Changelings on a date with the heartlands: design research to widen imagination capacity by troll perception

This comes from a place of waste, wounds, and wonders, a place called 'Troll perception in the Heartlands: artistic research to widen our imagination capacity' by MYCKET. As a transdisciplinary design project informed by folktales and mythology to expand the formal field, it generates sustainable future scenarios through site-specific crafting, performing, and animating informed by folktales and mythology. The aim is to create and share viable ways of designing and living and to support the return of a dialogue with earth and our fellow creatures. We enter learning processes, form pack with other creatures, and engage the transformative powers of art and advocacy. We hang out with various materials, from clay, plastic packaging, to cattails - fortunate to be hosted by an array of different sites - and dig out crafts and building techniques of the past that might teach us about how to household with the planet rather than to live at the expense of it. The methods that become available when we imagine a future where humans live with the planet's resources are often found in what is close at hand, historically and ideologically. Troll perception seeks to expand our imagination to grasp something that we do not yet know or remind us of something that has fallen into oblivion. It enables us to go beyond the tendency to rely on solutions to contemporary problems as corrections rather; instead, troll perception opens up possibilities of fundamental changes. What if we do not start from a dysfunctional system, but turn to folktales that narrate human life in relation to other lifeforms and reconnect to a time when people in this part of the world lived closer to nature? By approaching the unhuman, often terrifying, supernatural beings known as trolls and their kin, as possible companions, and embracing indigenous, queer, and trans activist methods across the Earth, we dig here in the landscapes of southern Sweden, a geography marked by extractivist industrial processes.