cefndir: background
about the project
“Our job is to build contact zones of complex entanglement.
Where all are transformed by the engagement
and scientific knowers do not presume in advance they have the truth”
Donna Haraway
2020: Sgwrs Dyffryn Peris Conversation is an experiment, bringing together my background in facilitation and concern about the state of the world, in fy milltir sgwâr, Dyffryn Peris.
I want to find out what happens in a place - a place in transition, as all places are - when we explore that place using the basic building block of conversation and connection. To deliberately avoid large scale intervention and bureaucratic dictat. To deliberately engage in ‘issues’ and places that might bring joy and pride and/or (potential) contention and fragmentation. To aim to engage in the ‘messy entanglement’ of different knowledges, looking for common ground. And to see what emerges. With no end - or output, or expectation - in sight.
My aim in this conversation is just to get to know all beings - human and non-human - and their interactions and interdependencies better. Within the context of an existential crisis that is gripping the world, a situation in which nothing can be taken for granted, and there is potentially no solid ground. We (the whole world) really doesn’t know where we are going, or how to get there. We are facing - experiencing - huge loss. For some it is loss of life itself. The extinguishing of the possibility of continuing. Loss of land. Of belonging. Of our way of life. Donna Haraway says “We are all refugees - human and non human - without refuge”. In the global North, we are refugees from our lifestyles and our extractive, exploitative attitudes to each other and the world.
I am interested - in this time of conflict and division, itself a product of this crisis - in the potential of finding a new way of being in the world. And doing it from the ground up.
I want to try to start those conversations from a point of connection to this place, from our foundation of feet and roots and bellies in the land and water. I have no pre-conceived ideas as to their outcome. But I hope that conversation - deep conversation - might get below ‘positions’ into understanding interests and needs, and to build something from there. In doing so, I will try to work with embodied, subjective, experiential knowledge along with scientific and/or so called ‘expert’ knowledge (as Iain Biggs says, “avoiding authority/power claims based on the abstract discourse derived from that expertise”). And maybe we will together find a re-grounding, a way of belonging here to this place in a way that opens the opportunity for pleasure and flourishing, as well as for grieving what we have lost.
“Place-based identity, the sense of place,
is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere,
an antedote to a prevailing alienation”
- Lucy Lippard“The community is not a ‘common being’ but a ‘being in common’ - Jean-Luc Nancy
Roots back in 1992
In 1992, when I was 23, I set out to bring people together in Gloucestershire to work out what to do about this idea of ‘sustainable development’. I knew i’d like the world to be different (I was already concerned about climate change), but had no idea what to do about it other than to save energy or buy less stuff, or use less fossil fuels. And those things seemed obviously trivial in the face of the massive system change needed. I called the initiative Vision 21 in recognition that I had no vision of what the future might be (in the 21st Century), and as it grew (eventually to a network of 1,500 people, with 65 projects) we became the leading example of a “Local Agenda 21”. We paid attention to the process of bringing people together, and we developed a ‘guided visualisation’ journey for people to travel to the future, and envisage a sustainable future. We took thousands of people on that journey. The year we took them to was 2020.
And now we are about to be in 2020. Things have changed. Some of those visions are in place. And yet so much hasn’t changed at all. As a result, we are now in a crisis so deep that life-threatening climate change and species loss are recognised as a symptom of a deeper malaise - an ever deepening malaise in our relationships to each other and the world we live in.
And I still don’t know what to do! I have spent the last 20+ years facilitating discussions between people and places and organisations in an attempt to build new relationships and new bringing togethers of knowledge and world views. I know that this works, but it is hard to do within the context of big institutions, working primarily for the public sector.
A logical conclusion, for 2020, for me, is to go back to the basic unit of what works: the unit of conversation. At a local level - in my place. To build from there.
Please join me! Get in touch if you would like to have a conversation, or offer or suggest something else!
