Under the flying carpet
towards other futures – sense and learning to make sense together –
What Nora Bateson called symmathesy*?
In the welcome letter to the performance
I was invited to debrand my clothes, my shoes, my toothbrush and paste,
dress in black and white
and leave my phone at home.
It felt like preparing to join in with the most essential:
my debranded sensing body and mind.
This summer the performance group Sisters Hope invited to a series of 24 hours long “Sensuous City” performances in Copenhagen under the summer program of Metropolis.
Why do I choose to publish this experience in the framework of examples of Nordic practices about (un)sustainable development?
My main concern sharing this experience in a few poetic lines in this publication, is to highlight modes of being, that can re-enchant and relieve our life-worlds form the ever wanting more and more consuming promises of advertisements and never ever to be achieved for all humanity, as we experience more and more with growing migration caused by droughts, fires and economic injustice.
Sisters Hope offers experimental paths of discovering and sharing other modes of being. Epistemologically, Sisters Hope wants to contribute to research with qualitative sensuous findings, as the growing analog archive accessible for research.
“As critical theory has pointed, the economic system has largely governed and dominated western society since the industrialization. … Rational thought has been our dominating validation principle and economic premises, such as efficiency, duty and discipline have largely dominated everyday life in westerne society. … However, the governance is not sustainable as the current ecological and economic crisis points at, and it has lead to a fundamental de-enchantment of the life-worlds of modern (wo)man.”
Under the flying carpet
Sensuous space
first fiction
Together alone with about ten others
Sometimes with closed eyes
Sometimes with gaze eyes
Guided by the unnamed
Debranded
Even our names
Unimportant
Who are you
No question
Obvious a sensing body
Obvious
many sensing bodys
collective bodies sensing diversely
and sharing those plurals
Guided and united
By a rope
Sensing the sounds
Listening, listening
Joy of listening to the city
Exploring
Sharing explorations and findings
Observed by others
And observing others
At the same time
The one the double
the double and the one
The double and the double
interconnected collective exploration
Under a flying carpet
Protected
open
Safe to let go
Answering questions by questions
Answering answers by questions
Flying
Followed by the masses in the shopping street
immersed under the sky
Of new futures.
“Biology, culture, and society are dependent at all levels upon the vitality of interaction they produce both internally and externally. A body, a family, a forest or a city can each be described as a buzzing hive of communication between and within its vitae. Together the organs of your body allow you to make sense of the world around you. A jungle can be understood best as a conversation among its flora and fauna, including the insects, the fungi of decay, and contact with humanity. Interaction is what creates and vitalizes the integrity of the living world. Over time the ongoing survival of the organisms in their environments requires that there be learning, and learning to learn, together. Gregory Bateson said, “The evolution is in the context.” So why don’t we have a word for mutual learning in living contexts?”
