Join us this October 2026 for Reforesting Minds, Relational Cartographies, a collaboration between Rizalab, MA Regenerative Design and Forest School at CSM, connecting Brazil and the UK through a shared enquiry into living systems, place and design.
To reforest the mind is to make space for different forms of intelligence, connection and interdependence, moving beyond the individual and human-centred perspectives that often shape how we understand the world. A forest is never one thing, but a living community of many roots, species, perspectives and forms of intelligence, interconnected and continually responding to one another.
We’ll explore what becomes possible when we look beyond the visible. When a place is not a backdrop, but a living network. When we begin to notice the relationships between species, soil, water, memory, materials, people and more-than-human life. And when roots become our guides.
Across three connected sessions in October, we’ll move between online exchange and situated practice in São Paulo and London, sensing, sharing and translating the often-unseen relationships that sustain the places we inhabit.
This is not about creating the same map, or finding one answer. It is about learning to see differently. To become more attentive to place. To experiment with what it might mean to design with living systems, rather than simply designing for them.
How do we shift in design from mapping cycles, waste streams, material and spatial geographies to mapping relations. A relational cartography asks a different question. What is connected to what, and how do those relationships shape a place and inform our design decisions?
What does a root make visible?
What does a river make possible?
What can soil teach us?
Mapping becomes a way of learning, of asking new questions, noticing what might otherwise remain unseen, and cultivating new relations. A situated practice through which we expand our design capacities to notice, trace and propose relationships with living systems.
What might we design differently if we began with relationships rather than things? What becomes possible when we design with relationships, rather than for them?
Three experiences.
Two territories.
Many ways of knowing.
Interested?
Sign up!
2 Oct Online launch group
10 Oct Brazil in person workshop
15 Oct London in person workshop
16 Oct Online presentations (public invite soon)
London participation open to CSM MA students only. We keep spots open for other interested people, please send email to Judith van den Boom
We already have a group of M Arch students joining, with a limited number of places remaining for other MA students, sign up by 25 September.
Mail Judith van den Boom for London information j.vandenboom@csm.arts.ac.uk
São Paulo participation: please reach out to Bruna Cerasi at
https://www.instagram.com/rizalab.co/
Mail Bruna Cerasi for Brazil information cerasibruna@gmail.com
Workshop is hosted by
Bruna Cerasi, Thalita Campbell in Brazil
Inés Quiñones, MARD and CSM Forest School in UK