Gentle Steps
ripening into livelihoods
Summer trail of the Seasonal Academy invites into a gentle growing of the seeds and landing intentions of your work into livelihood. The trail offers pathways into imaginative and critical thinking, deeply interconnected with sensing and feeling, unbound imagination and humbleness, in order to question taxonomies, make subversive connections, and imagine alternative structures for organisations that are life-supportive, for both human and more-than-human inhabitants of the planet.
Whatever is the project you wish to bring into life, this trail invites you to reimagine the practicalities and possibilities for its organisation, responding to a challenge that can be described as ‘capitalist realism’ (formulated by Mark Fisher). What do you need in order to land your vision? What can an organisation rooted in ecological care be? A mycelium network? An octopus? A strawberry field? A rainforest? How to find structures suitable for your work, redefining them on your own terms, through the lens of personal experiences?
What are other possible systems of value, infrastructure and exchange that center the living worlds over the accumulation of material and delusions of progress?
Often the established institutions and traditional businesses neglect ecological wellbeing, human and more-than-human, in a broader sense. Caring for costs only from an economical perspective doesn’t take into account all kinds of other costs: personal costs, environmental costs, social costs, wellbeing costs, ethical costs, relational costs. Caring solely for numbers as an indication of growth, makes one forget that there are all kinds of growth: personal growth, growth of a tree, growth of trust, depth, purpose, community, joy, growth of new life.
Whether you are growing tomatoes, making shoes, building homes or other tangible companions to human life, or if your work unfolds in the often invisible realms of culture, health, education or similar intangible necessities — encompassing various elements of a possible organisation, Gentle Steps offers a space to question the narratives we work by and experiment around ways of creating structures for your endeavours that compost infrastructures of separation and take root in attentive inter-being.
Trail flow
The old ways of “business as usual” are broken. They separated people from each other, from the natural environments, from our own bodies. We are searching for new pathways and invite you to join this lived inquiry into other kinds of organisations. Those that through their work honour multispecies ecological communities. Those that are bringing back instinct, intuition, wisdom of the body into all processes. Those that connect theory and practice to contribute to the emergence of economy of care, developing social and ecological sensitivity.
Week 1: Terraforming Fertile Grounds
If we understand culture like the soil we are in, this impulse is about working the ground, thinking conditions for other kinds of organisations into being. The constituent minerals and nutrients of the soil you lay in the beginning isn’t easy to replace later, as the flowers and fruit of your endeavours will bear the infallible taste of the culture that nourishes its roots.
Week 2: All Flourishing is Mutual
How will you move within the garden of your work? How will seeding be happening? Are seeds your property? Will competition have its space in your garden? How about symbiosis? What are your strategies for cultivation? In this session the notions and practices of commoning will be introduced, as ways of governing and organising ownership, touching on ideas of cosmolocalism, gift economy, open collaboration, contributive economy, commons-based ecosystems of production, mutualisation, and others.
Week 3: Organising Relations
The air is filled with tiredness of the usual hierarchical pyramids. This session offers pathways into thinking your project infrastructure as a potential variety of beings (an octopus, a firefly, an onion, a strawberry field, a rainforest, etc). We don’t have role models or easy narratives, but we will experiment with how to land visions for working relationships rooted in attention and care.
Week 4: Harvest
Understanding value usually ties up to money, and money is a challenging subject. But if it is not disconnected from relationships, if human economy is as sacred as everything else, how do we reinvent money? And what about all the non-monetary value? All value that can’t be measured with a simple capitalist logic? How do we nurture the mindset of abundance and respect the boundaries of the finite Planet at the same time? How do we liberate imagination of the possible from cultural habits of thinking? As Karen Barad puts it, we are not in-the-world, we are of-the-world, we co-shape its processes through our own perception and agreeing to what we assert as real and possible. This session invites into subjects around generative circular practices, degrowth and organising hope.
Week 5: When the Cows and Sheep Come Home
The closing week of the trail offers to think of the feral daily life of leading your project, to focus attention and intention, identify what is important and real, set priorities and structure your time, bringing values, intentions and practicalities into alignment with actions and impacts they have on ourselves and multiple others. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, there are some stories that may no longer be true: “What was true becomes meaningless, even a lie, because the truth has gone into another story. The water of the spring rises in another place”. This week will invite to welcome the fresh spring to rise.
Voices from the previous trails
Practical Infos
This is a self-paced learning experience. It begins with a personal live welcome session and ends with a contemplative closing session with one of the co-authors of the Seasonal Academy. If several participants wish to walk the trail together, we offer a possibility for both sessions to be collective rather than personal online meetings.
Every week recorded impulses and learning materials (including embodied practice and thinking-through-making invitations) will be shared with you on an online platform. Impulses are guided formats that try to be mostly screen-free and invite you for long walks and deep dives into practice. The online platform offers space for interacting with the team and sharing your process if you wish to do so.
All impulses will stay available for you to access at anytime also after the end of the trail.
Fees and Application
Applications for this edition are closed.
Visual Conversation: Charlotte Peys
“The time I spent in and with and surrounded by Foresta Collective was - as the name suggests - like spending time in a forest. I felt carried, cared for and part of a space full of interwoven and reciprocal relationships. In that space, the connections present in my personal and professional environment that I want to give attention to became clearer and stronger. Foresta Collective made visible what was already there in the most profound and shapeshifting way and for that I am grateful without end. I hope to care and carry it with me into the future.”
- Charlotte Peys (Ghent, Belgium) - artist, illustrator