The videos from day one of Civic Square's amazing RE: festival have just gone up. Featuring Hilary Cottam, Rob Hopkins, A/UK initiators, and many others
Civic Square’s online Re: Festival, which took place this April, turned out to be a fabulous tonic at the weirdest and most extreme early moment of the pandemic. Scores of diverse, ambitious, hands-on and visionary speakers and practitioners, skewing towards younger generations, and a real testament to the energy and worldliness of Birmingham and the Midlands. All power to Immy Kaur and her crew.
A/UK, in the form of co-initatiors Indra Adnan and Pat Kane, was delighted to be asked to speak at Day One of its eight days - and the keynote videos of that first day have just gone up on YouTube. We post Indra’s and Pat’s first below, but also there’s a full playlist embed at the bottom of this post - featuring voices like welfare visionary Hilary Cottam, Transition Network’s Rob Hopkins and futurist Scott Smith.
Intro text to Indra’s video:
Each one of us has a ‘dreaming brain’. Mostly we know it as our imagination - the natural resource everyone is born with that allows us to reshape reality. An active imagination is vital for us to get past old structures and the limits of past conditioning.
At the same time, the imagination can hijack our emotions and trap us in past traumas. Without awareness, we can fall into the trance of another person’s view of reality. Look at the power of The American Dream.
How can we use the power of dreaming consciously and collectively so that we move our communities - and society as a whole - towards the best outcomes for people and the planet?
Intro text to Pat’s video:
There’s an urgency about the kinds of organisations and structures we need to mobilise and energise people--to grapple with a disrupted biosphere, exponential tech, decolonized cultures. No dictionary we know has a definition for “constitute”... as a noun. In this workshop, can we provide one, and build something useful for these times?
What do we call the loose, capacious, yet coherent structures that could align a “multitude of purposes” coming from community and civil / network society? Not harnessing them to an ideology, party or regime too early, but allowing their powers to amass emergently and experimentally?
Could we call them “constitutes”? A serious-playful exercise in which you can explore your own definitions of the term, or challenges to it.
The full playlist of the Day One videos is embedded below - to see the menu, please click on the stack and “1/9” icons in the top right-hand corner of the screen