Slow Looking: A pedagogical gateway in the development of student creative articulation
Niall O'Hare, Belfast School of Architecture, Northern Ireland
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

Students who struggle with reflective practices grab and grasp at information for fast, immediate data accumulation and struggle with instigating and maintaining reasoning within their design process. This presentation seeks to awaken in students the traits of slowness to inform their personal development and academic discernment. Providing students with observation training, a deeper articulation of attention, demonstrates greater verbal and illustrated subjective articulation. Situated slowness may provide students with tools for inquiry which become more discerning, nuanced, and descriptive. Slowness as a learning attribute does not impede the breadth of learning; rather, it evokes the substance of creativity and ingenuity.

Experiencing Connectedness to Nature through Attending to Strangeness
Thor Magnus Tangerås, Kristiania University College, Norway
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

An important aspect of situatedness is our interconnectedness with the natural environment (e.g. Chemero, 2009). Many environmental psychologists assert that a person’s relationship with nature is a key antecedent of ecological values, beliefs and actions. Connectedness to Nature is a construct that has been operationalised in order to “measure individuals’ experiential sense of oneness with the natural world.” (Mayer et al 2004, 504). Studies provide evidence of a “strong positive relationship between the Connectedness to Nature Scale and eco-friendly actions” (2004, 512). Yang et al have found that experiences of awe can increase connectedness to nature (2018). How can poetry help us to acknowledge the loss of nature and biodiversity? This presentation proposes three different strategies of strange-making based on my current poetic project, which thematizes the potential conflict between climate concerns and preserving the natural environment. An explicit aspect of this is Wind Power: to what extent should we sacrifice wild nature in creating renewable energy? The central motif of my project is the wind turbine. One experiential approach is what I term ‘lyrical vandalism’: translating romantic lyrical poems by e.g. Goethe and Shelley into Norwegian, and subsequently ‘damaging’ them by replacing nature-words with words related to wind-turbine technology. The second strategy is by way of metaphor and hyperbole: e.g. representing the wind-turbine as a giant insect or plant. The third strategy is irony and satire: e.g. looking at the wind turbine as a musical instrument, a modern aeolian harp. The 20 min. presentation will provide concrete examples of these strategies in specific poems, and discuss how they may create and sustain attention to our ways of experiencing nature through processes of defamiliarization.

Sensory methods towards more-than-human placemaking
Zsófia Szonja Illés, Moholy-Nagy University of Design, Hungary
Breakout Session 2: Thursday 11 May 09:30 – 11:30

Join a talk on sensory methods in the context of more-than-human placemaking (see the above video) followed by a sensory walk in Évora. The talk will reflect on what different kinds of arts- and design-based sensory methods (e.g., sensory walks, sensory ethnography, and sensory installation art) can do in relation to global challenges such as climate change. The talk will work with the term ‘creative practice’ as research that involves participants and respondents in imagining, making, and telling as a set of interrelated practices. It will consider how these might encourage and enable a different kind of place-based and sensory engagement, collaboration, collaborative learning, and understanding around environmental issues, and how such methods might help designers to communicate complex, layered, entangled environmental and land use issues. Participants will be invited to join a sensory walk in Évora to test out the method in the local context.

RECONNECT A MIND-BODY EXPERIENCE
Roberta Alessandrini, IED – Istituto Europeo di Design, Italy
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

This talk will give you some hints and a historical overview of the research of several authors. Taking advantage of the stunning landscape of Évora, this outdoor experience will be based on a mind-body approach: listening, grounding, moving, drawing, telling and guessing stories, and a guided meditation to feel the state of connection with the surrounding nature, with our inner selves, with our creative power, with our neighbours. Are you ready to switch off and experiment? Unleash your creative power by reconnecting. Willis Harman and Howard Rheingold made an interesting example in their popular work Higher Creativity by explaining how the majority believes that some genius artists such as Brahms and Beethoven were ‘inspired by their nature’. As a lecturer, Alessandrini believes that the real initial phase of the creative process is the most crucial and the most difficult one.

Fitness for Unlikely Species
Andrea Palasti, Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
Breakout Session 4: Thursday 11 May 15:00 – 17:00

Have you ever wondered how it is to ruffle because of a light breeze, or to withdraw with the low tide? How to dance as wrigglers, or to burrow yourself as a clam? ‘Fitness for Unlikely Species’ is an attempt to challenge humans to channel their bodily experience through physical movement while rethinking fitness practices as connected to the environmental concept of entanglement by mimicking more-than-human worlds. By using the practice of mimicry, these shape-shifting somatic exercises can be regarded as relational tools for finding new ways of learning, understanding, connecting, and moving between worlds. ‘Fitness for Unlikely Species’ was first delivered with and for the students of the Academy of Art Novi Sad within the subject Elements of Visual Art, and for the students from the department of Art & Science at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, within the workshop ‘Liquid Tools for River Fiction’. The exercises were primarily developed as ‘empathy exercises’ and as a warm-up strategy for the students before working with/in and around the Danube. Experience these methods for yourself!

This is not a silent spring
Rita Carvalho, Inês Marques, Lusófona University, Portugal
Breakout Session 5: Friday 12 May 10:00 – 11:30

Departing from the observation and discussion of the 16th-century frescoes depicting birds at Casas Pintadas, we invite you to take a walk while listening to the songs of diverse species of birds, following a route in the outskirts of Évora. Using the audio recorder of their mobile phones, participants will record bird sounds they hear along the way. Participants are then invited to imitate some of these sounds and translate them into their own written language. This moment will be followed by the construction of an onomatopoeic object (interpretation of these sounds) using natural found materials. These new words, made with three-dimensional letters, are a human way of speaking avian language. At the end of the workshop these objects will be placed in nature as a humble homage to the birds, challenging the menace of a silent spring (Carson, 1962).