Dome of Visions Curator Gry Worre Hallberg has been working on a Phd for the last couple of years. The Phd – which has Dome of Visions as one of its two cases – has just been submitted.
It is titled “Sensuous Society – Carving the path towards a sustainable future”, and is further subtitled “through aesthetic inhabitation stimulating ecologic connectedness”, as that is my finding: That we must create spaces, not only for participation in but, for what I term ‘inhabitation’ of the sensuous and poetic, as such spaces stimulate a deep sense of connectedness at all ecological levels, which is so pivotal in order to transition into a more sustainable future.
My findings are rooted in years of intesive practice with the sensuous aspect of learnig, the in-between spaces of the city, aesthetic experiments and the imprint they leave on humans and the spaces in which they dwell, be it the city or the school. I have read, subtracted, explored and analysed the reflective material that participants in Dome of Visions and Sisters Academy, the other explored project, has generated set in motion by the practices and the substantiated theoretical framework at the intersection of aetshteics and ecology, here with Bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’, Guattari‘s three ecologies and Latours recent reflections on the curent state of crisis in the world as I write:
Bateson writes “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds.” (G. Bateson [1972] 2000, 492), as he argues that wrong ideas have dominated for centuries and it is now time to breed new ideas, that will ultimately cultivate an ecology of mind in humans, which understands this deep interconnectivity of everything.
This understanding sharply contrasts the understanding of everything to be separated, which is ‘the bad idea’ that has been cultivated for centuries and can be summarized in idioms as: “It is us against the environment”, “It is us against other men” and “it is the individual … that matters” (G. Bateson [1972] 2000, 500). Ideas that are still highly dominating as among other Latour reminds us in Down to Earth where Trump is portrayed as an embodied example of the human illusion of separation in its extremity and as the catastrophic outcome of this illusionary understanding (Latour [2017] 2018, 1ff).
Bateson furthermore argues that to train in humans an ecology of mind that understand the profound interconnectivity of all things, is not only one way out of the ecological crisis but the way, which is why he goes as far as naming the ‘bad ideas’ evil and thus proposes active propagation of the good ideas: “I believe that these ideas are not evil and that our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas…” (G. Bateson [1972] 2000, 513).
With Latours Trump-analogy in mind this work is not yet exhausted, rather the effort done to train and share this profound understanding is of the highest necessity in the face of the current crisis’. Herewithin in the face of the overarching climate crisis (environmental ecology), the crisis of discrimination (social ecology) and the crisis’ that each individual face, often expressed in depression, loneliness, anxiety and beyond (mental ecology). No matter at what ecological level (Guattari [1989] 2008) the healing potential lie in nurturing an understanding of deep interconnectivity, by which the process of repair would be initiated and the training of deep respect for all life begin. It is ultimately the life-threatening battle between connectedness or separation that we engage in.