Earthlings: Convivial Learnings
20.7.-2.8.2025.
Forest University, Fruška Gora
In our wounded world, there’s a background song.
A murmuring song emerging through cracks.
The song of life that breaks through.
Of life that flows and sings to the rhythms of the Earth.
Singing connections,
Convivial seeking,
reminding of life threads
that dance through us all.
Promiscuous care
Mutually aiding
Cherishing Symbiotic web of all life.
If Earthlings we are
How do we recall
The call of our time
To come back to Earth?
This Earthlings edition is happening in Serbia in the summer of 2025, at the place and time of great rupture and struggle that student blockades and protests have ignited; struggles of many, against corrupt, violent, alienated ways that suit only the few. Following Forest University ways of working and influenced by current events, it focuses on life-affirming, convivial, symbiotic ways of learning. Earthlings 2025 pose a question: How to learn and share knowledges otherwise, away from the dominant exploitative frameworks of education?
What do we want to challenge and transform?
Modern education is an exercise in abstraction, separation and alienation. Learners are separated from teachers, but also from learners of different ages and interests. Fields of knowledge are enclosed into separate boxes. Bodies are severed from minds; learning processes are separated from the environment; themes are divorced from the territories. Labour of care and repair are distanced, backgrounded and concealed.
Learners and teachers are uprooted to be colonised and turned useful in the universalised, globalised pursuit of profit through destruction. Non-teaching staff are engaged as low-paid labourers who’s task is to stay invisible while making education possible. Everyone else, winds, trees, birds, oceans, clouds and mice are welcome only if dead, as objects to be abstracted and dissected.
What kinds of learning and sharing we embrace?
Those actors and processes systematically backgrounded at the industrial, anthropocentric, patriarchal, capitalist educational logic, take centre stage at the FU. The Forest University welcomes understandings, arrangements, and ways of learning which thread connections between those usually separated in boxes of “learners”, “teachers”, “environments”, “technical staff”, “spaces”, “resources”, “contents” or “methods”. Therefore, collective place-making of the classroom, shared cooking and food caring, shared cleaning, and mutual content making and sharing are not separated from one another and are all parts of learning together. Through them, as Earthlings, we get invited to question exclusions and oppressions, while caring for one another, sharing and sprouting life-affirming convivial learnings.
What will we actually do?
Earthlings is a gathering where we are invited to live, share and learn together. We will be spending part of the day co-creating the future classroom of the Forest University, working with reed, straw and mud on the future roofed classroom. Processes of learning to work with mud are particularly convivial and suiting, because of the water, sand and clay as materials, because of the horizontality and accessibility of the working processes, because of the learning by experiencing and making mistakes that are easily repaired. This is the kind of collective work that creates not only walls, but also symbiotic relations, friendships and feelings of collective, convivial existence. Morphing with mud and earth through our bodies and space-making processes, we will have time for conversations, provocations, dances, deep listening, as well as group and individual work.
Other parts of the day are dedicated to collective explorations of other ways of rethinking learning. This is when all of us as participants join in offering ways, ideas, formats, workshops, conversations, readings, or methods we have previously experimented with, which in some way focus on symbiotic, convivial learning (you will be asked to think of these teachings/offerings in the application form). These might include, but are not limited to, land-based, critical, ecofeminist, ecological, permacultural, decolonial, anarchist and other pedagogies, practices and ways of learnings and sharing. Departing from conference, summer school, or similar formats, where program is quick and packed, these sessions provide opportunity to share, explore and get feedback on some of your work, practice, and ideas.
Throughout all days we will explore the convivial economy and symbiotic autonomy of the Forest University – our ways of living with waters, energy, waste, food, collective permaculture garden and more than humans that we share the Forest University with. We will be feeling what happens when a territory cares for us with its fruits, shades, beauties, and waters, and how it feels to care back, and care with.
Application process
We invite those of you who are interested in exploring these caring, convivial, rooted, symbiotic, corporeal ways of learning and sharing knowledge, time and space to apply by filling the application form by 15th of June 2025. We will let you know the results by the 25th of June 2025.
Financial contribution
Processes at the Forest University are non-profit and experimental in terms of convivial economies, including bartering, gifts, volunteering, etc. We as FU will contribute with organising, facilitating and hosting the gathering and its educational and working processes, and will also cover the cost of working materials and accommodation. We ask you as a participant for a contribution through which we will be buying food, securing there is enough water in case of draught and repairing tools.
Recommended minimum contribution: The recommended minimum contribution for all days is 150eur.
Pay it forward: Those who feel they can contribute more than the minimum recommended, maybe because they come for more money-affluent background, are welcome to do so. This depends from your position and willingness to contribute. What is collected will be used to fund stipend for someone who cannot afford or some future programs at the FU.
Ask for a stipend: We want learning processes not restricted through money. If you cannot afford to contribute financially, please underline this in your application and we will find ways.
Accommodation arrangements
Prepare yourself for a forest camping experience. We have collective open-air showers, as well as spaces for tents. If you have your camping equipment (tent, sleeping bag) please indicate in the admission form and bring it with you. If not, please indicate that in the application form, so we make sure we have enough tents to host everyone. For those that are for any reason unable to sleep in tents there are several in-doors beds and rooms. If you prefer that option, please write so in the application form.
Food arrangements
Cooking will be plant-based, low waste, as local as possible and collectively organised because it is integral process of the collective learning and caring for each other. There are no “cooks” and “dish washing” people in charge of providing us food, and we jointly create cooking teams changing on the daily basis. Each participant will spend up to 2 separate days in a cooking team overall. All other service work is organised in the same way, again, being an opportunity to work together and explore regenerative ways of sustaining our lives.
There are plant-based meals in every culture around the world, and new recipes are being explored each day. We invite you to explore your local gastronomic culture with attempt to share with us ways and tastes when your turn for cooking comes. This might mean bringing with yourself an ingredient or a spice that you might need, but also might be an improvisation of what we have locally. This is how we transform gathering around food into transcultural, sacred moments of sharing.
Common waste
We look to produce as little waste as possible that will pollute the soil and water, or that must be taken to the garbage collection stations in the city. We invite you to practice together awareness about the waste produced, as well as wastes which should not be wasted, but can circulate further. You will be part of composting practices both from kitchen scrapes and humanure. We drink water from the well, and do not want it infected by septic tanks. Therefore, we have dry toilets at the FU, which we hope you will love and pass further as a practice.
Travel arrangements
“How do we nurture more symbiotic, regenerative ways of relating to the web of life?” is a question to be explored not only at FU but during your journey, and we will be sharing and recalling the journeys when we gather. Each of you will organise, fund and explore ways to reach the FU in your own way. Ours is to say that The Earthlings do not start at the FU, but the moment when you start heading towards us.
If you do not have to fly over oceans or deserts, we strongly encourage you to explore ways to reach us that are to the ground, so that your Earthlings experiences include your physical journey in even more layered and regenerative way. This can be by bike, by train or bus, by hitchhiking or coming with a full car, or by foot if you are for a more radically rooted experience. If you want some ideas and concepts behind other types of mobilities, check this article we have wrote a few years ago for artists and cultural workers.