With the format of the Inventive Expeditions, people from civil society, science and art are invited to embark on small independent expeditions into their supposedly familiar environment and to experience it with a new, curious, roving – focused perception. In doing so, they take with them “in the back of their minds” the questions of climate catastrophe, species extinction, biodiversity, and – as a focal point – what trees and woody plants have to say about it.
This direct, physical-movement-oriented format is intended – in keeping with Alexander von Humboldt-, i.e. co-creative, work on strategies and designs for the future of city districts as living spaces.
In this way, the approach makes use of the insight, which has been dealt with for a long, long time, especially in philosophy, sociology and literature, that walking as a rhythmic movement can promote intuitive insight, cognition, empathy, transformation and ideas.
A cultural laboratory of the future, located in the tree nursery district in Berlin Treptow in collaboration with the Späth Arboretum begins with these expeditions.
The coronavirus prevented the process, which was conceived in this way. Instead, the first step was a digitally formulated invitation to physically carry out the expeditions in real life and to record and communicate the experiences textually and possibly in sketches. A difficult undertaking to translate a profoundly immediate physical approach. But it succeeded and had some advantages of its own.
60 participants made the expeditions in very different parts of Germany and in different countries and reported on them.