MISSIONS
1. Defending Ecological Intelligence
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2. Preserving and Transmitting European Field Knowledge
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3. Strengthening European Cognitive Resilience
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4. Connecting a European Community through Citizen Science
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5. Developing Environmental Storytelling
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1. Defending Ecological Intelligence 〰️ 2. Preserving and Transmitting European Field Knowledge 〰️ 3. Strengthening European Cognitive Resilience 〰️ 4. Connecting a European Community through Citizen Science 〰️ 5. Developing Environmental Storytelling 〰️
Followly pursues five missions: defending ecological intelligence, preserving European tracking cultures, strengthening cognitive resilience, connecting a European community through citizen science, and developing environmental storytelling.
We do not represent the tracking community. We are artists, educators and researchers who approach tracking as a practice rich in artistic, political and epistemic potential.
Defending Ecological Intelligence.
Followly promotes forms of intelligence that emerge from direct engagement with landscapes. Tracking develops the ability to read complex situations from subtle signs. It cultivates capacities that are becoming increasingly rare in contemporary societies: embodied perception, patient observation, detection of weak signals, contextual reasoning, working with uncertainty.
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At a time when automated systems increasingly dominate knowledge production, these forms of intelligence remain essential. They complement algorithmic systems by cultivating abilities that machines struggle to replicate.
Tracking therefore represents not only a naturalist practice, but also a training ground for ecological reasoning. We believe that engaging, even briefly, with the practice of tracking — or simply experiencing it during an introductory workshop — can be valuable for anyone pursuing ecological work, whether in political, academic or artistic fields.
Tracking brings together forms of perception, reasoning and embodied knowledge that allow living beings to navigate complex environments.
Tracking is precisely a practice of navigating complexity. Information is always partial. Signs are ambiguous. Different factors interact across multiple scales. The tracker must connect fragments, draw on memory and knowledge, shift perspectives and formulate hypotheses, while retaining the capacity to doubt them.
In this sense, tracking exercises forms of intelligence that may prove particularly relevant to the 21st century. Hyperobjects, ecological disruption, accelerating technological change and increasingly interconnected systems confront us with situations in which information may be abundant while certainty remains elusive. Without going as far as invoking the idea of a technological singularity, it seems increasingly difficult to imagine that any single perspective, discipline or form of intelligence will be sufficient to understand the worlds we inhabit.
The 21st century may well be the century of decentring: of learning to perceive, think and act within systems that exceed us, and to navigate them without assuming that we occupy their centre.
2. Preserving and Transmitting European Field Knowledge.
Across Europe, many forms of ecological knowledge have been developed through deep familiarity with landscapes. Naturalists, shepherds, foresters, hunters, farmers, guides and observers have cultivated sophisticated ways of interpreting the traces left by animals and natural processes. These practices represent Europe’s cultural immaterial heritage, but they also form part of our living cognitive infrastructures. Yet such knowledge does not sustain itself automatically. Like all living traditions, it requires attention, transmission and political support. Without this care, practices developed over millennia risk fading precisely at the moment when their relevance is becoming clearer than ever.
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Followly documents these practices and contributes to their transmission through films, educational materials and field-based pedagogy. By doing so, the project supports the preservation of situated knowledge while strengthening the connection between cultural heritage, environmental understanding and local practices. Concretely, we support these practitioners by offering what we know best: images, narrative attention and visibility for the practitioners and schools who keep these practices alive.
We are convinced that this knowledge can also generate concrete opportunities for European territories: supporting rural economies through nature-based tourism and cultural initiatives, preserving ancient skills and opening new pathways for young people in environmental education, guiding and biodiversity protection.
3. Strengthening European Cognitive Resilience.
At a time when many societies invest heavily in digital infrastructures, artificial intelligence and automated decision systems, it is essential to recognise that sovereignty cannot be technological alone. It must also be cognitive. Across European territories, generations of observers have developed sophisticated ways of interpreting living environments. These practices form a vast body of knowledge rooted in landscapes and transmitted through experience. This heritage represents a form of cognitive infrastructure that remains largely invisible but profoundly valuable.
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In a rapidly changing geopolitical and ecological context, preserving and transmitting these capacities becomes a strategic task. They contribute to the resilience of societies by maintaining the ability to understand territories directly, interpret and adapt to complex situations and respond to unexpected changes.
Followly seeks to document, preserve and renew this ecological intelligence as part of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.
4. Connecting a European Community through Citizen Science.
Tracking practices exist across Europe but often remain fragmented and locally rooted. Followly acts as a platform connecting trackers, naturalists, educators, researchers, artists and observers interested in reading landscapes through traces. The project contributes to emerging forms of citizen science, where careful field observations made by individuals contribute to collective ecological knowledge. Our art–science approach extends this process by inviting artists to engage directly with practitioners, territories and field knowledge.
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Through writing, image, sound and other forms of artistic research, they offer situated interpretations of what they encounter, not as illustrations of scientific knowledge, but as complementary ways of observing, questioning and making ecological relationships perceptible.
Through its agenda, documentation and collaborative initiatives, Followly strengthens a distributed European community engaged in observation, interpretation and shared learning about the living world, creating new porosities between science, art, field practice and public experience.
5. Developing a European Environmental Storytelling
Tracking reveals landscapes as spaces full of signs and narratives: footprints, broken branches and subtle marks in the ground are fragments of stories that unfold between humans, animals, plants and all the 'non-living' beings and phenomena. Followly explores how these stories can be shared through contemporary cultural forms such as films, articles, interviews, workshops, interactive experiences, artistic and transdisciplinary dialogues. A meeting ground between field practice, science, philosophy and art. Thinking from signs, thinking across differences, thinking nearby and remaining attentive to what escapes our interpretations.
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The goal is not to make ecological thought more uniform. It is to make it circulate. By combining our film-based practice with web and real-life encounters, the project contributes to developing new ways of narrating ecological relationships and making the complexity of living systems perceptible to wider audiences. Our ambition is to open passages.
Followly also sees tracking as a common ground from which different European traditions of thinking about the living world can meet. Philosophers, ecologists, ethologists, anthropologists, artists, naturalists and practitioners often investigate closely related questions, yet their conversations remain fragmented across disciplines, languages and national contexts. Rather than presenting it as a unified school of ecological thought, Followly wants to create conditions for these perspectives to encounter, challenge and transform one another. Tracking offers an unusually fertile terrain for such encounters because it begins with concrete situations while immediately opening onto larger questions.
Our fragmented audiovisual formats can themselves become a method for creating these dialogues. Observations can respond to one another across films, field recordings, conversations and encounters produced over several years. A thought formulated in one landscape may find its continuation, contradiction or transformation in another. Because Followly is not driven primarily by media visibility or economic growth, these conversations can remain slow, exploratory and unfinished. Contributors do not simply come to present established positions. Their ideas can be tested against landscapes, traces, other disciplines and other ways of knowing.