Post Hibernation (a.k.a spring)
Trembling Aspen | Series 04_My Life Here | Issue_10
March 19, 2024. It’s been a tough winter. A winter of the soul. A time of darknesses and stillnesses. Which has meant being gentle with that same soul.
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March 09, 2024. I am in KocoGarden. I’ve been inhabiting the space again, coming down here to work when I can. My Mom’s artwork on the wall against which I lean. My artwork is playing on the screen in front of me. I’m jotting down these notes as the heater up to my left does it’s best to keep up with the chill. Jotting down the notes is like chopping vegetables. Not yet a meal, a finished piece of writing. There’s more work to do. But chopping the vegetables feels good. It’s six days until the opening of the Koganecho Bazaar and the Yokohama Triennale. In six days the exhibition opens. "Am I ready," I wonder, "to step with grace toward a moment of being seen?"(2)
One year ago I arrived in Yokohama. I know the rhythms of this place now, from Mach onward. I know what it feels like, how the days get longer, the air gets warmer, and the excitement builds as everyone prepares for the arrival of the cherry blossoms. The roads and bridges and sunshine and air and people are more familiar now. Home.
Although winter was marked by stillness, the thing about winter, as any good plant will tell you, means a lot happening underground. My time in soul stillness has coincided with an ease and flow in following my curiosity again. Luxuriating in wild rabbit trails, scampering down digital tunnels, chasing after what ever my heart-mind desired. It wasn’t any old trail. Secretly—maybe even secret to me—the little light I was chasing was a sense of my sacred vocation. Maybe that sounds all highfalutin, but it’s not.
I like the word sacred, as in every human and more-than-human thing in the world has intrinsic value. It is sacred. Including me. That sense of place in the world means there is work in the world for me to do. Also, I like the word vocation, rather than the word purpose, which to my ear has a utilitarian ring, a slight skew toward instrumentality. I connect the word vocation to the word work. Not work in the sense of mindless drudgery, a kind of strip mining the soul in exchange for sustenance. No, I mean work as in serious play. As in following your heart’s desire and your intellect’s joy because that leads you to the thing that flows out of you, and that other people, much to your surprise, need. The sacred work of being child-like. (Which, for the record, is different from being childish)
Anyway, I prefer sacred vocation, for all its old-timey-ness and possible confusion with religious sentiment. It's bigger than religion, which at it's best is an attempt to re-connect (re-ligāre “to bind, tie”; cf. ligament) us to what is. Sacredness is simply what is. And our vocation—our sacred work—as human beings, is to respond to the sacredness of what is.
Where were we? Oh, yeah. Rabbit trails. My rabbit trails lead to a series of articles about bioregional banks and multivalent currencies. (I told you it was a rabbit trail. But what a wonderful rabbit trail it’s been!) The articles, if you dare tread far into the realms of Nerd-dom, can be found here, here, here and here.
For me, those articles were like a spring chinook, all full of sunshine and birds singing. They were written by Emily Harris, of Dark Matter Laboratories. I reached out to Emily, we set up a call and I had a chat with Emily and her colleague, Fang.
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Fast forward to now
It's now March 19, four days after the opening of the Koganechō Bazaar. I'm delighted to say, Emily, Fang and I are collaborating on a project called Flow. Taking inspiration from the gratitude-grief quilt project (Unsanctioned Forms of Caring), we're exploring how we might shed light on the flow of often unseen things-of-value in a neighbourhood. Things like informal information, solidarity (a.k.a. a sense of belonging), and care. By way of the Flow project I’ll be creating tangible expressions of a possible future at the intersection of socially engaged art, social sculpture, facilitation and conversation design. It’s Solarpunk science fiction in the real world!
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A bit of context (without getting too nerdy)
There are multiple, systemic, interwoven crisis facing us humans currently inhabiting planet earth. These crises have been summed up as the Polycrisis. At the same time we—that same bunch of humans inhabiting planet earth—seem trapped by a constellation of beliefs and systems which render us seemingly incapable of doing anything meaningful about the Polycrisis which we are all perfectly capable of seeing. That phenomenon has been dubbed the MetaCrisis.
It’s problematic that the Metacrisis is only thought of as a problem. Which sounds ridiculous to say. Of course it’s a problem! But our way out, isn’t out. It's through. There is no technology that is not also bound by the limits of our biosphere. And sorry, but we aren’t all going to fly off to Mars (where all the same problems will follow us BTW, as we would bring them, like carry on, in our hearts).
Yes, the problems we face are big, and go deep. Therefore, the possibilities we face are equally big and deep. And they both start with us. The face in the mirror. How we live and move and breathe in the world. I am my one and only leverage point in the universe. The only thing I have direct control over.
This is what I see Dark Matter Labs doing, seeing the whole picture in all its ugliness, and then finding the one small, local, thing they can do about it. Following possibility, rather than getting crippled by problems. Looking for the one little tender shoot that can find the light, despite all the very obvious and loud darkness.
My experience has been—and this is the negative way to say this, feel free to help me figure out the positive spin—the issues at hand are both broader and deeper than we are generally used to attending to. The word radical (in the sense of root) is really important. On a broad conceptual level, I often see the shallow rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic of status quo, and very little deep, systemic engagement with the future ahead of us. Likewise, on the ground, I see a lot of failing-fast without any perspective, without knowing where our failing is taking us. The view from 30,000 feet matters, and so do details and nuance on the ground. It’s a delicate balance, attending to both the big picture and the particularities of here and now.
This is what I see the folks at Dark Matter Labs doing. They are attending to possibility, and at a depth and breadth that resonates with me. Deep and broad possibility. Whew. That's worth coming out of hibernation for.
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Flow will be happening in KocoGarden for the run of the Koganechō Bazaar, from March 15-June 09.
I've been posting to Instagram to both @br0ken_w1ng and @kocogarden_project
There is so much more to tell you, but we have to start somewhere after a winter of stillness. So, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’m part of. It feels daunting, and energizing, scary and exciting—thrilling would be the word.
Footnotes:
(1) You can find the feature image in its natural habitat, tucked away in a DMLabs provocation called "Radicle Civics — Building Proofs of Possibilities for a Civic Economy and Society" (I'm actually working with Radicle Civics, which is a sub-team of Dark Matter Labs, but that's a story for another time.)
(2) https://hereandnowstudios.com/parables-of-change. It's on the card on the left, above Parables of Change, in hard to read light peach coloured pencil.
Hey, I’m Steve, an artist-in-residence in Yokohama, Japan. I make collaborative art, participatory art, interactive new media installations, and abstract visual art. I explore themes of home, identity, belonging and how to live your life like a work of art. I write about it all in this very newsletter, Trembling Aspen.
I’m learning out loud so we can learn together.
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