Island Dwelling along the Franciscan Trail: Attending to Sea-Land Knowledge through Theo-Artistic Interventions.

Explorations of medieval travelling narratives through polysemous reading practices and experimenting with theo-artistic interventions brought the transdisciplinary research methods used in the Praxis of Social Imaginaries project to a new field of exploration. When the previous project had a focus on listening to and bringing forth minority voices and silenced histories from the encounters European merchants, missionaries and soldiers had with for-them-unknown people and lands, our attention now turns to human relations in Creation.

By following the path of historic Franciscan brothers sailing across the Baltic Sea, and reading texts by medieval authors within the traditions of Franciscan spirituality, we ask if there is something that can be gained from the past that supports the engagement with local sea-land knowledge today to support sustainable island dwelling for the future?

Symmary

This project addresses urgent environmental challenges—such as biodiversity loss—by establishing a sustainable and innovative platform for transdisciplinary (TD) research and collaboration. Through a series of TD symposia, we convene a nomadic community of students, researchers, artists, activists, and local knowledge holders to co-develop and test TD skills, tools, and practices.

We boldly propose that engaging with non-dominant epistemologies—ways of knowing, sensing, and being—can foster anti-colonial TD collaboration and support the transformation of siloed knowledge production. Our aim is to create inclusive learning communities where site-specific and ancestral knowledges, folklore, and myths intersect with dominant sustainability science, generating new insights and approaches.

A key innovation is our use of polysemous reading practices, which draw on experimenting with artistic research practices while engaging with historical documents from the Åland Islands and the Archipelago Sea region. These practices allow for multiple interpretations and relational engagements with place. Within the symposia, we develop theo-artistic interventions—creative, embodied methods that reconnect participants with their sense of creatureliness and promote care for the lands and seas we inhabit.

The symposia serve as experimental sites, spaces of investigation and as an ethnographic field for research, enabling iterative refinement of TD tools and skills. They also catalyse collaborations between artists and researchers, resulting in new theo-artistic works that are shared with local communities through performances and dialogue sessions.

Finally, the project will pilot an Almanack of Transdisciplinary Gnoseology—a living archive of plural ways of knowing—to support future TD initiatives and knowledge integration.

Praxis of Social Imaginaries – a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Knowledge

This project was piloted in collaboration with the Nordic Summer University study circle The Praxis of Social Imaginaries. Cosmologies, Othering and Liminality, which Hellsten co-hosts together with historian and dance researcher Lindsey Drury (PhD, Freie Universität Berlin/ University of Kent) from 2023 to August 2025. After the summer 2024, the project gained a starting grant from the Polin Institute and was able to fund both research and artistic work that is described here.