Various cycling routes based on legends and folktales
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Dasha Ilina’s video work Advice Well Taken: Folk Tales of Digital Savation uses the ‘techlore’ concept to find out what ‘urban legends’ are in the age of smartphones. You can watch the ‘director’s cut’ of the video installation here. You can also have a look at a selection of the catalogue here. The 2023 Impakt Festival information about the installation can be found here. The essay was commissioned by Dasha Iina for the catalogue that came out in November 2023 during the Impakt Festival in Utrecht, where the video installation premiered. Read the ‘cookie conversation’ with the artist here, conducted by the Impakt Festival.
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At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
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