Šumski univerzitet - Forest University

22/07/2026

Hi dear people!

Just after this year's Earthlings we will be gathering from 31.7-3.8., for the Common Song living laboratory - for people carrying transformative work in a changed world. This gathering is for those who already hold projects, practices, organizations, or serious questions of service, and who want to re-sense the next form of their work in relation to place, ancestry, more-than-human life, peers, body, voice, field and practical reality.

This is not a conventional retreat, training or public workshop. It is a small working circle for people who come with living work and are ready to support one another in clarifying what this moment asks from us now.

https://livingfuturefoundation.org/common_song_forest_university

Common Song

Planetary future living lab: grounding, prototypes, common action
Forest University, Fruska Gora, Serbia
July 31 - August 3, 2026

We invite you to a three-day future living lab dedicated to acknowledging our planetary situation, exploring future scenarios and the causes that have brought us to this point, and prototyping field methods for working with processes of planetary evolution and healing. The aim isn't another round of shared awareness, but concrete next steps — prototypes, agreements, and projects that people leave with.

We are gathering a small group of people who work at the edge of this — NGO leaders, peacebuilders, ecologists, journalists, community weavers, social entrepreneurs — not to produce another strategy, but to do something different: to find together the deeper current that our separate efforts are already serving. What the indigenous traditions would call the song of life. What system thinkers would call the emergent field. What you may simply feel as the calling that drew you into this work before you had words for it.

We invite you to a future living lab - a space of collective awareness and feeling to find visions, meanings, grounded practices, connections and common actions towards futures that serve life – the wellbeing of both human and more-than-human actors.

Program formats
• Systemic constellations
• Prototyping and agreement-building sessions
• Strategic future-scenarious sessions
• Mystery formats
• Collective cooking
• Symbiotic dwelling and convivial practices of the Forest University - guided tour
• Session of teachings with distant relatives (class with more-than-human teachers)
• Body-energy practices (qigong)
• Round dance practices with common singing
• Deep talking and co-being around the Fire

To ensure a coherent group experience, participation is by application. To participate, please fill out the form on event's website (link in the first comment).

Event team: Pavel and Katerina Luksha (Global Education Futures), Visnja Kisic and Goran Tomka (Šumski univerzitet - Forest University), Peter Levich (Future Foundation).

We encourage you to spread this invitation to the people, groups, circles, communities, and tribes with whom you wish to share it.

28/05/2025

The open call for the second edition of "Zemljani / Earthlings" is on!!!

"Zemljani / Earthlings" is an annual explorative gathering dedicated to symbiotic, regenerative, convivial ways of relating to the 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 the many against corrupt, violent, alienated ways that suit only the few.

Following Forest University aspirations and influenced by current events, this Zemljani/Earthlings gathering focuses on life-affirming, convivial, symbiotic learning. Earthlings 2025 poses a question: How to learn and share knowledges otherwise, away from the dominant exploitative frameworks of education?

Earthlings is a gathering where we are invited to live, share and learn together. If you are interested in or have experience in land-based, critical, ecofeminist, ecological, permacultural, decolonial, anarchist and other pedagogies, practices and ways of learnings and sharing, come join us in exploring horizons of convivial education.

The gathering is taking place at the Forest University from 20th of July to 2nd August 2025, and the application process is open until 15th of June 2025.

For more information and application form, go to: https://www.sumski.net/2025/05/27/472/

23/01/2025

Hvala svima koji staju
Da bi bili budni i budili

Svima koji ove zime
Čuji krike sv(oj)ih bića

U tišinama
Na minusima

Skupljaju se
Snaga, bunt u nada

Za novi život
Korenito drugačiji

Zajednički, nenasilan
Brižan

30/10/2024

Dear earthlings,

Tomorrow from 17-18h CET we will gather online from different places to connect in the Peace Prayer Circle.

Connecting through praying and holding space for life and peace within,
for life and peace among all beings, cultures, territories,
uttering prayers in many languages from many places on the Earth.

It is one of many ways we feel responding to the culture of destruction, violence and wars that are raging and are being promoted.

The Peace Prayer Circle takes place within the Deep Live Gathering and if you feel like joining, just fill in the google form that is in the comment of this post, so we can share a zoom link with you.

With love,
Šumski

03/10/2024

We came back home to Šumski univerzitet - Forest University from 'Symbiotic movements', a mobility project we imagined as alternative to moving from a place A to place B as soon as possible, and as alternative to dominant routes of travel and exchages, from peripheries towards centres of power and cultural capital.

We travelled for four weeks, through the forests of Central Europe, Baltics and Finland, having classes with non-human teachers all along the way, listening to what forests can teach us about rewilding culture. On this blog of Bioart Society who supported us in this endaveour, we wrote how this felt, and what we bring back home with us.

"We are back home. 27 days of travel; 8 countries; 12 national parks and many more reserves; 7150 kilometres; 84 meals on the road; 1100 kilowatts of electricity spent; 25 nights of sleep crawled in the car, parked in strange places. Do these numbers even matter? How do these numbers feel? Like ages on the road. Like going far. Like bending time. Like being a stranger. Like befriending some creatures and lands along the way."

During August-September 2024, Višnja Kisić and Goran Tomka travelled through the forest ecosystems in Eastern and Northeastern Europe for an intense “class with a non-human teacher", to explore slow, symbiotic wilderness and ways of moving through it. They started their journey from Serbia and concluded in Helsinki. In this second and last blog entry, they write about their journey and what souveniers they received in the end.

🔗 You can read the whole blog entry on our website: https://bioartsociety.fi/projects/rewilding-cultures/posts/homecoming-with-gifts-from-distant-relatives

Kisić's and Tomka's journey was part of our Creative Europe collaboration project Rewilding Cultures. The project wants to reposition the wild within the field of art practices connecting to science and technology. As the European cultural sector has been and still is affected by multiple subsequent and coincident crises (incl. COVID-19, war-induced inflation, migration) we need to rewild on terms fit for the present and future.

11/09/2024

In the last three weeks we have been engaged in the "symbiotic movement" trip from the Southern banks of the Pannonian plain (Serbia) to the Arctic circle (Finland), which took us on an exploration of slow, symbiotic wilderness and ways of moving through it.

Moving slowly, without a set plan and a determined course, we stay in various national parks, reserves and non-listed, random rivers and lake shores. Sleeping where we can (mostly in our car), and wandering a lot, we have our senses opened for wisdoms and teachings that can be found on such places, still not silenced by the explosive, aggressive, colonizing culture always-in-a-hurry.

In this blogpost, on Bioart Society that has supported our movement through Rewilding Culture project, we share some of the impressions from the journey.

Wild. Unbounded. Rootless. Predators off the hook. This is the cultural representation of wilderness embodied in our dominant imaginaries across Europe. Wild is when an eagle catches its pray. When wolfs haul, when bears attack, when snakes bite. Wild is explosive, rapturous, and immoral. Hence when...

22/08/2024

What forests can teach us
about rewilding culture?

Leaving this forest of ours
For 'Symbiotic movements'
A journey through the forests of
Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
No plans and dates set,
But questions we travel with.

P.S. Feeling thankful that the Hungarian border frenzy reminded us of the beauty of choosing the marginal paths and forgotten crossings since the very start.

24/07/2024

Circles of sharing. Circles of exploring. Circles of sensing where we are and who we might be.

Each day someone is sharing a particular practice, qustions, topic to explore and way to explore with all others.

Slowly we get to see what offerings each of us carries and cares for.

20/07/2024

Ovih vrelih letnjih dana nicalo je svašta nešto dobro ovde kod nas, ispunjeno znojem, lepotom i radošću.

ZEMLJANI / EARTHLINGS počunju sutra.

A mi smo danima pravili mesta za šatore u šumarku, tuševe i lavaboe pod vedrim nebom od starih greda i saksija, i izolovali budući atelje/biblioteku/radionicu za Šumski univerzitet - Forest University , spremnu za blatne maltere i vredne ruke koje sutra dolaze. 🤎💚💙