An Ecology of Beasts
Designing Coexistence as a Collective Practice
In a moment when design is increasingly driven by individual authorship, speed, and finished outputs, An Ecology of Beasts proposes a different model.
Developed by Common Index, the project revisits medieval bestiaries as speculative systems rather than historical curiosities. In medieval culture, bestiaries were not neutral catalogs of animals: they were tools for interpreting the world, where myth, belief, observation, and imagination coexisted.
The project translates this logic into a contemporary digital context. Through an open call, participants drew a creature from a digital bestiary deck and reinterpreted it freely, with video as the only constraint. Designers, artists, filmmakers, and creative technologists responded with radically different approaches, from generative systems to text-driven works.
Rather than curating these works into a linear narrative, the exhibition was structured as a non-hierarchical system. Videos circulate across multiple screens following an internal logic, allowing difference to remain visible. Cohesion emerges not from visual consistency, but from coexistence.
This logic is extended through Cartography of Entangled States, an interactive installation that translates the presence, movement, sound, and environmental data into a continuously evolving digital landscape. Inspired by medieval mappae mundi, the installation does not represent the beasts, but the environment they inhabit shaped by participation and relation.
An Ecology of Beasts frames exhibition-making as infrastructure rather than display, and design as a collective process rather than a finished object. What it produces is not a statement, but a living index: open, mutable, and sustained through shared presence. Not for impact, but for care.
An Ecology of Beasts
Exhibition Design: Sole° Studio
Photos by: Valerio Salvatore & Luca Venturoli
More informations can be found here.
