​“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories.

There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.”
-Jimmy Neil Smith, Director of the International Storytelling Center-

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What can water foretell us about ourselves and our future?

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We explain and build worlds through stories. They are the carriers of

knowledge we have been collecting and passing on. Earthly Storytelling –

Tales of Water unfolds as a traveling, collective picnic storytelling process across

six countries (Serbia, Greece, North Macedonia, Slovakia, Poland, Norway), along

the E75 highway route. Woven across European landscapes from Southeast point

in Greece all the way up to the Northeast point in Norway in the Arctic region

it is an exploration of coexistence between humans and non-humans in the

time of planetary crisis. Participants were invited to collectively draft a structure of

one chapter per city. Each city settled around a different body of Water: Sea, River,

Lake, Arctic Ocean in a distinct cultural landscapes, provided a rich set of structural

elements for plot twist, characters, story setting etc. 

 

Earthly Storytelling – Tales of Water come as a constellation of voices carrying knowledge about and of water. Its sediments and gestures become ripples in the current as each new iteration with new voices, will transform what we have written into a new story.  Arriving as an invitation to join and weave a thread of your own, this collective tapestry is imagining new ways of being together on a damaged planet. Generating multiple stories

from the same body of knowledge, we will continue to speculate, reinterpret, share and think together.

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E75 Art Bus was an Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture project that gathered various international artists, organized by Artists' Association MUU in Finland.