blind to biodiversity; it looks at the world through uniformity.” What we need, perhaps, is to train a “biodiversity of the mind”, and design can help cultivate it by training our attention toward relation, complexity, and care.
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This project was developed thanks to @ecosystemalliance and funded by LVMH MAISON/0. Thanks to @kilchoantrust for opening their space and sharing their knowledge and passion about biodiversity restoration.
Sharing some process while still developing my final output for Ecosystem Alliance. The past month we spent 10 days at Kilchoan Melfort Trust, diving into the place and activating new ways of understanding biodiversity restoration. How can design restore attention to ecological relations? How can we map the entanglements that ecological science measures? How can we create a new cultural space for these intangible flows? I realized the complexity of biodiversity restoration in place but also in the relationships it is sustained by, it is urgent that we understand-or just sit with-this complexity, not trying to conquer, but observing.
As part of my research on biocultural regeneration, I am spending a week in Scotland with Ecosystem Alliance doing fieldwork research amongst other things. You may read about the Alliance here ⬇️.
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The Ecosystem Alliance addresses biodiversity restoration by bringing ecologists and designers together.
We focus on place-based collaboration, whether online or onsite, aiming to produce new knowledge,
develop new methods.
Biodiversity loss and ecosystem recovery demand approaches that extend beyond ecology. Yet, true
interdisciplinarity is often hindered by differing terminologies, conceptual models, and expectations of
outcomes. This research explores what happens when disciplines meet, why collective work matters, and how
collaboration can reshape our practices. Biodiversity restoration is not a challenge with a single solution. It
requires tools for navigating the specific conditions of place and species while cultivating deeper alliances
that foster imagination and novelty. By bringing ecologists and designers together, we are building an intra-
local, interdisciplinary activation that generates new methods and perspectives.
15 Speculative Spoons is a tactile provocation that invites us to question current food systems and to reflect upon our complicity in the actual ecological crisis. These 15 spoons are woven from esparto grass (Stipa tenacissima), an endemic plant of Mediterranean drylands. The number 15 refers to Goal 15 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals—Life on Land—which focuses on halting desertification and restoring degraded ecosystems. Each spoon is a gesture toward reconnecting with the wisdom of local species, inviting us to see arid landscapes not as empty or exhausted, but as rich, resilient territories with regenerative potential.
