New possibilities — Accelerator Insights #4
This is the last of four blogs sharing insights from our involvement in the Julie’s Bicycle’s Accelerator Programme, exploring the role of neighbourhood festivals, celebrations and gatherings in bringing about more regenerative futures for the places we call home.
In the previous blogs we shared the beginnings of our journey into the field of Regenerative Design. We talked through the Regenerative Design Workshop that we held with Dr Tanja Beer, and dipped into how we’ve started thinking about the roles that cultural organisations might play in bringing about more regenerative cultures for the places we care about.
In this final blog we update on where things are with “Local Futures” and Walthamstow Garden Party. Reflecting on some key learnings and insights from our time as part of The Accelerator Programme, as well as questions that we’ll be carrying with us into the future.
This week the news that Walthamstow Garden Party won’t be going ahead was shared with everyone involved. Back in 2019 when we applied to be part of the Accelerator Programme, we could never have guessed that Walthamstow Garden Party 2019 would be our last festival in Lloyd Park. But the world looks very different now than it did back then.
There is sadness. Walthamstow Garden Party has created some incredible experiences and unforgettable memories for lots of people. At a personal level, working on the festival has been transformational. A hugely nourishing experience, which has brought together so many different parts of my “entangled life”. But mostly there is huge excitement. There is much to compost from this long collaboration and hopefully there is richer soil now, from which new seeds can grow.
As we come towards the end of the Accelerator Programme, it is safe to say that we are more confused now than when we began. We don’t have any answers, but we have learnt such a huge amount and have some powerful questions to help us navigate wisely through these uncertain times.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
We have come to our real work
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Our Real Work, Wendell Berry
Below are some of our key insights and questions from the last two years, exploring the role of neighbourhood festivals, celebrations and gatherings might play in bringing about more regenerative futures for the places we call home.
1) FRAMEWORKS
“Instead of programming us [frameworks], they break our programming. They encourage careful consideration of what is appropriate in a specific situation”. Carol Sanford The Regenerative Life
Reflecting back on the Regenerative Design Workshop, my key take away is that frameworks are essential if we want to avoid repeating patterns of the past. I know this sounds pretty basic — BUT my default response has always been to resist & rebel against these kinds of tools. I still remember ignoring all my teacher’s advice to plan and map out essays or exam questions. I was far too impatient for that, and would just dive straight in to writing; improvising my way through and letting the structure emerge.
BUT its pretty clear now, that we can no longer trust the default modes we have operated within. Delving into the design world, I can see the immense value of using these tools to help anchor thinking and push ourselves beyond limiting patterns of thinking.
This might sound easy, but I don’t underestimate how HARD this will be for us to put into action. It will take PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. I take great comfort from the testimony below from a LENSES practitioner, and understanding that this is not something we can master overnight:
“This way of thinking and being in the world is taking time to develop in me. At some stage I was a bit frustrated because I could see the aim of a regenerative project, but could not grasp how to do it. When I realized that this is not something that I could master overnight, and when I could see that for many practitioners this is a life work of self-development and service to others, then I got more relaxed. I understood that if I really want to follow this path I need to start to be more patient and gentle with myself and others”
How can we create more space to practice using frameworks which help push us beyond limiting patterns of thinking?
2) MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
“Restorative fairness prioritises repairing the harm already done, by putting those who have been harmed at the centre of decision making and making systemic injustices that caused the harm in the first place visible” Farhana Yamin, Climate Lawyer & Justice Activist
In May 2021 brave colleagues past and present from Barbican published Barbican Stories “An indispensable record of discrimination in the workplace. Written by current and former employees who have experienced racism at the Barbican”.
Shockingly, nothing in the publication was particularly surprising. These experiences have been talked about and shared by colleagues, artists and partners for years and years, both at the Barbican & across the sector. But as isolated incidents the visibility each story revealed was only ever partial & fragmented and therefore they were always managed and treated as unfortunate one off incidents.
In the The Long time Academy, podcast activist and storyteller Ella Saltmarsh talks to George The Poet about the importance of making the invisible systems we exist within more visible, using the analogy “spraying water on the web”. I love this analogy. The publication of Barbican Stories felt like an incredible collective act of “spraying water on the web” of structural inequality at the Barbican. Once revealed in this way, it was impossible to ignore.
Making the invisible visible feels particularly important in the Arts and Culture sector. So much of what has been historically funded and celebrated is shaped by invisible & enigmatic tastes, experiences and values of a few people. These invisible structures are so baked in & normalised that they often go completely unquestioned and shape so much of what is possible (and impossible).
Local collaborator Hassan Vawda writes beautifully about these questions in his paper “Activists, Influencers, or Participants?: A Muslim Culture Forum and the London Borough of Culture 2019” and in his article The Planet Solaris of DI
How might we move beyond “language of inclusion, reality of exclusion” / “language of collaboration, reality of extraction” by working harder to reveal invisible structures and be more transparent about the why, how and what we do?
3) ENDINGS
“Composers make; decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake there isn’t anything that composers can make with” Merlin Sheldrake, The Entangled Life
If we really want “to act upon the insights of the last two years” then we must create space for different ideas to emerge. We can’t do this without letting things end. I’ve just finished reading Merlin Sheldrake’s fascinating book about how fungi “make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures”. He talks beautifully about how composition and decomposition are both vital to life. And so, we must get much much better at decomposition and endings. Celebrating them and the possibilities that they offer us, rather than seeing them as failures.
What if we could learn from the beautiful work of Stewarding Loss to dedicate as much time, energy and care to ending Walthamstow Garden Party as we did to its beginning?
4) RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS
“Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death: and the deeds that ye do upon the earth, it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them” William Morris
Walthamstow Garden Party took place in the beautiful grounds of the William Morris Gallery, and this quote by Morris was one of our favourites. New / stronger / deeper / denser relationships with and between neighbours and place was undoubtedly one of the most precious outcomes associated with being part of the festival. But this relational work, often sat uncomfortably alongside the inevitable pressures, stresses & urgencies of making a large scale, two-day festival with over 100 organisations, 2000 participants and 30,000 attendees.
During a team workshop we came to a couple of questions:
- What if how we’re being is more important than what we’re doing?
- What if what we do could be in service to being in “right relationship” to each other and to place?
This felt like a really important shift. Relationships had made the festival possible, but the festival was putting strain on these relationships and limiting who we were in relationship with. If we really wanted to design for relationships to thrive, then a large-scale, annual festival was perhaps not the right convening call!
I enjoyed reading this article Community Principle: Weaving Form the Inside Out. It captures a lot of the challenges and learnings we’ve been wrangling with. It also reminds me of a fabulous passage in Seed & Spark about murmurations and the “rule of seven”. “When uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbours optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort”.
How might we focus more on weaving from the inside out, starting with ourselves and a small number of close collaborators. How might this approach help weave us back into everything and enable rich new possibilities to emerge, that are beyond anything we could ever plan for?
What might shift if we all nurtured deeper, denser relationships with fewer collaborators?
5) REGENERATIVE CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURES
“The future will not be a new, big tower of power. Our hope in the future is for well-trodden paths from house to house. That is the image that holds a lot of promise for our future.” David Steindlerast
One of the many contributing factors for deciding to end Walthamstow Garden Party was the sheer cost (financial and environmental) of building and managing the infrastructure of a temporary green field festival. So much of the budget was gobbled up by basic infrastructure costs; sound, staging, power, security, trackway, water, toilets etc … that came and went, and left behind a hefty carbon footprint. We began to imagine what might be possible if the equivalent budgets were spent on investing in social infrastructures that would support stronger / deeper / denser relationships to thrive year round. Once this began … there was really no going back.
For the culture sector, building, maintaining and filling up “shiny towers” seems to be the default option. I know that many of these spaces are invaluable, but buildings comes at a such huge financial and environmental cost. How might we start thinking more creatively about what future cultural infrastructures might look like?
We’re excited about some of the models that have been bubbling up through film project Leytonstone Loves Film. We’re keen to explore together what shared infrastructures might support local film exhibitors, film makers, film curators and film lovers to connect in the places they call home. What might a distributed network of “picture homes” of every shape and size look like up and down Leytonstone High Street (using churches, community halls, cafes, pubs, empty shops, parks and more) and how might everyone access a common pool of resources (kit, skills, tools, knowledge, ideas). I hope we can share more about this in coming months. For now, we’re keeping this question close to heart:
What might become possible if we invested more in the “well trodden paths between houses”?
Final Thoughts
Oufff. As I try to weave together the final strands from this tangle of blogs, I can’t help thinking it would have been easier had I worked within a better framework! Perhaps next time! Until then, I hope there are bits and bobs in here that might plant a seed or spark an idea. We are well outside our comfort zone, learning and embracing the inevitable confusion that comes from trying to break out of systems that are no longer fit for purpose. We are hugely privileged to do this work from within the context of a funded arts organisation. We know there are brilliant people, everywhere, doing this work already. What are the appropriate contributions we can make from where we are? Please get in touch if you have ideas, questions, thoughts…
