Toni Spencer and Starter Culture

I recently attended a fascinating 'Creative Lab’ led by artist Toni Spencer. Toni created space to play, inquire and explore the ‘poddd’ (pedagogy of death,decay and destruction).

The Art and Energy Collective have a design framework that looks to nature for inspiration and as muse and to date we’ve considered Moths and Moss in particular quite deeply, giving energy to our Mass Participation Projects Moths to a Flame and The Mossy Carpet.

In this creative lab, Toni invited us to look for inspiration in elements of the natural world that may trigger aversion and fear in some. These experts in death decay and destruction, like ‘Bacteria’, ‘Hyenas’, ‘Beetles’, ‘Fungi’, ‘Worms’ ‘Forest fires’ ‘Earthquakes’ ‘Tsunamis’ etc, can be considered teachers, and they can tell us something about what it takes to compost, deconstruct or process something.

We also considered aspects of life that we may wish to overcome, like ‘Ultra-processed foods’, ‘Over-farming’, ‘Pollution’, ‘Trolling’, ‘Colonialism’, ‘Systemic Injustice’, ‘Poverty’. etc You could choose anything you wanted.

In a creative space we were invited to explore and share through making what the ‘teachers’ might have to tell us about the ‘problem’ we face.

The session was facilitated really well and was educational, enriching, challenging and inspirational. I enjoyed being given time and space and encouragement to investigate and reflect on things that could have been uncomfortable and wonder at why it is that I do feel discomfort! It certainly reminded me that the ‘discomfort zone’ is a space where new awareness can emerge from oblivion. So it is worth exploring things that we find challenging. Like for instance the climate challenge.

Because The Art and Energy Collective recognises climate emergency as the overarching context for our practice, we can sometimes forget the aversion that many have to facing and responding to it. So it was a helpful reminder of how some might feel about our work!

In addition, it was enriching finding myself amongst others with huge experience and expertise in considering these issues too! Toni’s creative investigation is ongoing and she additionally is part of a collective called ‘Starter Culture’ all of whom appear to be exploring the cultural response to imbalances of power.

It was another reminder to me of how reassuring and energising it is to be part of something bigger than yourself. We can trust that other brilliant people are also imagining and responding to the challenges we face.

And, if thinking about those tricky things is all too heavy or too heady, we don’t have to stick in the swampiness, we can always choose to rest, and return to it another time.

—————

I’ve taken the text below from the Starter Culture Collective website and would like to encourage you to take a look at their work.

WHAT IS STARTER CULTURE?

We are a small emergent collective dedicated to supporting the inner-led change needed to challenge systemic injustice and support outer social and ecological change and deep cultural transformation. We do this by supporting people, groups and organisations to compost power-over culture from the inside-out.

It is palpable that the effectiveness of our outer actions depends on us engaging in inner practices that support us to expand our consciousness beyond right/wrong binaries - and the power-over culture and drama triangle consciousness this polarising mind-set perpetuates. Without changing our inner worlds our change-efforts simply replicate the power-over paradigm that created our current crises. It is the tending of this threshold between the inner and outer dimensions of change that Starter Culture is bringing to the conversation about systemic change. 

Why composting?

With this in heart-mind, we at Starter Culture find ourselves articulating our approach to change through the lens of composting power-over culture from the inside-out. We are using the word composting because for us it encompasses the closed-loop system we experience deep transformation to require. That is, rather than bypassing our current situation by trying to skip straight to whatever it is our strategic minds tell us we want or need, composting supports our current ways to break down and ferment into something new, something we could not possibly foresee from our current vantage point. And which then grows out of the composted nutriment of the past.

It may be a cliche that no problem is solved from the mindset that created it, but it is still true. If we could envisage where we need to get to it wouldn’t be a big enough change to make it worth going from where we are

MANDA SCOTT

Compost is a natural process of the life-death-life cycle that humans participate in when we grow gardens. The parts of the fruits and vegetables we do not eat, grass clippings, plants that are growing where we don’t wish for them to grow (weeds) all join the compost pile along with straw, dried stalks and other dry or brown bits. Compost becomes a nourishing, generative tonic and renewal of the garden that is made out of the dying and dead and no longer needed parts of last year's garden. The way this transformation to humus (rather than rot) happens is through the intentional creation of good containers within which to inoculate healthy bacteria and mycelium from the Earth, which when added by human hands, is called a starter culture. We seek to be part of and support the inoculation of transformation in our current culture.

For us, it is this composting process that holds the keys to unleashing the deep cultural transformation that is possible. Each new iteration of culture grows upon the previous one, and we want to presence the goodness that is also within the current human culture - it is not all terrible! - there is also beauty and gifts that have evolved over the last several thousand years.  And, it is obvious to some of us that the current culture is dying, which it needs to, in order to make good soil for life to grow out of. The violence and suffering that result from our cultural illusion of separability from Earth, needs to stop. Compost is about returning to Earth, becoming Earth and growing a never-before-seen relational culture from the humus of the old culture, composted.

We long to help unleash our collective transformative power to radically address the inequality, systemic injustice and abuses of power giving rise to the inordinate human suffering, ecological destruction and species extinction that are bringing into question the future of our own species. We are doing this through collaboration with those interested in what can be imagined at the threshold of the inner and outer dimensions of social and ecological change and the relational field of the personal and the collective.  And crucially, this deep cultural transformation goes well beyond change within just the human realm. It is a remembering of the eco-centric or Earth-centered relational ways of living as humans within the ecosystems of Earth community.

————-

If you have encountered any interesting creative activity that explore climate and ecological issues, please feel free to share details in the comments section below.