Niin Metsä Vastaa: The Forest Answers

• Quick look

  ✹ Project: Design and facilitation of a new workshop method for language co-creation, imagining new language for more reciprocal human-forest relationships in Finland

  ✦ Methods: Collective imagination, language co-creation

  ✦ Funder: Collective Imagination Practice Community

  ✦ Collaborators: Iines Reinikainen and Zeynep Falay von Flittner (through the Falay Collective)

  ✦ Year: 2024 - ongoing

• About the project

  • How does the language we use impact how can we imagine our relationship with nature?

  • How can we design new words that can make invisible collective experiences visible?

  • What kind of forest heritage are we curating for the next generations?

  Niin Metsä Vastaa (As the Forest Answers) takes a fresh look at how Finns connect with forests. By exploring the language we use, it taps into the rich variety of forest relationships that often get overlooked. The project aims to co-create new words and expressions that can help shape a more sustainable connection with forests in the future. Working with different groups in Finnish society, Niin Metsä Vastaa seeks to build a creative dictionary that captures our evolving relationship with nature and the need for a regenerative approach.

• Process

  During the first working period for the project, funded by CIPC, we created a prototype approach for co-creating intentional language to inspect and shape our relationships with nature.

  This workshop was then piloted online with the CIPC community, and in-person at Puistokatu 4 in Helsinki.