‘Design for more-than-human futures is an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by an ethics of more-than-human coexistence that breaks with the unsustainability installed in the designs that outfit our lives’ (Tironi et al., 2024, p. 2). The transformative times we live in require more radical approaches to design that can enable the exploration of alternative ways of life. As Tironi et al., (2024, p. 2) posits, ‘design cannot be a mere spectator, nor can it continue to replicate clientelist and instrumentalist strategies for relating to the world’ by ‘rethinking our anthropocentric inheritance’. Humans should reflect on their transformative capacities, turning their detrimental impact into working with nature and enabling the agency for MTHs.

Artistic co-authorship with communities, past and present artists, or MTHs contributes to plural design by providing new views and ways to create authorship in a post-humanist society (Bacharach and Tollefsen, 2015). Natural resources can contribute to designing a more inclusive society that strives for activism and more political agendas. Nature is increasingly recognised as an author in scientific publications, such as Martuwarra RiverOfLife (Pelizzon et al., 2021) and Wann Country (Foster et al., 2020). Similarly, co-authorship with nature through the arts can create radically new ways of investigating ethical and copyright questions by offering alternate views, but more research is needed. Hick (2014) studied co-authorship and multiple authorship in artistic practice, but the role of plants, animals, and other non-human entities remains underexplored and warrants further investigation.

Mitchell (2010, p. 11) defines bioart as a ‘medium’ offering conditions for emergence through processes of biological mutation. Biotextile is defined by Plank (2020, para. 5) as ‘biofabricated textiles [that] are materials grown from live microorganisms’. The performative aspects of this biotextile were explored by Härkönen et al. (2023) from a legal and copyright perspective. The analysis described bioart as a performance, as the author was not wholly in control throughout the creative roots stitching processes. In its living form, the authorship of the biotextile belongs to the seedlings who stitched the tapestry. In a later stage, after the seedlings have died and the biotextile emerges in its dried state, the authorship of bioart may transfer at a later stage to the bioartist.

Placemaking relates to urban design and the inclusion of communities when co-designing or performing. In recent years, placemaking in natural environments and rural communities utilising performance and other arts-based methods has been studied (Björn and Miettinen, 2024; Björn et al., 2023). Humanistic geographer Relph (1976) provided an analytical account of place identity, drawing on personal experience. Place-based identity unites a place’s affective and cognitive aspects (Paasi, 2003) and is, like gender or social class, a substructure of self-identity. Creative placemaking and place-based art have evolved to become social, economic, and culturally empowering art forms that place artists and arts workers at the centre of their communities. As a result, artists have become proactive protagonists as to what communities, not governments, can accomplish through the arts (Grodach, 2011). Documentary films can be used as tools for creative placemaking (Plow, 2015).

The goal of placemaking practice is to go beyond the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry, 1992). Place-based arts adopted a deep consideration for ‘place ethic’, which demands respect for any place that reaches further than merely drawing aesthetic inspiration derived from what is known as the ‘tourist gaze’, which often results from a superficial and short-term interaction with a place (Lippard, 1997). Thus, place ethics considers the cultural value of a place, acknowledging that it is deeply rooted in cultural meanings and traditions that are often rendered invisible or silent due to the hegemonic forces at play. Björn and Miettinen (2024) discuss place-based arts and service design that engage with place ethics in the context of artistic cartographies. Through these approaches, the authors explore new materialities, methods of self-presentation, and ways to consider the cultural significance of a place. They propose that artistic cartographies and placemaking offer valuable means to acknowledge and preserve the deeply rooted cultural and natural meanings and traditions of a place (Björn and Miettinen, 2024).

A critical view of traditional placemaking highlights its reliance on community consultation and local stories while still operating within colonial conceptualisations of the ‘site’ (Foster et al., 2020). These authors explain that the concept of a country includes the ecologies of plants, animals, water, sky, air, and all aspects of the natural environment. Björn et al. (2023) have explored placemaking as a place-specific approach to service design that engages reflexivity, knowledge-sharing, and epistemology towards non-humans, for example, plants and the surrounding environment. Placemaking can help identify place-related values, such as appreciation of nature and culture, through service design.

Study 1 draws on the study by Pink (2008), who explores sensory sociality and its role in placemaking. Pink (2008) argues that focussing on place invites ethnographers to conceptualise how embodied beings are differentiated by gender, generation, class, race, ethnicity, and more. The researcher and the researched are jointly present in a simultaneously experienced and constructed place. Walks and routes connect us to the processes of placemaking. Pink uses both the walks and the routes to question whether the ethnographer and the researcher are also participants in placemaking and whether ethnographic research can be examined from the perspective of placemaking. Study 1 connects ethnography and placemaking through observations, notes, and interviews. Pink (2008) describes ethnographic placemaking as a crossroads of direct experience and its reorganisation. In this context, memories are emphasised alongside systematic material analysis. Pink suggests that theorising common ethnographic methods through placemaking generates an understanding of how people construct urban environments through embodied and imaginative practices and how researchers create ethnographic places (see Table 2).

Study 1 is based on the video ‘placemaking through performance’, which includes several artistic video processes. The placemaking performances were conducted with groups of women. The author (she/her) had a long-term relationship with the women in different roles, such as colleague, thesis supervisor, and friend. There was familiarity and care when documenting the performances (Sarantou et al., 2021, 87–89).

Filmmaking is used as a means of visual communication. Carbonell (2022) studied a new mode of filmmaking called multispecies cinema, which is an attempt to experience MTHs through the use of different senses, such as seeing, hearing, and feeling, providing a means for understanding the ecosystem in flux. Barad (2017) discusses spacetimemattering, marking the inseparability of space, time, and matter. This verb stands for the relationalities of moments, places, things, and the intra-actions that configure and iterate them. The video format can enable spacetimemattering to represent the role of material in constructing reality. Time and temporality can be manipulated in the video. It enabled the artists to visualise and communicate several positions and even render the past and present into the same frame (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022).

We examined the idea of placemaking and performing in a natural environment and through embodied experience. Filming ‘placemaking through performance’ involved artistic processes using photography, video, and performance to design, test, and iterate new artistic ways and meanings for placemaking and create artistic performances in the natural environment. The idea of performing and performance developed through several embodied studies through working intuitively in a natural environment during the shooting sessions. In our artistic processes, placemaking provides storytelling and performance channels to create the personal understandings and meanings of a place. The artistic research process included critical thinking and evaluation of the meaning and contents (Henke et al., 2020) of the artistic process (see Figure 1).

In the top right image of Figure 2, the performer traces the lifelines of the granite engraved in the rock bed with her feet. The performer honours the temporal dimensions of the stone and its enduring interconnectedness with the culture and stories of the local community that lived on Vänö Island in Finland. The bottom centre image (Figure 2) illustrates that the performance is about the physical burden placed on the performer by dragging a bundle of chopped wood in the perpetual shape of an enigma. Performance signifies providing resources often exploited by human-centred and consumer existence. In addition, the performances interacted with nature, as the affordances of the natural environment—such as the hard rock surface and soft snow—both enabled and, in the case of the snow, restricted the performance due to the heavy wood bundle.

Roots Stitching was a collaborative work between the sunflower seedlings and Sarantou. This section reflects on the biological agency of sunflower seedlings growing on a woolbed. These studies were conducted in various locations from Finland, Australia, and Japan, and they yielded different results based on the environments in which the seedlings performed their rhizomatic root growth to connect different layers of wool. The seedlings were provided with wool to perform stitching with their roots to create the intricate textures of a wool tapestry. Sarantou is a Namibian-born Australian who worked in academic contexts in Finland and, more recently, in Japan. In all the places she has lived, her bioart and root tapestries assist her in exploring rootlessness resulting from migration.

The analytical approaches used in this article are visual analysis (Studies 1 and 2) and thematic analysis (Study 1). Visual analysis examines visual elements such as line, colour, shape, and composition to understand the meaning, function, and impact of a work. It systematically considers context, purpose, and symbolism to deepen our understanding of visual representation, whether art or design. Drew and Guillemin (2014, p. 54) propose the interpretive engagement framework, which consists of five elements: the researcher, participant, image, context of production, and audiences. These elements each make a unique contribution to visual analysis, but when applied as a systematic analytical approach, they can, in combination, significantly contribute to the entire analysis.

Seymour (2023) explains the process of visually analysing the composition of artworks or photographs. The process is inspired by the studies by Fry (2018) and Bell (2019), who summarise how art and photographs can be interpreted in four steps: identification, description, connection, and interpretation. Rodriguez and Dimitrova (2011) propose a similar visual analysis method, a four-level framework for identifying and analysing visual frames in which each level explains and seeks to identify unique points of view within that visual frame. Their frameworks can be used to analyse a variety of visual media or how audiences interpret them. Both indicate the systematic use of visual analysis processes in which different phases lead to gaining more comprehensive insights into the artwork or photograph.

Both frameworks are informative and have been used in the visual analysis in Studies 1 and 2. For example, in roots stitching, the analysis compares how art elements changed over 12 weeks to identify the performance of the seedlings, which enabled the artist to describe how the composition of the meshwork developed. The meshwork was created in the history of placemaking in the Bioartex Laboratory and the interactions between the artist and seedlings. On an emotional level, the interconnection between the meshwork and the artist evolved, at least for Sarantou, who experienced emotional stimuli from the developing meshwork, the slow creation of the changing colour palette from growth to demise of the seedlings.

Thematic analysis was used to analyse the transcribed data from the focus group. This analytical method identifies and analyses patterns of meaning within a dataset (Joffe, 2012). It highlights key themes significant to understanding the phenomenon being studied, ultimately showcasing the most prominent meaning of the data through clusters of similar or opposing data, which is used to constitute new themes. As Joffe (2012, p. 209) explains, ‘a theme refers to a specific pattern of meaning found in the data’. The transcribed data from the focus group interview were analysed by clustering similar content under new themes, such as placemaking and agency; while performing and documenting these performances, the natural environment and its forces impacted how and when to visualise them.

Performance through placemaking is an artistic practice in which one uses one’s creative potential to move one’s body through the feelings, emotions, and memories that one senses from a particular place, such as a natural environment. These movements can fill a small or large space, be enacted with natural elements such as trees or water, and engage available objects. Performance through placemaking is place-specific and embodied (Wilbur, 2015). Placemaking strengthens the connection between people and the places they share. Placemaking is needed more and more because people are dislocated or newcomers to different places. Therefore, it is essential to create new strategies for people to feel a meaningful connection between each other and the places they share. We may change the places in which we live several times. Hence, we lose the traditional knowledge stored by our parents or grandparents, such as how to find mushrooms, how to find blueberries in the nearby forest, or how to familiarise ourselves with natural landmarks. These art-based methods can be meaningful ways to create familiarity and meaning with specific locations and connections between places and the people sharing them. Artistic processes around placemaking create feelings and memories of strong intergenerational connections with particular locations, and these can carry immense meaning for placemaking and connection with the place (Rico and Jennings, 2012).

This artistic research project explored the role of human and non-human agency, interaction, and temporality in performance and the environment. Artistic action can connect our bodies with the surrounding ecosystem and remind us of this connection—being embodied and part-of-nature creatures (Gibbs, 2014). Some of the performances are in new locations where one is trying to make sense, create meaning, or develop respect for the place, such as Victoria Falls, Cape Town, or other locations that one wants to preserve and protect. These embodied and artistic interactions create new affordances for performing in and learning about the natural environment. Placemaking could be used to revitalise the earth’s connection and ground us. Some locations, such as Pulmankijärvi, have unique biodiversity. Sense can be enhanced through placemaking, and performances can bring together true and imagined stories through the signs and signals observed in a natural environment.

Artistic research and artistic thinking are used in several ways during the process: performing; documenting; creating photographs and videos; narrating the performances; discussing the processes; opening up spaces for improvisation, iteration, and interpretation; and creating meaning for the “Placemaking Through Performance.”

Placemaking through performance is a process. We are still investigating, studying, and figuring out all kinds of meanings relating to it, including what can be done with it and what kinds of contexts it can be applied to. It has already proved its potential, and we are continually working with it. Filmmaking can help the audience understand the process and utilise their senses when spectating. The idea of the project was to present feelings related to the natural environment with embodied actions and movements through performances in specific places that felt special and specific. The places were selected intuitively. This embodied performance sensitised us to the location so that we could hear, see, smell, listen to, and feel the natural environment. Using all the senses is integral to performing in a natural environment. Doing so enables the discovery of affordances, sensitising oneself to create connections with past generations and co-authoring with non-humans such as plants, water, and animals. Intra-action during placemaking creates an embodied personal and a shared space between humans and non-humans (Barad, 2007). Intra-action proposes questions of co-authorship during placemaking. The flow and soundscape of the natural environment play a role and are documented in the video. The rhythm, movement, and silence are co-created with entities in the natural environment.

Vera (2021) proposes land-based design approaches to un-design the colonial space in the university context. Vera acknowledges herself and the land in diverse worlds, where different ways of being and knowing can build community and transform realities into possibilities of change. Vera (2021) presents a design process that dismantles colonial structures and separates individual and universal structures; understanding place-specific history and the natural environment enabled us, the participants, to feel a connection to the land. Vera (2021) points out that decolonising ourselves gives us a respectful way of looking at a world where many worlds can fit. Similarly, creative placemaking can bring the idea of pluriverse and place-specific knowledge into a dialogue and enable us to know things new and have the possibility of transformation.

In this context, it is essential to acknowledge how the intersection of whiteness and placemaking is intertwined with the social constructions of race and identity. It is necessary not to overlook the implications of race, especially whiteness, and how this shapes our visual communication, experiences, and practices. Visual communication can contribute to power dynamics; awareness of and dismantling these dynamics is essential (Thompson, 2017).

Fari (2023) studied site-orientated performance while documenting how the body can be both in front of and behind the camera while trying to create a deep awareness of the place. While Fari (2023) investigates the narrative agency of the camera, Miettinen investigates the agency of the place where she is performing (Björn and Miettinen, 2024). Fari’s (2023) artistic practice is similar to the first author’s and highlights the challenge of providing and understanding the agency of all participating in both performing and visual communication. Placemaking can enable a platform of co-authorship and communication, but more study needs to be done to develop the agency of MTHs and the means for their communication. The practice itself enables a strong linkage and rooting with the natural environment, and the affordances it offers open opportunities for this agency and visual communication.

The finding regarding the biotextile is that this form of bioart-making can be understood as a performance by the sunflower seedlings, which later transformed into a wool tapestry of dried roots. As Härkönen et al. (2023) posit, it is necessary to identify the entity to which mandatory copyright criteria are applied. The performance of the roots stitching entitles the Sunflower Seedlings to be the performers of the stitching process. Hence, they have authorship and control as long as the performances last, as explained by Härkönen et al. (2023, Section 5.1, p. 107). However, the photography of these processes has implications for authorship as artworks.

The findings also revealed that it is essential to acknowledge the agency of the roots while stitching and its control of the action, hence having the authorship of the performance. The seedlings were autonomous, living MTHs, partly independent of human input, although only temporarily. In addition, the agency revealed by the seedlings to grow through layers of paper, and then, a woolbed revealed that their growth was sometimes beyond the control of the artist-researcher. Regarding bioart, Kac (2021, p. 1367) reminds us that ‘art that manipulates or creates life must be pursued with great care, with acknowledgement of the complex issues it raises and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life created’. The question of nurturing is vital in this case, as the role of the artist-researcher was nurturing, enabling the seedlings to be in control and having authorship of the process and performance. The sunflower seedlings had agency, but as Ingold (2007, p. 1) posits, they were also ‘caught up in these currents of the lifeworld… not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational’, which is reflected in the transformative process of the biotextile. From having authorship through performative growth to co-authorship in the dead state of the root and wool tapestry, the performance of the biotextile was methodical and contextual. This outcome contrasts with additional biotextiles that transformed differently into new performative growth and ongoing (slow) live processes of rot and decay.

Our performances with nature in various southern and northern environments relied on improvisation and intuition to explore and better understand the affordances of nature, enabling co-authorship with it. Wilmot (2020) discusses documentary filmmaking as a placemaking practice, arguing that it can be used to examine the relationships between place, a sense of belonging, the notions of home, and away, and the conditions of modernity and post-colonialism. Filmmaking was part of the placemaking performance to communicate better the authorship of nature and sensory levels of placemaking. The reflection that filmmaking creates when used with placemaking enables new ways of creating knowledge, such as new ways of knowing and understanding the authorship of nature.

Another insight into placemaking is presented by Lilja (2022, p. 206). who posits that ‘movement as such produces place’. The slow meshworking of the MTH growth movements of the sunflower seedlings was placemaking in the Bioartex Laboratory at the University of Lapland. Similarly, studies of seedlings were conducted in South Australia and Japan, where they also engaged in placemaking. The movement of seedlings reacting to being and growing within one another’s environment, captured by time-lapse photography as a documentation tool, illustrates their placemaking. The co-performance created during the photographic documentation (Holm, 2008) between the seedlings, as research participants, and the artist-researcher added another dimension to the placemaking activities in the laboratory and elsewhere.

Ingold (2007, p. 1) critically investigates the term ‘materiality’. He explains that it refers to ‘the stuff things are made of’ and ‘the stuff we want to understand’. Exemplified by the biotextile (or root tapestry), the Finnish lambswool and the roots (living or dead) are the materialities resulting from our co-authorship with MTHs. In the example of the enigma performance, the materials are the textile wrapped around and holding the heavy birch wood on the soft, light snow in northern Finland. The weight and texture of the natural materials, and their environment, resisted movement and placemaking. Visually, the resistance the materials caused to the performance was not evident at first, yet the video documentation visually communicated the difficulty of the performance and the symbolic flagellation of hauling the heavy bundle of wood through the snow.

Ingold (2012, p. 438; cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 454) explains materiality as the connection to consciousness. As artist-researchers, the authors investigated their practice in the context of performative ontology. Being immersed in the practice and doing the artistic practice that was corporeal and sensory enabled both authors to develop a methodology where the MTHs participated, documenting these processes and then developing artistic outcomes that could be visually communicated to the audience. The concept of intra-action (Barad, 2007) was exploited and worked to offer new information on artistic practice and visual communication about and with MTHs. Intra-action enables the co-creation and co-authorship between humans and MTHs during placemaking. Barad (2007, p. 392) emphasises the importance of responsibility and accountability in ethical relationships with others. This principle extends to artistic practice, requiring responsibility and humility in intra-actions between humans and MTHs, particularly when engaging with Indigenous places that demand respect—whether it be Sápmi or other vulnerable locations. Such respect cannot be overlooked or forgotten.

Barad (2017, p. 106) argues through their notion of spacetimemattering that entanglements are shaped by historical, political, and ethical dimensions. Entanglements signify the fundamental interconnectedness and co-composition of all matter and meaning, challenging traditional separations between objects, subjects, and their spatiotemporal dimensions. The biotextile created by the seedlings is a metaphor for how conditions required by MTHs and humans are entangled. The entanglements of the biotextile connected diverse spaces, times, and materialities into a co-authored expression, while digital expressions, also co-created with MTHs, facilitated the visual communications of such entanglements.

Digital technologies enabled the documentation, digital inscription, and material understanding of the performances by (the study Roots Stitching) and with (the study video “Placemaking Through Performance”) the natural environment. The documentation of the performances by MTHs and humans captured by the digital video and photographs, and the performative aspects involved in capturing and creating video and photograph, were placemaking, produced by the movement that creates a place, as Lilja (2022) explains. In the example of the biotextile, digital technologies created material understanding through the digital tracing around the temporal root activity, thereby capturing the performance in a format that can contribute to the sedimentation of knowledge, as it will be laid down in layers of documentation and investigation into the future.

As efficient pedagogical tools, digital technologies can enable critical thinking by identifying and cultivating critical thinking and enhancing the continuous flow of information and knowledge (Mhlongo et al., 2023). Visual and digital documentation outcomes, such as photographs and videos, should be critically considered through careful connection to history and context, or text and context (Sontag, 2018, 175). This article presents examples of how visual documentation and images can be dealt with in research. For example, Study 1 used text captured through a focus group discussion to create more profound insights into the contexts of the images through textual data from the 57-min focus group. Study 2, in contrast, used systematic photo and video documentation over an extended 12-week period, including time-lapse photography, to capture the history of the seedlings’ sprouting, growth, movements, and stitching of the wool, including rotting and/or death, which were interpreted as performances due to the characteristics of their movements, which were stimulated by their direct environment.

The use of digital technologies, therefore, can visualise and communicate the boundaries we must critically reflect on as humans, as well as the reflective and learning capacities we need to nurture to enable effective interactions with MTHs. According to Giaccardi and Redström (2020), design processes are no longer isolated from production; instead, development and deployment are fully integrated. Technologies actively ‘learn’ during consumption, constantly evolving, adapting, and transforming in the process.

Thompson (2017) provides another perspective by describing the ontological turn in the context of sound studies. She examines how sound can be understood through the nature of being and existence, not only through representation. Sound can be a medium of communication and an aspect of social and cultural reality. Similarly, digital technologies are used for visual communication and to shape social relations, identities, and power structures. This question should be investigated and scrutinised from a decolonial perspective (Thompson, 2017).

Improvisation as such is wayfinding (Ingold, 2004), which refers to making the best of and coping with the affordances of a given environment (Sarantou and Miettinen, 2017). With a sensitive and respectful attitude towards walking as wayfinding (Instone, 2015), the affordances within nature and natural environments may be better recognised for their fragility and limitations. Lilja (2022, pp. 201–204) emphasises the enactment of attentive walking to critically reflect on our extractive mindsets, juxtaposed with our human proximity to and interconnectedness with ‘mineralness’ as a part of the natural constitution of our bodies. At the same time, mineralness signals an additional dimension with the interconnection of mineral matter through digital technologies. Lilja (2022) explains that due to humans’ contribution to substantial material devastation and heavy resource use, ‘mineralness can be understood as an attribute to help us [re]think the mineral beyond the subject/object divide… but also its nature culture entanglement as the mineral constitution of bodies, including the human’ (pp. 102–104). Through improvisatory practices, often born from a lack of resources and driven by thriftiness, as observed through craft-design practices in Namibia (Sarantou, 2014), our attentiveness to nature–culture affordances can remind us of our critical examination of our human boundaries and the limitations of our natural resources. Our awareness of our mineralness and interconnectedness should stimulate humans’ awareness of more respectful wayfaring with MTHs, including digital technologies.