Think Like a Forest: Art, Activism and Permaculture
Strengthening Our Roots: Skills for building campaigns on social and environmental justice as European grassroots youth groups
This project gathered participants from various countries around Europe, most of them involved in groups active locally on issues of environmental and/or social justice. The UK collective The Laboratory for Insurectionnary Imagination provided most of the content of the programme. During ten days, we explored how to develop effective campaigns and events using art-activism skills and the Permaculture design model.
This workshop was attended by young people coming from France, Hungary, Croatia, Danemark, Estonia, Belgium, Poland, Germany, Armenia, the UK and Ireland. They were artists, activists and individuals recognizing that these cannot be separated as fixed categories. Together we shared an amazing array of skills, knowledge and hunger for more.
As with all of EYFA' s projects, we shared and practice together methods for participatory and non-discriminatory discussion and decision-making processes such as consensus decision-making, hand signals and facilitation.
Permaculture
Applying nature's ancient patterns for building new social relationships.
From the observation of the way natural ecosystems function, we can derive various principles or attitudes* that can make our activities come closer to the efficiency, sustainability and resilience of these ecosystems. This has been the basis of a design model and philosophy called Permaculture, relying on three key concepts: Earth care, People care, Fair shares. It has and is being used a lot to design agricultural systems, but it can also be successfully applied to thinking about the way we live, work, resist and create together.
The document below is a a tool box of permaculture design put together by the Lab of I.I, mapping out a basis for this 'revolution disguised as gardening'.
*http://www.labofii.net/docs/13attitudes.pdf
Art-activism
On Art and Life
“We may see the overall meaning of art change profoundly from being an end to being a means, from holding out a promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating a way of living meaningfully in this one.” Alan Kaprow, in“The Real Experiment”.
“There are millions of books, essays, exhibitions, conference papers, videos, films, performances - warning us about our wasting world, describing the details of the approaching apocalypse. There is so much art about the crisis, art that illustrates the catastrophe and so little that believes it can stop it. (...)
“ Art is not enough” Performance Artist Guillermo Gomez- Pena reminds us. But I would add, it’s not that it’s not enough, it’s just that we have imprisoned it in a timid box labeled “representation”, a gilded cage that separates it from getting its hands dirty with radical politics, a solitary cell that fears collective action. Yet art has so much to offer, if only it was applied to the right contexts and had the courage to really expand it’s definitions, to let go and dissolve itself into life. (...)
And so designing propaganda for movements could be art, and writing about movements could be art and making films about movements could be art -- but for me it was much much more than that. Although these things were important, what was most important to me was that artists got involved in organising and moulding social movements like any other artistic material. What we needed was to make radical ecological justice politics as beautiful and desirable as the next i-pod, as inspirational as the fantasy of capitalism. For me art became the collective planning of events and the choreographing of mass actions of civil disobedience, it became the process of narrowing the gap between dream and action, the poetic and the political."
John Jordan, in his talk on Tales of Insurrectionary Imagination.