Proximity, Psychological Safety, and the Nail Salon: Conditions for Creative Collaboration at Feÿtopia
Details
- Interviewee: Tuuli
- Role: Researcher, IdeaSquare CERN, Feytopian
- Community: Feÿtopia
- Location: chateau du fey
- Date: 2026-04-23
- Language: English
Summary
Tuli has worked at Aalto Design Factory in Finland and set up IdeaSquare at CERN, both spaces designed to collide researchers, students, and practitioners from different disciplines. When she conducted a survey during Open Science Week at Feÿtopia, she found three conditions that drove creative collaboration: proximity (no need to schedule a meeting across town), psychological safety (the comfort to express strange ideas), and playfulness.
She contrasts Feÿtopia with Geneva's conference culture, where people arrive in suits playing institutional roles and take a long time to show up as humans. At Fey, doing dishes side by side, going to the sauna, cooking together: these flattened hierarchies in practice. Jess not making a big deal of herself in introductions is the structural embodiment of that culture.
Her examples of collaboration span the full scale. A nail salon emerged from a single glitter polish found in a car. A Burning Nest immersive installation was born here in February, won a grant, and was installed at a UK festival in May. An AI researcher conversation about hyperstitions led to a working prototype being set up in the fireplace room within 24 hours.
Personally, she was emigrating to Geneva and had gone through a breakup when she deepened her time at Fey. She describes it as a soft landing pad: nourishing food, daily exercise someone else initiates, intellectual conversation. She spent three hours crying in the forest one season, was left alone to do it, and came back held. Her birthday the following year felt like being completely seen.
Key quotes
We really need spaces where there's space for the unplanned, the unrehearsed, the yet unthought of.
This afternoon we did a nail salon. It started with somebody saying they had a glitter nail polish in their car. All of a sudden we had ten people painting each other's nails, some for the first time. There was no effort, coordination, planning, scheduling, timing. It just happened.
To be able to experience how life can be makes it possible to plan and act and design systems accordingly.
Just being here makes me feel like everything I want to bring out, I can. And actually, it's not enough. I can bring out more.
Transcript
---
interviewee: Tuli
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
themes:
- Creativity
- Collaboration
- Community
- Belonging
- Technology
- Imagination
notes: |
Heavily cleaned from ASR-generated raw transcript. Speakers reconstructed.
Names flagged with [name uncertain in source] need verification before publication.
---
# Interview Transcript: Tuli
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytopia
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham
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**Sharon:** What's your name, and where are we sitting right now?
**Tuli:** My name is Tuli, and we're sitting here in Minnow at Château de Fey [room name uncertain], which is one of the very nice rooms in the castle.
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**Sharon:** How did you get to know this place?
**Tuli:** I got to know about this place some years back, because Jess was studying architecture in Switzerland, where I'm based in Geneva. Over the years I've been here for different weddings, for Fey Arts, and also seen editions of the Feynale [event name uncertain in source]. I've been lucky to be in and out and see it at different stages.
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**Sharon:** How many seasons have you been here already?
**Tuli:** I've been coming since 2019, 2020, but I haven't spent longer stretches of time here except last season and this season. Before that I'd come for a few days to a week at most. So the last two years have been my deepest dive into the Feytopia community.
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**Sharon:** Why do you keep coming back?
**Tuli:** I really enjoy it when you have a group of very different kinds of people living together. Here there's a feeling that things emerge very easily. Somebody has an idea, somebody else jumps on that idea, and all of a sudden things are happening. It feels easy and interesting. The conversations over lunch or dinner are a very interesting way to live.
I'm also fascinated by how different collaborations emerge in creative communities. This is definitely one of those spaces where that's happening, so I find myself coming back time after time.
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**Sharon:** How do creative collaborations happen in different communities? What have you seen in different places?
**Tuli:** My background is in the Aalto Design Factory, which is a passion-based platform that we started at Aalto University. The design requirement was that nobody wants to go home from this space. We had researchers, we had students from different parts of the university. We did a lot of prototyping. Prototyping and building things together, and designing processes together, really brought everybody in.
The head of Design Factory would often make blueberry pie, which is not a likely thing to do for a Finnish mechanical engineering professor. I think that really shows that by your own behavior you can create cultures that enable different kinds of collaboration.
Then I set up a space at CERN called IdeaSquare. It's a building where we do similar things. We have students, researchers, people from different backgrounds doing hackathons, events, courses, processes, projects. In both spaces there's a kitchen that's a big part of the communal activity. We cook together, we eat together. That's one of the places where the informal interactions happen.
In conferences, it's often the coffee machine and water coolers where this happens. It's nice to have dedicated places and spaces where it can emerge daily. At IdeaSquare we did a lot of building things, having different ideation techniques, just a myriad of different collisions between different kinds of people. That was really feeding the creative juices. You'd never know who you'd find in the kitchen sitting next to you. That part is similar to what we find at Feytopia.
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**Sharon:** From these experiences, what would you say are the conditions that prompt people toward creative collaboration?
**Tuli:** There was a really great week when I came here this season, around Open Science Week, and I did a little survey to find out what those elements might be.
The first big thing is just proximity. You don't need to plan a meeting and schedule and organize and go across town to meet interesting people. You can find somebody who sits a meter away from you. So having interesting individuals around you is important.
Having psychological safety is also important, which is actually what Google has found in their studies about creativity. Feeling comfortable and confident to be vulnerable, to express ideas that might be a little bit strange. For instance, here there's the Emotional Ecologist circle, which maintains that kind of emotional safety with the community. There are different practices in place to uphold that.
There's playfulness. We can have different ideas when we're in a playful mood, in an environment where that's part of the daily practices. That's definitely also one of the things that came up in the survey.
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**Sharon:** Can you give me an example of what makes you feel psychologically safe in a place like this? And maybe a place where you haven't felt that safety, and what helped you feel safe here.
**Tuli:** What I noticed is when somebody comes in fresh, they might have this energy of trying to act very secure or impressive. After a few days, they simmer down a little bit. I feel like the majority of people here don't have the need to be very impressive or serious. For me, that's a big part of also not having to portray myself that way. People feel very comfortable to be themselves here.
As a contrast, I've been based in Geneva for the last decade, and there are a lot of conferences, seminars, different events. Often you find people coming in with suits, needing to play a role or a part of the organization. It can take a long while before they show up as human beings behind that role.
Here it's many things. Jess is very down to earth. She never makes a big deal out of herself. If we're sitting down and everybody's doing introductions, you wouldn't often guess that she's the founder of the place. Cooking together, doing dishes together. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of Google. If you come here, we're going to do dishes together. This kind of doing things, getting your hands dirty side by side with somebody, helps maintain a low hierarchy and seeing each other as human beings.
Going to the sauna as well.
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**Sharon:** What didn't feel like that, then?
**Tuli:** I think it's really when you have these extremely institutional environments where people feel insecure, where you have this strong representative role that you're playing. Those are the environments where what is happening here is not taking place.
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**Sharon:** I'm trying to slowly flush out the blueprints. My assumption, from the 50% bachelor degree I've done in arts, is that we learn from the hard parts, from the mistakes, from the conflicts, and then we go beyond them. We also learn through a lot of negation to prove a point. AI is kind of showing us how we are. I feel like there's so many of us trying so many places where it's always "oh, this is not the place, this didn't feel right." I wonder if we can slowly fish out the conditions for collaboration at a higher level. So I'm hearing you say places that are less institutional, less about your degrees or your headlines.
**Tuli:** I think it comes down to psychological safety and trust. In a lot of organizational contexts, you need to secure your own setup, make sure your projects are good, that you're in a good position within the organization. That's part of it.
That's also why I feel basic things like doing the dishes can make a difference. That's not something we share typically in our working environments. We don't see those parts of each other. We don't connect on different kinds of levels.
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**Sharon:** What have you seen come out of people collaborating over here?
**Tuli:** There are many different things coming out. Some are bigger research collaborations. Some are art pieces that people are building together. There are different formats. Something developed for Open Science Week is now being brought by parts of the community to different events. There are also a lot of people making books or films, getting inspired to make those books and films by the conversations of this place.
So there are direct, bigger and smaller, micro and macro forms of collaboration that come about. Like this afternoon we did a nail salon. It started with somebody saying they had a glitter nail polish in their car. Everybody brought out their different polishes, and all of a sudden we had ten people painting each other's nails, some for the first time. There was no effort, coordination, planning, scheduling, timing. It just happened.
---
**Sharon:** What do you think is the importance of places like this now? There's something sweet and beautiful, and maybe a little surprising, that this highly curated place of intellectuals and changemakers, people in their mid 30s and 40s, ends up painting each other's nails at noon in the chateau. What need does this place answer for you?
**Tuli:** There are different angles. One is definitely that we don't have spaces for emergence and common sense-making. If I go to any conference in Geneva, the schedule is fully booked with sitting and talking in different formats. A panel conversation, a keynote speech. When we have many people in the room, one person is talking and everybody else is listening, and we know what we're talking about. There's an agenda, it's fixed.
We really need spaces where there's space for the unplanned, the unrehearsed, the yet unthought of. Where you can have a conversation with somebody from a completely different field, and then have a moment of a new connection, a new link that helps you to operate better in the world, that gives you the perspective needed to come up with proposals and approaches we really need in these times.
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**Sharon:** And for you personally?
**Tuli:** For me personally, honestly, I'm emigrating to Geneva and I feel very lost. I broke up with my partner, and this place is such a soft landing pad to just be and think about what my next steps are, in a place that's deeply nourishing on so many levels.
Food that's great, exercises that someone just decides to do every day, the intellectual conversations, the cool projects people are working on. For me, it's deeply nourishing.
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**Sharon:** A hub, a catalyst to see how it can be to live in a community.
**Tuli:** Yes. Mathieu talks about the effect where there was this ghost timeline of how fast people thought they could run 100 meters, and once it was broken, then it was possible for others to go for it. I'm resonating with that. To be able to experience how life can be makes it possible to plan and act and design systems accordingly.
For myself, I've been lucky to spend a lot of time in different kinds of communities, including inside institutions, in weird parts of institutions where these kinds of communities have existed. Then something tends to happen over time where they start to wither, or don't withstand the administration, or whatever happens, and it falls apart. Here I feel like it's really growing, becoming stronger, which is great to see as a development.
For me it's also a very nourishing environment. I love the embodied parts of doing breathwork, going to the sauna, doing sports, setting up a volleyball net. The intellectual stimulation, being able to talk with people from very different backgrounds, not only culturally but also in thinking styles and fields. Being able to navigate when I want to be social and be in these beautiful moments like we're having right now, and when I want to focus on my own work, and having all of this available, is really a beautiful offering and a space to be in.
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**Sharon:** Could you name one significant effect this place has had on your perspective or your life?
**Tuli:** For me, one of the effects is that people here are so much coming from the "yes, and" mentality that it's an invitation to be more of myself and do more of the things I might not be doing in different environments. That's a significant effect, because just being here makes me feel like everything I want to bring out, I can. And actually, it's not enough. I can bring out more. This is not a typical environment.
Also, feeling enabled. We had some conversations about hyperstitioning with an AI researcher, and 24 hours later we had this working prototype of how we can come up with hyperstitions collectively, and we started to play with that. It was so nice. I entered the fireplace room and people were laughing, and I had no idea that a system had already been set up. It brings a lot of joy and new openings, new pathways to develop further. For me that is something I think is quite unique to this place.
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**Sharon:** I've been hearing about the AI bubble getting bigger over the last two or three years. Up to the point I arrived here this season, it felt like a buzzword, something happening in my social media stream. Then it felt quite integrated here, in a way that's okay. Now I understand how to work better with these tools. As the world becomes a place where people are spending more time on their computers, even here it's quite hard to get people outside of their computers. What do you see as the role of a place like this in how it interacts with this technological wave?
**Tuli:** There are multiple ways. We have some technologies, some robots, building cutting-edge stuff in house. If anybody has a question, there's actually a deep way to explore and find answers. At the same time, we have AI Radio, where there's an AI agent or symbiont that's evolving with all the people interacting with it. It's such an easy thing because it's just on your phone's chat. For many people, it's the first time they're interacting with a technological entity like that.
Again, the psychological safety makes it so that people feel comfortable to ask. In many environments you feel potentially ashamed to ask dumb questions. Here there really are no dumb questions. Controversy is also welcome. Somebody working with planetary health or ethics can raise questions that are actually welcomed by the technologically oriented people. I really like that these conversations can happen, and I think they could even happen more intentionally, because there are not many environments that can hold that kind of polarization.
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**Sharon:** If you think ten years into the future, where everything is possible, the right people are here, the best funding is available, what's the potential of a place like this? What's the potential of Feytopia? And how do you think we can get there?
**Tuli:** Part of it is being an inspirational space of hope, a space where you can see how enjoyable and meaningful life can be at the same time. Not some kind of escape, but actually finding meaning in deepening connections with each other. The context, the forest, is also a really important part here.
What I would love to see is different working groups here, a bit like at Black Mountain College or MIT Media Lab, that could really develop some kind of line of work and research and contribution to the bigger whole that is hard to do somewhere else, that is really enabled by the context here.
It could be about self-expression. What are all the different forms of that? How can we increase it and support people to find their own form of it? It could be along the lines of symbionts, and how we can actually develop mutually beneficial technological and human entities. Also collaborative processes. I would love to see work being tried, tested, developed here that can inspire and spread into different parts of the world as well.
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**Sharon:** What do you think has prevented it from happening up until now? Or what needs to be put in place for these groups to thrive here?
**Tuli:** It needs a little bit of intentionality and funding. There's this creative energy with the residency period, but it's only part of the year, and people have very different motivations to come. Some come to really recharge, some to be inspired, some are transient. So it would take some coordination, having different people who want to take stewardship of these topics or groups, and having significant time and funding, the resources around them.
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**Sharon:** Do you have a personal story about a collaboration that felt good for you here? Maybe a story that someone who hasn't been here can try to understand, to get a sense of how things happen?
**Tuli:** It's difficult because there are so many, some bigger and some smaller.
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**Sharon:** I'll tell a version, and you guide me to a better version. Sitting alone one night, I love to work with the autopilot mode that we sometimes engage in without knowing we're in it. So I invited people to show how they dry themselves with a towel.
**Tuli:** Yes. You go to the shower, exit the shower, take the towel, and get dry. Everybody does it in a different way, and we don't often pay attention to that. Somebody started going through the routine, and we learned so much as a group. It was so much fun.
There were a few women who went through their routine and the guys were very impressed. They were like, "Wow, you're enjoying drying yourself so much. I'm inspired. I want to do it differently." Somebody shared that there are actually sides to the towel, and everybody was like, "What? There are sides to the towel?" It had never crossed my mind. It was this delightful moment of collective learning and sharing that just popped out. It felt really curious and nourishing.
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**Sharon:** For the sake of the AI transcription that's going to come out of this, can you give one more story?
**Tuli:** I could also tell about the Burning Nest installation. That might be a nice story.
Last season I got invited to submit an art proposal to a festival. I happened to mention this to the people who were around, and somebody said, "Oh, I would love to do that. Let's plan something." He's an electric technician, so we started to think about sensors and different technologies. There are two other people based in the UK where the festival was happening who said, "Great, we're going to join, we're going to help out." I pulled in a musician to support the audio part of the project. All of a sudden we wrote a grant, we won the grant, and in May we installed this interactive, immersive installation at the festival. It happened very fast, very easily, and it was very enriching for the people in the project.
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**Sharon:** What was the timeline?
**Tuli:** The first invitation and idea came in February. We had a few meetings along the way, ordered electronics, ordered all the hardware, set up. The festival was in May. So most of it happened here. This is the incubator from start to finish. We did actually decentralize for a few weeks. We ordered the structures to the UK, the electronics to Spain, so everything was a bit in different places and then came together. But the incubation had been here.
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**Sharon:** I'm doing all of these interviews, and from the researcher point of view that's asking how we collaborate better here, what questions do you think we should ask? What topics should we talk about, so that if I'm going to have a hundred recorded conversations, it allows everyone to see this place in a new light, to understand what's happening, how we can make better collaborations here that last longer, that have more success? What is already here, and what is needed? What are your answers to this, and what questions do you think we should ask?
**Tuli:** The first thing that comes to mind is the latent potential of the network and people here. So asking, in the last month, six months, whatever period of time is relevant, who have you wanted to collaborate with? Because often you meet somebody curious and you're like, "Oh, it would be fun to do something with them," but maybe nothing materializes. There's the latent part, and then there are the existing collaborations.
What we don't know is the impact of something that might have happened here, the impact it has for the person it happened to. It might seem like a small or obvious thing, but actually it might be very meaningful and lead to different kinds of implications. Those two angles would be really curious.
We could also design processes around it. What came out recently is that people would be really curious to have a little bit of interest grouping and mapping, to see who's working on similar themes, who's interested to share, and just have spaces and conversations around these topics. Right now it's still very serendipitous. Sometimes it comes out, sometimes it comes out the last day somebody is here, and you're like, "What? I didn't know you're also working on these themes. We should have a meeting. I would love to talk more with you." So how can we make sure that happens early on, without overloading or being overbearing for the people here?
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**Sharon:** What else?
**Tuli:** It depends what purpose we're asking for. It would be really curious to know what happens easier or faster here, and what are the aspects that enable those things to take place compared with other contexts.
And what types of collaborations are coming out. Sometimes it's really hard to name something we might not even consider. In the study I did, I put up facilitation as a form of collaboration, which it is, but it might not be something that occurs to somebody used to being here, because those things are very commonplace.
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**Sharon:** So how would you answer these questions yourself? Starting with people you'd have liked to collaborate with.
**Tuli:** It's really hard. There are so many. We're talking with Katie about civic imagination, so that's an ongoing conversation. I'm so curious about many things, but it's hard to keep track.
There's obviously this trail with Poli, creating new forms of human-technological collaboration, and getting to be very curious in developing that.
I'm interested in governance and how to bring this project forward, especially in the context of France. What are the ways, instruments, mechanisms, people, connections through which this project can thrive? I care about that deeply.
There are so many that are more linked with creative practices and theater and developing characters that can be used in another environment. Or going deeper into Butoh practices, because I'm really curious about embodiments, and there are several people who have a Butoh practice here. Or sound design. It just feels like a rich garden. I don't know which plant to pick.
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**Sharon:** What was the next question? Faster, easier?
**Tuli:** My experience is that things happen here way quicker, and the planning, coordination, effort to make things happen is way lower. That makes me want to engage and build stuff way more.
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**Sharon:** And the impact of something happening here?
**Tuli:** For myself, helping to hold space for this art project, this immersive installation we put together, was really meaningful for me as a leader and space holder for this kind of work. It deepened my understanding of what I can do if I decide to hold this kind of space for others. I want to do more of that now. So it had a big impact.
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**Sharon:** And what kind of collaborations happen here?
**Tuli:** Probably types that have already come out. Everything from very small things, like leading a workshop or coming up with a small experience, to bigger ones, like thinking about New European Bauhaus proposals or how the space could grow in four years, or planting trees that we'll see grow but that will take 10 to 20 years. Very different time scales, different formats of project.
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**Sharon:** What makes you so inspired to collaborate with this space? Why put so much energy in?
**Tuli:** For me, these are exactly the kinds of spaces we need to be having, that we need to be supporting, where it's human centered, but not only. It's also life centered. Here there's a big alignment between how things flow and what's happening.
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**Sharon:** Do you have some concept in your mind like, "Wow, this is great, I really want to contribute and double down on this place, because if I do, then this could happen"?
**Tuli:** I really just think we need more of this in the world. What can happen is maybe humanity finds the most beautiful world that our hearts know is possible. I don't know what would be more worth it. It can be transformative for the lives of people who pass through here. It can be transformative for the lives of people those people meet. It can inspire new trails and new forms of practice in different spaces. I don't know what would be more worthwhile than that.
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**Sharon:** What do you think your unique gift is in making this happen here?
**Tuli:** My curiosity and enthusiasm to learn from all kinds of different practices and people. I have a natural tendency to just go nuts when I get to do that. Also, I love when we have inclusive environments where everybody feels welcome and feels they have a space in the herd. I really love to support environments where everybody has a seat at the table. Those are at least two things I can contribute with.
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**Sharon:** Last question. I'm curious if you can say anything about a moment that was actually very challenging here for you, and how did you go through it?
**Tuli:** I remember last year, there was a week where I felt very unseen, because there were a lot of people who knew each other very well, and maybe there's a fatigue with so many people transitioning through.
Also, because there are emotionally mature people here who can serve as mirrors, it triggered something in me, and I felt very vulnerable. I just went to the forest, and I think I cried for three hours at the crossing of all the roads there. Some people were having a walk and they just walked by and let me be inside of my sorrow and my process. Then I could come back here and also be met in that, and also be fine with having this turbulence going on in me.
I like that here you have a space to isolate or go to the forest, and then come back to the community.
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**Sharon:** How do you feel the community met you in this?
**Tuli:** There were many people who offered to talk, or their presence, not forcing it, which was perfect for me. I actually do feel some butterfly effects of that this year. At least I imagine them to. That's what they are. There's very much these quick processes we talked about, but there are also these slow processes.
This year for my birthday here, I felt so seen, so loved, that it was overwhelmingly beautiful.
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**Sharon:** Thank you. Anything else you want to say before we close?
**Tuuli:** For me, it's complete. Maybe I could have spoken more from my institutional researcher background, but you were inviting me more to the personal space, so it's also fun to go there.
Maybe one last question I can say: is there anything you think you're not doing, or could do better, to get the most value from these interviews in a way that can benefit the project as well?
I'd be curious to have a conversation about what your goals are, what you hope to capture and share, the angles and aspects of that. Without that it's really hard to say. In any case, in any form or shape, it's beautiful that you're capturing this version of the people here, what is happening here. That holds already a lot of the value.
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