The Foundling’s Tale

‘The Foundling’s Tale’ is a project responding to our semester brief ‘Jelly Worlds’, where we, Design Investigations, partnered with Vienna’s Natural History Museum to imagine and speculate deep time and alternate evolutionary histories. The brief emerged from NHM’s desire to explore stories around the recently discovered Gabon fossils that suggest multicellular life existed 2 billion years ago.
.
The Foundling’s Tale is an exploration into alternative folklore, traditional tales and people’s deeply rooted connection to nature. It investigates the evolution of Gabonionta into rock-like beings, called foundlings, and tells the tale of one of them that came to life and started hunting and running out of frustration and uncertainty as its only way of coping with the changing world.
.
This tale lived on and inspired rituals and customs that bring people closer to the stone again, caring for it and painting it, letting it scream to vent its emotions, helping it cope with its changing world, to keep it from turning beastly again
.
The Foundling’s Tale is asking questions of character, how do you cope with change, where is the beast inside of you, are you giving yourself enough time to vent and heal, are you running through life or are you taking enough time out to appreciate every moment?