When individual stories are told (and heard), lived experiences expand into new territories… and understanding lived experiences is the basis for creating positive, lasting change.
When lived experience meets with learned experience something beyond knowledge is created.
We sense make together, and that springs into existance in a brand new form, which has not before been known in any space or time. So we focus specifically on what makes that contextually unique – as everything is.
“Everything is contextually unique” – Barbara Adam
So coming from this uniqueness, what is it that needs more of our attention from this?
Is it enough to be resolutely ‘in the present’?
How much of our shared future do we need to consider together in the present?
If ‘our’ future is not imagined as shared, then how do we know what we can sustain without each other?
How will our future gain it’s purest potential from the present without our imaginations being taken on a meaningful walk or a drunken meander? These types of questions and many more form in part, our explorations… often bringing many more questions before solutions can become within our reach.
Our work exists to create non-hierarchical platforms, so that all voices can be listened to, unfolding the latent agency of individuals, so all participants, if they choose, are to further become agents for sustained collective change.
For too long, solutions to systemic problems have been sought from skewed perspectives. Those with privilege and position have made the decisions and written the policy that affect the lives of vastly under-represented groups.
We create antidotes and alternatives to these narrow planes of operation.
We do this by disrupting outmoded research models, to naturally expand awareness that we hope substantially and sustainably continues to gain agency in everyday living for all who put the work in.
We work with people.
We challenge traditional notions of who gets a seat at ‘the’ table (and who gets to ask their questions).
By gathering people in equity and togetherness, we excavate their lived experiences and applied understandings without pre-judgement, so that what matters to each and every individual can be gently unfolded into significant enough forms to make the party wherever it is we find ourselves, together.
There is Freedom to be found in held spaces.
We create events.
We gather people.
We research through the lens of relationship, whilst ensuring the people are not the resource.
This means we actively combat oppression through practice, so that our working methods are not only inclusive, but reciprocal.
Quite simply, we pay back. Yes, this can mean with actual money.Yet the intention for any and all of our work remains the same: That the actual process of the research becomes an intervention for change. We do not only rely on changes coming through the research outcome or product.
Relational activism makes change happen through personal and informal relationships. It's open to anyone who wants to achieve social change but may not choose to participate in the demonstrations and campaigns of more “traditional” forms of activism.
Relational conceives of the individual as a member of a community; relational uses daily practices to change norms, and relational uses the private sphere for public purposes. In this way, relational activism locates agency in the collective and uses relationships as the locus for change.
Someone working with empathy, compassion, the ability to connect and form networks, with an understanding that sustained change happens through relationships, and someone who resolutely rejects the notion that those qualities are incompatible with leadership.
Holding neutral spaces of clear witnessing, Tim and Seth seek to gently unfold what matters to each and every individual who lands in the workshop space. People speak for themselves, and the conversations are not steered in pre-conceived direction which means there is no specific outcome expected or presumed. Thus, the modern compulsion to consume, achieve, attain something, has no place in this work. The work that Seth and Tim do together builds on the simple, everyday values of:
Curiosity, connection and creativity
Exploration of everyday lived relations
Story sharing …whilst aiming for institutional reform.
What if we began to rely on our fellow humans as equals, and they relied on us?
Coming from a place of mutual belonging, newly won through radical vulnerability,receptivity, and the destabilising of institutional hierarchy, it’s a strategy that the pairbelieve could pioneer huge systemic change.
‘An event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but there still is something there that cannot be outdated…..: it is an opening to the possible. It goes as much inside individuals as in the depths of society.’
– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Often activist practices are not included in the narratives of political and art history, or only acknowledged when purged of their radical aspects. By acting in new ways and identifying our ways of connecting that bring unusually diverse contexts together. Working tirelessly at creating and generously owning our own motifs of love emerging throughout our work, we can break through the mechanisms of exclusion and solidify our vision into its shifting shape of lightness of touch and formulated shapeless space – sharing love in its ‘living form’ rather than identification before purpose that heals and is a very real fix.
Adrienne Maree Brown writes:
“…humans so far have generally deified and aligned with the “king” of the jungle or forest – lions, tigers, bears. And yet so many of these creatures, for all their isolated ferocity and alpha power, are going extinct. While a major cause of that extinction is our human impact, there is something to be said for adaption, the adaption of small, collaborative species”.
It is this collaboration as a means to activate humanity, and our responses to the challenges we face, both personally and collectively. What if, rather than looking to the “kings” of the jungle – the leaders, the institutions and the systems - we adapt, via collaborative effort like the ants, the fungi, bacteria, squirrels, mice and bamboo of the natural world? What if, instead of expecting social intervention from on high, we asked our neighbours, our sisters, and brothers for help before it got too much?
What if potential crisis could be averted, because the community had open eyes and open hearts enough to hold the most vulnerable close?