Creative Lab

With Toni Spencer at Caddaford Barns Studio

28th March 2024

Details

“Targeting a climate resilient, sustainable world involves fundamental changes to how society functions, including changes to underlying values, worldviews, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships.”
– The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sixth Assessment Report 

Within modernity, the idealised life hides away any signs of death, decay and destruction. The falling apart of things: breakdown, collapse and disintegration are seen only as negative experiences. In any healthy ecosystem, these movements are essential for life, enacted by different  species, patterns and processes. 

Within nature, (including humans, even if we deny it), there is constant breakdown in intricate relationship with constant emergent life, and all the in betweens. This work sits alongside work such as Deep Adaptation, Hospicing Modernity, regenerative culture building and Postactivism ‘in practice’. Some questions we might explore:

• What have we forgotten, hidden away, denied? And what impact has that had culturally?
• How might the problem (increasing unhealthy collapse and breakdown) also be the doorway to the solution?
• If we had a healthy relationship with natural aggression, might we have less harmful violence?
• If we had a healthy relationship with grief and loss, might we have less depression and mental health breakdown?
• If we had healthy relationships with natural cycles of death, decay, entropy, might we have less attachment to growth, to perfection, to youth and to limited ideas of beauty and success?

Come and explore ideas, practices and questions around ‘a pedagogy of death, decay and destruction’ through creative exercises, collaborative responses and discussion. The day will be guided but with space for you to explore your own work and questions through the day, applying some of the activities directly to your own context.

In our organising and organisations, in our creativity and communities:

1. What will support a wider turning towards the realities of past, current and future collapse and destruction of ecosystems and social systems?
2. What will enable us to work with generative forms of death, decay and destruction to change ongoing patterns of harm?
3. What will nourish the soil of emergence  so that new ways of being and doing that are rooted in decolonial, deep ecological and healing orientations can emerge?

This day is for change agents, artists, systemic thinkers, facilitators, activists interested in processes and practices of change. Hosted by Toni Spencer as part of collective research into ‘a pedagogy of death, decay and destruction’ for systemic change praxis.

“Dismantle ,  Disrupt, De colonise and then re- imagine what it’s supposed to look like…”

“How can we hospice a dying way of knowing/being and assist with the birth of something new, still fragile, undefined and potentially (but not necessarily) wiser with radical tenderness?”

– Vanessa Andreotti

For more information about the project read here. 

This day is part of a wider research project kindly funded by Lankelly Chase.

£5 to book – more is welcome! A % of all donations will go to the Devon Wildlife Trust’s work with beavers.

More information on access and what to bring when you book a place.

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