Composting Speculative Spaces for Artistic Methods.

SSAM is founded on methodological COMPOSTING of recycled yet speculative productions to the lives and to the world, instead of creating new knowledge or claiming knowing.

asking new-old questions, disturbing the balance, without a particular goal or solution in mind, with the idea of “staying with the trouble”.  

Researcher/artist/educators collectively experiment through making how research approaches in fields, such as arts and education, could better live with and respond to the difficult, changing, and demanding sociopolitical issues of the world, while the world changes drastically and constantly. As a starting point, this relational and collective project acknowledges that inquiry methods renew themselves slowly, techniques always entail recycling and haunting of the pasts, and inquiry often remains as an estranged element of individually lived experiences.  

Within SSAM, we speculatively layer and turn around again and again the role of embodied, affective, emotional, physical, sensorial, and spiritual, non-binary and non-linear wild thinking, excluding the colonial westerns models of knowledge production, emphasizing neurodiversity, the more than human relations, Response/ ability,  permaculture, and Indigenous aspects of living. We explore what might become and happen when the continuity of diversity would be divided, divided, and divided again… We will also seek for collective and relational working methods.



Creating a sustainable, collective, and speculative relationship to the world (of inquiry) is facilitated through hesitation, slowness, wild thinking, and with the unthinkable. SSAM aims to take the methods so far that the methods themselves would no longer be recognized as methods and methodological practices stay curious of themselves. The idea is to explore in artistic ways, blend living and inquiry, make new openings, explore boundaries and liminal spaces, and go beyond creating spaces for relational freedom. SSAM suggests rejecting models, pre-set molds, and research done with a sense of safety and wonder. Instead, the practice of making the compost concentrates on recycling, circling around questions,

We will create a speculative compost space for research creations and eventually bring living inquiry outside the academy and closer to multiplicities of lives, to people’s lived experiences, and diverse communities. Eventually we will create a composting collection that will be used in diverse ways of engaging with the world of different approaches on artistic methods and share them publicly in meaningful ways. In this process, we invite multiple researcher - artist -educators around the world to join this composing project, with a rotating cycle.

Meet the Coordinators

Mira Kallio-Tavin

Professor of Art

Mirka Koro

Professor of Qualitative Research

ABOUT COORDINATORS