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]]>In this interview, Claire Milne, Inner Transition Coordinator for the Transition Network, discusses the addictive qualities of digital technologies, how we can make peace with them in our own lives, and how to repurpose these technologies for the transition to a more just, caring and ecological future.
On 20th November, Claire will join Gaia Trustee Philippe Sibaud at 42 Acres Shoreditch in London to launch Gaia’s new report Wh@t on Earth: How digital technologies are severing our relationship from ourselves, each other and our living planet. Book now!
Tell us about your role at the Transition Network?
The Transition movement is about celebrating the wealth of our communities; it is a community-led global initiative to achieve spiritual growth and ecological, social and political change. I am both the Inner Transition Coordinator and I hold a role called Nurturing Collaboration. My roles are basically around the inner dimension of Transition and designing for collaborative culture.
Your work is in large part collaborative and reaching out to external organisations. Is there a place for digital technology in your work in Inner Transition?
I feel like although it [digital technology] plays a role in eroding deeper relationships I also feel like it’s playing, in some respects, very positive roles in connecting people at levels of scale that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible. So being able to collaborate beyond the local level – at the regional, national and international levels – is very helpful.
Like with anything, if we are able to be in full choice we can have a healthy relationship with digital technology and it can play a healthy role in our life. Then it starts to get more complicated because, you could equally say that hard-core Class A drugs are not wrong, because at the end of the day it’s about our relationship with them. But what we know about Class A drugs or even technology is that the way they interact with our neurobiology [has] the potential to be hurtful at the physiological and psychological level. Then it becomes more complicated because what we’re being asked to do is recover from addiction.
What part does technology play in the Transition Network’s ideal envisioned future?
I find it really helpful to ask the question: ‘is the world that I’m longing for and that my life is dedicated to in part creating screen based?’ The answer is really clearly no.
But another a part of me recognises that at the stage that we’re at, there is a need for some degree of that relationship with digital technology to enable that scale of change that is required in order to bring about transformation. And at the same time to have the depth of psychological and spiritual transformation that’s needed for us as a species, to survive, there is equal need for us to have times in our lives that are free from digital technology.
That comes back to the reality that technology has this addictive quality and therefore the creative tension that we’re all being asked to navigate at this point in history is how can we relate something that is so crucial to the transformation of our world in a way that doesn’t fall into encouraging that addiction.
And the degree to which we’re addicted to technology is seriously high, and plays out to the identity politics that were already there. The degree to which we are addicted and to what we are addicted to is correlated to the ideas we hold about what will make us lovable and feel like we belong and feel like we’re good enough. Technology just completely feeds into that, and that’s why at a psychological level it’s addictive.
In identity politics at the moment, there are certain aspects like the ‘work ethic’ that plays a big role in burn out. This core belief within us, seen as the capitalist protestant belief, that for us to be good enough – for us to be accepted by the tribe, for us to be loved – we need to be productive and we need to be good at stuff. It’s very clear that technology feeds that. It feeds this idea that we can be superhuman, we can get even more done, we can work 24/7. Social media feeds into identity politics, around what we look like and celebrity status and all the phenomena around getting likes. This is all about that addiction to looking good that feeds into these identity politics.
And I say this with compassion because it’s very easy to slip into a sort of persecutory tone, but the reality is that these are deep wounds and they’re painful and we develop behavioural strategies to protect us from feeling the wounding of believing we’re not lovable and don’t belong. These behavioural strategies have been really amplified and codified by technology.
We are at a tipping point in terms of the ecological damage that humans are causing to our living planet. We have so much knowledge about our impacts, but are arguably more disconnected from Earth than ever. Do you think digital tech is playing a role in that? Can we revive that important connection with the Earth in time before our crises totally overwhelm us?
On a good day I’ll feel like that’s possible and on a bad day I think that that’s just an absolute joke. And I don’t think anyone has the answer.
It comes back to that question: is the life I’m longing for screen-based? And I realise that’s not answering your question. I think that maybe what is important is being able to sit with the not knowing. Too much is unknown to know whether that depth of inner change is possible.
Because we cannot control what is happening, we can make a difference and make interventions. So whatever happens, we need to learn how to navigate challenging, precarious situations in the physical world. So the greatest privilege, and I think human right, is access to support around inner resilience: education around emotional intelligence, and inner resilience.
If we can be in choice around how we respond to things and in choice around how we respond to addictive substances like technology, then we have freedom. For me, the inner dimension of change and the inner dimension of transition are all about liberation from the ego and the superego, and the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism.
So ultimately, the future of the Earth and our interdependence with the other-than-human world is dependent on us liberating our egos from patriarchy and the conditions that then leads to the destruction of the Earth and other beings, because it is leading us to this state of disconnection, disillusionment and separation.
Do you see a correlation between technology and patriarchy?
I think it’s really important to look at the role that our relationship with technology is playing in coping with trauma. Because I think for a lot of people, connecting via technology enables us not to have to feel that trauma.
Connecting through technology really colludes with that dissociated state that comes with trauma. If we’re not in our bodies and in our hearts, then we can’t meet other beings from that heart-felt, emotional place, we’re just two heads meeting.
That dissociated state is what is very characteristic of a lot of society because there’s this sort of low-level trauma that’s just across the board, and I think that technology really speaks to that. A lot of the population are sort of drawn to connecting via technology because it protects us from feeling the pain and limitations around relationships.
Is there any practice that you employ to feel that reconnection with the Earth?
Well, an interesting one for me is the sit spot. And I work with the sit spot in two ways. There’s the kind of well-known sit spot where you go out and you find your spot in nature and take your attention 50% with yourself and 50% with your peripheral vision, which as a regular practice just allows this deepening of connection to the other-than-human world.
But the tune-up on that would be the inner sit spot. So bound out into the world to find your sit spot, and then practice the inner sit spot, whereby you go in to your inner world. It could take the form of a body scan or all sorts of mindfulness practices, but there’s something really beautiful about the combination of that classic sit spot out in the world and then combining that with an inner sit spot to make sure you are in connection with yourself as well.
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]]>The post Who are the new Co-op weavers? appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Although Rochdale is normally credited as the “birthplace of cooperation” records show that in 1761, sixteen weavers in Ayrshire set up “The Society of Weavers in Finnick”, arguably the first co-operative organisation of the industrial age. It was some 83 years later, in 1844 that the infamous Rochdale Pioneers opened their store in Toad Lane, Rochdale and devised the principles which became the model for cooperatives worldwide.
Regardless of the dates, both groups had the same objectives, and the Fenwick charter required members to be “honest and faithful to one another … and to make good and sufficient work and exact neither higher nor lower prices than are accustomed in the towns and parishes of the neighbourhood”.
Fenwick survived on tweed and muslin weaving, shoemaking and farming and its tradesmen depended on patronage by the local elite. The late 1700s were a period of rapid change in the textile industry, with increasing pressure from agents and manufacturers to lower prices. Inspectors were employed to check the quality of work and prices, and it could be disastrous for a village to gain a bad reputation for quality, over-charging, or late delivery.
It does not take much imagination to see the parallels between the pressures placed on the Fenwick weavers and the perils of today’s “gig economy” workers whose livelihoods can be ruined by a few bad ratings and a damaged, digital, reputation.
The weavers’ society began by buying and sharing materials and looms in an effort to reduce operating costs for their members whilst still delivering a quality service. Together they were weaving threads into cloth, creating the materials the nation required for clothing and linen, quite literally weaving the ‘fabric of society’.
Today the term ‘thread’ has taken on another meaning and even the Oxford English Dictionary includes a second definition, after sewing and weaving, citing a thread as “a group of linked messages posted on an Internet forum that share a common subject or theme” and it is here, in this new digital domain, that a renewed essence of cooperation is emerging.
As the body of collective knowledge available via the internet, and technological developments, expand exponentially delivering unforeseen changes to the fabric of todays societies, the digital threads of collaboration are being teased out, untangled and woven into something better by a new type of co-operative weaver.
The internet has spawned a myriad of collaborative projects, the most notable of which are still Wikipedia, Firefox and Linux itself – the open source kernel which supports majority of the internet – but, in general, effective large-scale online collaboration has been extremely slow to evolve. Instead we are presented with a cacophony of voices all vying for our waning attention and, despite our best efforts, we naturally gravitate into internet silos which hamper the cross-pollination of ideas and opinions. Plus, now publishing one’s ideas has become so easy, there is often huge overlap between disparate groups who share exactly the same vision, purpose and objectives but remain ignorant of each others’ existence, or unsure how they could collaborate when they do discover each other.
This is the realm in which The Collaborative Technology Alliance highlights the objective: “There are many groups around the world working to deliver a more open, more collaborative and inclusive society. These groups are intention-aligned but remain disparate initiatives, which means they fail to benefit from the network effect”.
Imagine how much more effective we could be if the members of the Transition Network, NEON, Occupy, The Solidarity Economy, The Internet of Ownership, The WWOOFers, The Eco village Network and all the other hundreds and thousands of like-minded networks were actively collaborating on creating the type of society to which they all aspire. The network effect would be unstoppable.
The good news is that there are people working on uniting these groups and they are the new co-op weavers: People like Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholtz from the Platform Cooperativism movement, Michel Bauwens and all his excellent collaborators at the Peer to Peer Foundation, Fransesca Pick and her fellow connectors at OuiShare, Arthur Brock and the other boffins behind Holo (the new alternative to blockchain), and Pia Mancini and the other hackers and makers behind Democracy.earth. These are just some of the people that are using the warp and the weft of the world wide web to to weave a new fabric for our society; A fabric woven from the cooperative spirit which has been missing from our world for too long. We are extremely proud to be hosting most of the above names, as well as a hundreds of other would-be-weavers to the second Platform Co-op conference, OPEN 2018, which will take place in London in July.
Once the original Fenwick weavers got together in 1761 it was not long before they branched out into food and “victuals” by buying a sack of oatmeal at wholesale to sell to their members in smaller quantities at cut prices. Very soon they began lending money to needy members and their families making the Fenwick Society the first recorded credit union in the world. The story in Rochdale was very similar. The Pioneers decided it was time shoppers were treated with honesty, openness and respect, that they should be able to share in the profits that their custom contributed to and that they should have a democratic right to have a say in the business. Every customer of the shop became a member and so had a true stake in the business. When you think about it like that, and what transpired as a result of those pioneers, we would do well to recognise the new co-operative weavers of today and to assist them in every way we can.
Come to OPEN 2018 on the 26th & 27th of July to meet many of the people named above and help co-create a cooperative future.
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]]>The post Transition and the Commons: freeing our imaginations appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>On 16 November I was in Brussels for the first European Commons Assembly: a gathering of over 100 people from all over Europe and beyond who are stepping forward to make visible, manage and protect the resources that we as citizens hold in common. We held our session in the European Parliament, hosted by members of the Inter-Group on Common Goods: MEPs who have formed a new working group that will include strategy on the commons in political debate. This is a milestone: the meeting of these two separate groups for the purpose of proposing policy that could be enacted across EU states sends out a number of signals.
“Only the purpose of a coherent community, fully alive in both the world and in the minds of its members, can carry us beyond fragmentation, contradiction, and negativity, teaching us to preserve, not in opposition but in affirmation and affection, all things needful to make us glad to live”.
American poet and ecologist Wendell Berry
One is a call to those working in this space (and the Commons is all about spaces) that the work we are doing to protect our water, soils, fisheries, public spaces, shared knowledge, local food and energy production and digital networks is seen and valued. Another is that the transition to sustainable living, to itself be sustainable, is being called to grapple with issues of governance and law so that we can build frameworks that uphold and validate our work.
A third signal is simply that all the shared ideas and language around the Commons offer a lively, inclusive space in which we can find Eco-Villages, the Internet, Permaculture, municipalities and mayors, mapping, Community Land Trusts, local Democracy, Transition, farmers, housing co-ops and the many facets of this movement. A movement that now appears to be moving in from the margins as more people realize that whole-systems change takes all of us to join in.
So what is the Commons? I’m going to make a quick backtrack for those of you curious to know more. In Europe we first hear about the Commons from the Roman Emperor Justinian who in 535 AD placed res communes (shared things) in the body of law he drew up. “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind—the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea”.
Here in the UK, and in much of the western world, our law is based on Roman law, which is essentially about property. The commons are documented in the historical record when they but up against enclosure. Famously the Charter of the Forest, issued in 1217, two years after Magna Carta, gave common people access to the hunting ground of the King for activities from which they could gain a livelihood. Commoning (exercising those activities) kept the Commons alive, and still does.
The Forest Charter’s 1st Chapter saved common of pasture for all those “accustomed” to it. The 9th chapter provided agistment (pasturing of livestock) and pannage (pasturing of pigs) to freemen. The 13th stated that every freeman shall have his honey. The 14th chapter said that those who come to buy wood, timber, bark or charcoal and carry it out in carts must pay chiminage (a road tax) but those who carry wood, bark or charcoal on their backs need not pay chiminage.
I have focused on the rights relating to wood because wood in the Middle Ages was ubiquitous: it fuelled the economy, it shaped the architecture, it literally underpinned the culture. It was present in every aspect of life and dominated the life-supporting ecosystems of Europe. Fast forward to Standing Rock and you can see that the way indigenous peoples care for precious resources is akin to commoning, and that the market (rather than a king) is seeking to further enclose not just land but the whole Sioux culture. And the driving force now is oil.
We got into small groups during the Assembly to share what The Commons means to us, and I jotted down some of the answers: “Moving from I to We: the big problems we have are in common, we need to solve them in common.” “All those things that are not owned or enclosed: knowledge, water, the soil, the air….” “Those natural resources that support life on earth and that we all share”. “The commons expands civic space and the concept of what it means to be a citizen.” “They are reservoirs of bio-diversity”, “empowering community renewable energy”, “things that need to be excluded from the market because they are so vital to life”.
The EU Intergroup on Common Goods names “co-ops providing care for elderly in the neighbourhood, Greeks cooking for their crisis-struck neighbours in social solidarity initiatives, or collaborative production endeavours such as Wikipedia made possible by new technology”. And adds: “in discussions on climate change, on common ownership of water and in discussions on social justice, people have started appealing more to the concepts of ‘the common good,’ ‘commons’ or ‘public goods’ – all in parallel to the use of human rights. Surely the human rights discourse remains the most powerful social justice language we have, importantly enshrined in international conventions. With the concepts of the commons and common goods also gaining political traction our emancipatory spectrum is now being broadened. Tellingly, this discourse has now also reached Brussels.”
While in the Parliament we heard three policy proposals presented, Democracy as a Commons, Community Land Trusts (housing), and open technology for a Digital Commons. Altogether the collective of groups and individuals in the Commons Assembly prepared 26 proposals that are still being worked on for future submission.
These range from scientific commons and citizen science, the Commons and the solidarity economy, and currency as a commons to education, energy and knowledge. If you want to join in, please go to the European Commons Assembly website. At a time of deepening political upheaval I was heartened to read in the call that the European Commons Assembly put out that “we consider ourselves active and cooperative citizens caretakers working for healthy and fair neighbourhoods, cities and societies”.
What does Democracy as a Commons look like? We were reminded that Iceland crowd-sourced a whole new constitution. In Madrid, citizen candidates of popular unity won the election for the city administration. In Belgium the G1000 Citizens Summit had over 1000 people deliberating chosen topics. How can we scale these processes up? At local level, citizens can share power and promote public debate, organising their own civic discussions and inviting politicians to come and listen. At national level, we could demand a legal structure for citizen organising. And at municipal level we were reminded that in Bologna the Regolamento or Regulation on public collaboration for urban commons has enabled the community to take responsibility for its common good, creating a new dimension of the urban commons.
I saw an example of urban space in the process of becoming a commons when I was in Paris immediately before the Commons Assembly. As a co-founder of the Community Chartering Network I was work-shopping charters for community governance of the Commons with Remix the Commons, the organization that masterminded the Commons Assembly. We were invited to a meeting run by Civic Lab where they showed us the consultation they had been running with citizens in the 18th Arrondissement on the empty space beneath the raised metro railway lines between the Stalingrad and Barbes stops, along the Rue La Chapelle. The space had been a temporary camp for migrants, who were then moved on and the areas fenced off.
The city of Paris administration had then teamed up with the mayoral teams from several arrondissements in the north of Paris to call for ideas about what the space could become. As well as a covered urban promenade and cycle track, could there be more permanent meeting spaces, maybe for eating as well as gathering? How could all ethnic groups be made welcome? This was a space for the imagination if ever I saw one. And that is how I see the Commons: one of the most vibrant, connected and positive spaces for re-imagining what it means to be a citizen of place. Transition needs to be a part of this.
Isabel Carlisle. Cross posted from the Transition Network.
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]]>The post Introducing ’21 Stories of Transition’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Rob Hopkins introduces the Transition Network‘s new book compilation. Click here to pre-order the book..
November 1st sees the publication of a landmark new publication from Transition Network. ’21 Stories of Transition: how a movement of communities is coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world’ is published in advance of the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris in December, and is a joyous and inspiring celebration of what the Transition movement has become.
It tells 21 stories of 39 Transition projects in 15 countries, drawing out some staggering insights into their impacts (for example, between them, our 21 stories alone have saved car travel equivalent to driving to the Moon and back 3 times, installed renewable energy equivalent to that needed by 4,000 homes, put over £1 million of local currencies into circulation, and generated over 18,500 hours of volunteer input). But those are just the measurable impacts. So much of what these groups do is much harder to measure, but just as important.
Our stories are:
Told in the voices of the people making these projects happen, ’21 Stories for Transition’ also tells of the challenges groups face, and the strategies they develop to ensure the resilience not just of their projects, but also their groups. It’s the most heartwarming, diverse and colourful Transition publication yet. It will be published in both an English and a French edition.
The English edition will be published on November 1st, but you can pre-order now, and get your copy hot off the press. The French edition will follow a couple of weeks later. Over the 21 days before COP21, we will be publishing one of these stories every day, as well as sharing more news on Transition-related events that will be taking place in Paris during the conference.
’21 Stories of Transition’ is gorgeously designed, 96 pages long, in full colour. We think it is the most beautiful book on Transition yet published. It is NOT available via Amazon. We will be sending books out on November 1st. If you would like to order more than one, we are offering discounts for Transition groups:
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]]>The post Podcast of the Day: Isabelle Frémeaux, John Jordan and the rise of the insurrectionary imagination. appeared first on P2P Foundation.
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The following podcast (and text) is reposted from the Transition Network website.
Isabelle Frémeaux (IF) and John Jordan (JJ) are the co-founders of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. It’s a collective which , according to Isabelle, “aims at opening spaces, real or virtual, and bringing artists and activists together to work on and co-create more creative forms of resistance and civil disobedience”. Both have a long history in campaigns and movements, as well as the arts. I started by asking them to give us an overview of the kind of work they are involved in.
IF: The work we do has several dimensions. We do a lot of experiments. We like to call what we do experimental projects or pieces. We like the idea of experimenting collectively and accepting that sometimes things might fail, and that by embracing that capacity for failure we can be more creative. I’m by training an academic and a trainer, so I tend to be more into the training dimension of what we do.
We do quite a lot of workshops and trainings, from a day to 2 weeks with artists and activists to really see the synergies between arts and activism and often permaculture, and to see how when these three domains merge, we can create synergies for more creative, more efficient, more productive, more resilient projects that we aim to be projects that are geared towards forms of resistance and civil disobedience.
JJ: What we don’t do is ‘political art’. We’re quite critical of the notion of political art, which for us is art which is about political issues. Occasionally we make films and books but we call those “holidays in representation”. The majority of our work is not making films and books, it’s actually making these experiments which are really critiquing representation; the idea that most artists will make a performance about climate change or a sculptural installation about the loss of biodiversity or a film about climate justice.
What we are very clear about is that actually what we like to do, and what we think is vitally important, is to bring artists and activists together not to show the world but to transform it directly. Not to make images of politics, but to make politics artistic. The reason we work with these two worlds is we think that artists have a lot of creativity, a lot of capacity to think outside the box, a lot of capacity to transform things into poetics, yet often have big egos and not much social engagement.
We think activists – and of course these are generalisations – often have a lot of social critique, capacity to work collectively, but often a failure of imagination. Often the same rituals, the same kinds of demonstrations, the same kinds of tools for transforming society. By bringing these two worlds together, we think we can actually create something different.
We are always embedded in social movements. We spent 5 years as organisers within the Climate Camp and at the same time as organising the camp we were also organising workshops and actions that brought artists and activists together. For example one project was the creation of a thing called the Great Rebel Raft Regatta where we buried a whole load of boats in a forest a week before the Climate Camp happened in Kingsnorth.
The Climate Camp was a self-managed camp developed to create education and alternatives to the climate catastrophe, but it also always had an action at the end of it. This camp at Kingsnorth was actually to stop the building of a new coal fired power station that was taking place next to a power station that already existed. The project that we did, the Great Rebel Raft Regatta basically brought people together into affinity groups. We buried boats a week beforehand in the forest and with the boat was a bottle of rum. We also gave them a treasure map.
One of the Great Rebel Raft Regatta’s treasure maps.
We sent people off in their affinity groups to find the buried boat with the treasure map. They would dig up the boat, sleep in the forest overnight, then at 7 o’clock run out of the forest, take their boat onto the river and go and find and block the power station. We got about 150 people, and one boat managed to block a third of the power station and shut a third of it down. For us, it’s really using forms of action that are effective in terms of having an effect on the real world, but also are fun and adventurous. The whole aesthetic of the treasure map and the bottle of rum and the people dressed up as pirates brings a playful element to activism which we think is absolutely fundamental.
You use this term ‘insurrectionary imagination’. Could you just say a little bit more about what you mean by that?
IF: The imagination has the potential and is a fundamental ingredient for insurrection. We wanted to reclaim the offensive and the defiance that is often lacking in art. By calling it a ‘laboratory’ would call on the idea of imagination without having what we feel can be quite a bland understanding and bland connotation of the word ‘imagination’ which is very often seen as something lovely and creative and child-like by actually reclaiming the existence of the defiance of what we wanted to do. This is why we put the word ‘insurrectionary’ in the name of our collective.
JJ: Here’s how we describe it on our website:
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) merges art and life, creativity and resistance, proposition and opposition. Infamous for touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, turning hundreds of abandoned bikes into machines of disobedience and launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station; we treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection. The Lab of ii is now in the process of setting up an international utopian art/life school on a Permaculture farm in Brittany.
We don’t actually believe in the separation between artists and activists, and we don’t actually believe in those two terms. We think the notion of art as a separate action in everyday life is a very recent phenomenon within the Western tradition. In most cultures there isn’t a separation of art and everyday life.
We think that activism, this idea that activists have this monopoly on social change, is exactly the same as art having a monopoly on creativity. Actually everyone can and has the capacity and does change the world in some way, all the time. So in a way it’s a kind of dialectical relationship, because we wanted to get rid of both those notions. For us, creating an insurrection or some kind of revolutionary change (which we think is absolutely necessary), we have to provide the alternatives to capitalism and the climate catastrophe and resist the problems that are happening that we can’t divide.
We see the DNA of social transformation as being two strands. Being the creation of alternatives such as Transition Towns etc, and a resistance, a resistance against the fossil fuel industries, the banks that fund them and so on. One without the other is absolutely pointless, because if we don’t resist then we forget who the enemy is and there’s a massive danger that our projects become simply experiments in laboratories for new forms of green capitalism. If we don’t create the alternatives, then of course we simply have a culture of resistance and a culture that’s simply saying ‘no’ all the time and that isn’t sustainable in terms of mental health and personal sustainability because people just burn out.
Historically we see the division of these two movements being absolutely a problem, and I think the 1970s is a classic example. For us in all our projects, we try to make models of alternative forms of living. So we haven’t flown on a plane for 10 years, despite the fact that we have this international art world career, where most of the people in that world spend their life on aeroplanes. We live ecologically, we live in a yurt in a community where we set up an organic farm, where we put the land into production. For us that’s not necessarily political but that’s what we do normally anyway, and resistance work is always done without hierarchy. We teach consensus at the beginning of all our projects and we try and use permaculture principles to make them happen.
As one example, and this is relevant because our latest project is geared towards the COP 21 in Paris, the UN Climate Summit which is aiming to find a universal agreement on CO2 emissions and adaptation and so on in December this year. In 2009, we were invited by 2 museums to do projects around COP15 in Denmark, in Copenhagen. We were invited by the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.
We had already spent some time in Copenhagen. We published a book on alternatives called Paths Through Utopias, unfortunately only available in French, Korean and German. And we spent some time in Christiania in Copenhagen, a self-managed community in Copenhagen. We noticed then, during that time, that there were thousands of abandoned bikes all over Copenhagen. So we thought: there’s the material. There’s a permaculture principle, “create no waste”. We thought let’s see what we can do with the waste of Copenhagen with these abandoned bikes. Let’s transform them into tools of civil disobedience.
Traditionally, civil disobedience in the Gandhian, Thoreau tradition is through the body and we thought what can we do with the body and a bicycle? We proposed this to the two museums, they both agreed. In the project we worked with the Climate Camp as the movement we were working with and the idea was that we would produce prototypes in the Arnolfini Gallery where we would put 50 people together in an open free workshop, we would teach them the basics of permaculture principles and so on, and we would then go – ok, what can we do with these bikes, and design a prototype that we’d then take to Copenhagen to then scale up.
Then we had an interesting moment when both museums said “you can’t do any welding in the museum”. So we thought ok, fine, we’ll get a container outside and we can put an image in it and it’ll be a more public space anyway, so the problem was the solution. Then they had a phone call from the Copenhagen curator and she said “we’ve got a container, but there’s just one little thing. We just talked to the Police in Denmark, and there are certain rules about what is a bicycle.
A bicycle can’t have more than three wheels, it can’t be more than 3 metres long etc etc. If your objects are outside of those rules then you have to write to the police, you have to show them the design and it will take 3 weeks before they come back to you and say you’ve got the right to go on the road. So we said “well that’s very interesting, but we’re doing civil disobedience. We don’t really care whether the bikes are legal or not”. At which point there was this pause, and she was like “so you’re really going to do it…”
We’ve had this experience in the art world a lot. Basically, a lot of the art world pretends to do politics. They have these very radical texts and radical propositions. Maybe she imagined we were going to build these objects and stay in the museum, but for us that’s not the point. The point is actually to take action. Unfortunately the museum then pulled out, but we did find an ex-squat in Copenhagen which is a sort of art and cultural centre called the Candy Factory and produced a project there. About 200 people ended up being involved and took part in the demonstration against the corporate domination of the UN climate talks.
In a way this is a good example of how we think a lot of so-called political art at the moment, which is very trendy. There are endless biennials, museum exhibitions, theatre festivals which use the word ‘political’, ‘radical’, ‘socially engaged’ and so on. Actually, as far as we’re concerned, a lot of it is what we’d call “pictures of politics”.
You recently wrote that “the Left is very scared of using desire and the body and capitalism and the Right are brilliant at it”. Can you talk us through what the implications of that are, and for Transition as well?
IF: There is a tendency amongst the Left, and of course these are massive generalisations. A tendency to feel that the problem is what people don’t know and that therefore if we can produce more facts or figures or information or reports and that people know what’s going on; if we can show the maths, if we can have better pictures of the number of species that are going extinct or the number of people that are being affected, the figures of unemployment etc, then people will react. There’s this idea that there is a large number of people who do not act because they don’t know.
Whereas we believe that very often the problem is actually what people do know, that they cling on to things and values that have been the structure of their life for a long time, and that what generally makes people move is not rational thinking but much more often desires and fantasies of what could be.
There’s a beautiful quote by an American author called Stephen Duncan that puts it very beautifully, about “the dreams of what could be”. The dreams of what could be are much more located in the emotions, in the body, rather than in the left brain. It’s really important to combine them. It’s not a question of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying “stop all reports, stop all research, stop all science”. But to not overly rely on them.
The Clown Army at Gleneagles for the G8 Summit.
The numbers should be there as backup, to be used as crutches, but what is going to motivate most of us is to be able to experience emotionally and bodily a life that is more just, that is more healthy, that is more relaxed, that is more enjoyable. That’s not something that is purely rational. That is one of the knots that is very complicated to untie, the great lie of neo-liberalism and capitalism which is that more stuff necessarily means a better life. We know that it’s untrue, and yet this is something that is difficult to untie. We will manage to untie that by talking and calling upon people’s values.
At the same time, one of the notions that can be of new learning for projects like Transition Towns is that these emotions are the positive emotions of what could be, but also the negative emotions of what we know is wrong with what is going on. Actually, it is a matter of finding the balance and finding how one can feed the other and not overcome the other. Sometimes there can be a tendency to want to deny and obscure the anger and frustration at the injustice and the destruction.
Actually these emotions need to be acknowledged, and need to be used as fuel for resistance, while the emotions of what could be can be used as a tool to move forward to the alternative. It’s the combination of these two emotions that can make the social movements irresistible and indestructible, and very often the movements are indestructible when they’re only calling upon one of those. So it comes back to this DNA of the yes and the no, but I think it’s very true in the kind of emotions that we call upon in ourselves and in other people.
Permaculture is a big part of your work. Could you say a bit about that? Why is permaculture important to what you do?
IF: It offers a very inspiring and stable framework; a very stable value framework. To be able to work in the way we want, we thought that the three main pillars of permaculture are a very efficient way of making people understand that actually it’s not so complicated. Because the principles are a really good road map for working towards the system, and designs that are productive and resilient and respectful. Personally we feel very touched by the idea that you take nature as your teacher and the more you do that, the less you see nature as this external thing outside of you.
More and more you take it as a tool so that you can reintegrate yourself in nature which we’ve been taught to see as this thing…the fact that we very often talk about the environment is telling. It’s this thing that surrounds us, that obviously we’re not part of. Permaculture is an excellent tool to be able to reintegrate oneself into what is actually our only consistent. So we try to use the principles as frameworks for our experiments, and generally the spirit of permaculture is our inspiration.
JJ: And we have this 10 day training called ‘Think like a Forest’ which we have done 4 or 5 times over the past years. It’s actually very inspired – it’s a training in art, activism and permaculture and it really looks at what does art bring to activism, what does activism bring to art, what does art bring to permaculture, what does permaculture bring to art and activism and so forth, to look at it as a system of three worlds. That training was actually very inspired by a training by Starhawk, who’s an anarcho-feminist witch, very involved in the peace movement in the 80s and the alt to globalisation movement, who has a course called the Earth Activist Training Course which we both attended and was very much a big inspiration for us many, many years ago.
We modelled our course on that in a sense where there’s a permaculture element, but instead of having the witchcraft element, we replaced witchcraft with art. Her thing is earth-based spirituality, activism and permaculture, ours is art, activism and permaculture. And in a sense, art is magic. It’s a form of magic. We think that’s one of its powers, that actually things become true when enough people believe in them. Art is very good at weaving the magic that we need in these moments.
[This is an edited version of a longer conversation. You can hear our discussion in full in the podcast below:]
John and Isabelle are just two of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right). The book is published at the end of this month. TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time. Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015. Valid until 31 Dec 2015.
Originally published on April 2, 2015, by Rob Hopkins
The post Podcast of the Day: Isabelle Frémeaux, John Jordan and the rise of the insurrectionary imagination. appeared first on P2P Foundation.
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