Previous Residencies
Our Past Residencies
What is 'Sympoiesis'?
Image Credits: Christelle Enault
From October 2021, we have been running a series of 'Sympoiesis Residencies'.
Sympoiesis is a term that Donna Harraway developed in her book 'Staying with the Trouble' which means: "interfacing between different viewpoints (and in fact disciplines of science) to establish a principle of collaboration (synergy) by which the expertise of either standpoint can be combined, and enhanced, to bring out new understanding."
This concept seemed appropriate at a time when, despite our best intentions, any attempt to do things together often leads to conflict. Whether in our personal relationships, our workplaces or in the most beautiful intentional community projects, violence, injustice and power dynamics inevitably come to the fore.
Stuck in our perceptions, we are often the victim of the one we oppress, unable to get out of our crossed projections.
So the question is how to deal with this dynamic which is part of our collective trauma and which is rooted in a culture of polarisation of which we are only the mirror? How do we get out of the paradigm of good and evil, of failure and success in order to stop feeding the injustice, violence and oppression in this world?
Rather than hope for a different future we start adapting deeply now, remaking the future sympoietically. We are being-_with what is coming.,_We create a frame of togetherness to adjust to the trouble.
Why Sympoiesis residencies
We know that many of us are interested in the transition, the state of the world. In our own ways, each of us is sensitive to it and wants to contribute to it.
However, we see that whatever good intentions, either in our personal, work or community life our automatic mechanisms seem to bring us back to suffering, injustice and oppression.
It is becoming clear that we need collective bodies (communities, sangha etc) to transform those mechanisms through collective practices and new social technologies.
Life Itself is organizing a series of experiential (and experimental) collective residencies under the title of Sympoiesis where we can explore what practices and social technologies we need to cultivate the disposition of "being with".
Each residency will run for a month with the first starting in mid October 2021. Residencies combine both an activating frame of collective practices ( sitting, cooking, cleaning as the MVP) with the space for you to continue your daily work.
