Positive confusion — Accelerator Insights #2
This is the second 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 first blog we set out some of the initial questions we had at the start of the Accelerator Programme, at a time when we were still in planning mode for the 2020 & 2021 festivals.
Having accepted that these festivals weren’t going to happen. We began a new phase of our journey with less immediate delivery pressures and more time to hold collective conversations about what a re-imagined festival might look like in the future.
Re-imagining
In early 2021 we started to convene partners to explore ideas, hopes and dreams together. People were excited and hopeful that with a longer 18month lead time, new relationships, approaches, connections and learning might emerge and inform the shape of what might be possible together in 2022.
We organised a series of sessions focused on very practical questions that were emerging:
What if we designed a festival based around what is readily available in our local area?
How can we design for zero waste?
How can we decarbonise?
What should the overall values/ objectives of the festival be?
How should decisions be made?
Ideas from some of the sessions were documented in these wonderful visualisations by local artist Rae Goddard:
Building on these initial conversations, in May 2021 we worked together with local creatives to create an online “Imagination Exchange” a series of talks, conversations and activities, hosted on the digital community platform Mighty Networks
Sessions were convened by local organisations around a key provocation grown from the earlier workshops. Below are the amazing visuals from each of the main sessions relating to Walthamstow Garden Party.
What if everything we did was community powered?
Led by cohort partner Artillery
How can we re-imagine Cultural Infrastructures?
Led by Yaa Addae and Uzoma Orji and curated by Waltham Forest Muslim Culture Forum
Curating culture, who is excluded?
Led by Waltham Forest Muslim Culture Forum
What if we could make a grassroots Green New Deal happen in Waltham Forest powered by community and culture?
Led by artists Hilary Powell & Dan Edelstyn connected to their project POWER
The sessions threw up sooooooooo many more questions and sparked great conversations that pushed us to think about things differently and challenge how we were working.
Rapid Learning
Over this period, and largely thanks to a lock-down Christmas and a lengthy period of enforced hibernation, I also went on a bit of a personal reading frenzy. As a mum of three, including four year old twins, reading for pleasure had become a bit of a distant memory. Sleep was a scarce resource & usually swept me away within minutes of attempting to turn a page. But in early 2021 time seemed to slow down and amidst the chaos of family life, I began to read ferociously again.
One the books that really grabbed my attention was Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl. The book explores ways in which we can use better questions to reframe and understand the multiple crises that we currently face, letting go of the mirage of certainty and control to embrace complexity and emergence.
“By living and loving the questions more deeply we can rediscover the beauty and abundance around us, find deep meaning in belonging to the universe, deep joy in nurturing relationships with all of life, and deep satisfaction in co-creating a thriving and healthier life for all”
The book also led me to a fascinating conversation between Daniel Christian Wahl. and Michel Bauwens focused on The Re-emergence of the Commons & Cosmos Local Regeneration
“I believe that value is created by everyone. Value is created not by commodifying but by contribution. Every citizen, every inhabitant is productive and creates value. Caring is commoning. Caring is value creation.”
In the conversation they also talk about the idea of Cosmos Local.
“ … the ideal of cosmo-local is that everything that is light is shared globally and everything that is heavy is local…”
This concept caught our imagination. When we began thinking about our original enquiry into Local Futures [exploring the regenerative potential of local, place based approaches to festivals for both people and planet] it was never meant to be isolationist. Thinking about “everything that is light” … ideas, knowledge, imagination, creativity …being something that should shared collectively at a global scale and “everything that is heavy” …. production etc … being made and adapted from a local context, really made a lot of sense for our work.
The original framing of our enquiry [how a hyper local, community powered approach might increase the social & environment benefits of festivals] suddenly found a whole new language. The concept of Regenerative Cultures really helped us bring together the insights & learning from all the many conversations we’d been having on the ground with communities, with new frameworks and mental models focused on what working regeneratively might really mean and demand from us in the future.
EMERGING QUESTIONS
How could we go from doing things better, (being a more sustainable festival) to doing better things (being regenerative)?
How might a neighbourhood approach to festivals and cultural events help us rekindling deeper more regenerative relationships with the places we call home?
How might temporary events spaces be used as “living labs” to restore connections between people & place, cultures & nature and act as a testing ground to seed future potential in neighbourhoods?
What neighbourhood infrastructure would be needed to support these relationships to thrive beyond the temporal and spatial limits of events?
Through Julies Bicycle we connected with the fabulous Dr Tanja Beer, an ecological designer, community artist and Senior Lecturer in Design at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia.
The next blog will focus in on our foray into Regenerative Design, our work with Tanja and our first foray into using regenerative design tools and frameworks.
Links & further reading:
Mighty Networks: Is the community platform we used to host the Imagination Exchange
Waltham Forest Muslim Culture Forum is a network of local artists, heritage workers, and creative practitioners from Muslim backgrounds in Waltham Forest
Rae Goddard: Is a Walthamstow based artist who attended all our workshops and created all the incredible visual minutes included above.
Yaa Addae is a curator, artist & founder of A-Kra Studio. An art futurist laboratory based in Ghana.
Chidumaga Uzoma Orji is a creative technologist and visual artist based in Owerri, Nigeria.
Hilary Powel is a Walthamstow based artist using cultural action to challenge an increasingly unjust system and imagine another way of living.
Artillery Artillery is an arts development organisation based in Walthamstow, North East London, established by the creative team behind the E17 Art Trail.
Tanja Beer: is an ecological designer, community artist and Senior Lecturer in Design at the Queensland College of Art in Australia.
Daniel Christian Wahl. is the author of Designing Regenerative Cultures
Michel Bauwens is the founder of P2P Foundation, a non-profit organization and global network dedicated to advocacy and research of commons-oriented peer to peer (P2P) dynamics in society.
