Alternative Editorial: Playing the Whole System
A movement session at Harvest Kaplankaya
This past week we found ourselves in the company of an unusual group of community builders, called Harvest Kaplankaya. On the one hand it was a diverse, global gathering of people sharing a desire to go 'next level' in their response to the multiple crises.
On the other it was an experimental community on its own ground, in the rugged beauty of the Southern Turkish coast, hoping to take shape as a fractal of interconnectedness that could replicate anywhere.
Implied in Harvest Kaplankaya’s (HK’s) fractal is the interdependency of body, mind and energy. As such, the opportunities for participants moved from mind-body practices (yoga, breath-work, movement flow), to abstract cognitive exploration (discussing the metanarrative of our crises to the “conscious” governance of states). As well as real-time prototyping and tool-sharing for building community agency networks at the neighbourhood and city level (for more, see our Friday blog).
Then every evening, there was a whole-community food and dance - a combined source of joyful energy that bound one day to the next.
While some of this might sound familiar to many of us committed to worlding - the practice of imagining alternative worlds and then bringing them into being - HK was unusual for a number of reasons. Firstly, its vision was driven equally by sensory and intellectual input - reaching for a feeling about the future, as much as a plan for it. In its attempts at whole-ism, it was profoundly feminine and attracted a majority female audience (although, more on that below!).
Secondly, HK took place in a situation with abundant resources: the founders were able to supply and attract well-capitalised participants and projects from different parts of the world. Bursaries for attendance were made readily available, and there was certainly a commitment to diversity playing out in every aspect of the gathering. But the high production values and the wealth of experience embedded in the event made for an unusually supportive platform for ambitious ideas.
From some angles, this is the kind of lush “playspace” that you’d ration your access to: a rarity, open to the charge of “not being real”. As co-founder (with Roman Carel) Burak Oymen asked pointedly in his opening speech “are we being naive?”
At the same time, we welcomed its affordances: the freedom it offered our imaginations, when less constrained by budgets. It was a site where we could think of citizens not just as recipients of care, but as a new (re)source of intelligence for cosmolocal flourishing.
A zone where we could dream of technology not as a threat to our jobs, but as an enabler of mass creativity. A moment where we could remove the barriers between spiritual yearning for Utopias and the steady manifestation of transformed societies.
For many that would be a luxury we cannot entertain. Social injustice has to be understood as constitutive of the environmental crisis and one cannot be tackled without the other. For others, it's a moment we have to seize when we can: a cosmolocal approach should be about pulling ideas down to communities from areas of cutting-edge practice, wherever they appear. In that sense, there is a lot to transfer from a process like HK.
Events like these do permit you to dwell on the biggest of pictures. In the last Kaplankaya gathering in May the closing panel - led by human-potential guru Jamie Wheal - posed the question 'Western Civilisation: What to Keep and What to Kill? (see video here). In discussion, trauma specialist Gabor Mate rejected the legitimacy of the question, quoting Gandhi saying Western Civilisation “would be a fine thing”—but had never arrived.
Following on, AG Co-initiator Indra Adnan brought the perspective of the 30-year revolution (beginning with the birth of the internet) which revealed the many green shoots of what Buckminster Fuller described as “building a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Five months later at the next Harvest, the intellectual paradigm has shifted somewhat. At one end of a spectrum Daniel Schmachtenberger described his Consilience Project, in a presentation titled "Making Sense in a Nonsensical World", where he described our multi-polar world as dangerously chaotic.
At the other pole, Taiye Selasi proposed a 'State of Consciousness: The Past, Present and Purpose of the 21st Century State'. Adah Parris brought the notion of "Kinship in the Age of 1s, 0s and Nodes of Possibility" - describing the radical inclusion now possible in the digital age.
Other speakers focused on consciousness as the primary agent of transformation. Ari Peralta —co-founder of MyCocoon and contributor to both medical and business research and practice—talked about "The Innerverse: the intersection of sensory enrichment and neuroscience". In a moving talk, Ari mingled his arduous personal journey with his research into the power of colour, texture, shape, scent and sound, affecting our ability to heal or thrive.
Ethnomusicologist Alexander Tannous travelled deep into the mathematics of music to describe how we have come to live within the logos - the structures of our everyday culture. Sharing the fractal patterns of how sound - in language as well as through music - has constructed our reality until now, Alex proposed these phenomena could both heal and expand us.
A venue at Harvest Kaplankaya
Another focus in this Harvest event was on new architectural models (see our blog, here), pointing to the possibility of what AG might call cosmolocal communities. This was curated by urbanism and futurist Thomas Ermacora. Ralph Horat began by entrancing us with a plan for The Next Generation Village, fully inclusive of sustainable food and energy sources, new governance models and experimental currencies for community wealth building.
John Brevard brought fractal designs to open landscapes, interrupting our sense of what is real and needed now, with images of how the future will appear when we reconnect with nature. Christian Jochnick shared the story of his patient and labour intensive work in Ibiza as a “naturepreneur” intent on bringing a new economy through the widest possible inclusion of those living on the island.
Anyone reading carefully will notice that adds up to quite a lot of male speakers, relative to females - a subject that was readily picked up by the community, once it was called out. Not so much on the mainstage: the readiness to 'give way' to women's voices did not require much pushing. Check Thomas Ermacora's Radical Feminist t-shirt on his video from our Friday blog: in our experience, he’s not simply virtue signalling—it’s a clarion call.
However, an intention does not always add up to change as we grapple with our agnotology - meaning, the condition of not knowing what you don't know to make change happen. You can't lift a table while you are standing on it.
On the one hand, does gender matter in a present day in which binaries are deeply questioned and fluidity has become more common? This perspective is important, particularly as the near-future unfolds, with young people less in thrall to fixed identities. At the same time, it stays vitally important in a wider world in which women still suffer heavy structural inequality and abuse. What new culture, practice and energy is free to move into the public space when women are no longer oppressed?
Our patterns of social change are mixed today - but we have a common history of men designing the public space in which women and other genders were marginalised. Women therefore have a different relationship to formal power - but may be the stronger for it. As the old system collapses, they may not feel so implied in its failure and maybe more resilient too.
So in terms of simply balancing the speaker list there has to be a willingness to change the agenda when women are not forthcoming: to meet them where they are asking to show up, rather than seeking the female perspective on the current system, and its old roles.
This approach would benefit any desire to move into a more diverse space. Check out Nesta’s Future Fest series (curated by AG Co-initiator Pat Kane from 2013-2020) for evidence of how creative and energetic a gathering becomes when you don't compromise on diversity. This commitment brings the intelligence previously missing from what Schmachtenberger called, in his opening prez, our “self-terminating system”.
But there was another aspect this community seemed willing to explore. In such a feminine space as Harvest was (about 60/40 of the attendees were woman-identifying), did it matter that women could not be seen in the spotlight? Were they not already playing their part in the whole community by holding the space for health, embodiment and nurturing more broadly? Why should they crave the very thing they might critique in men - namely, the desire for more attention?
That's a fair question until we think about it in terms of the economy or the socio-political agenda for the future. As both economists Riane Eisler and Elinor Ostrom have pointed out for decades, unless the gifts of all genders are brought to the attention of the public space, can we expect any new outcomes from our new projects?
Imagine what happens when we name those working for next to nothing today - carers, mothers, network weavers - as the 'social architects' we need? When we invite them to bring their specific skills into the spotlight, so that we better understand the infrastructure we need to invest more in for the future? Without which well funded projects may not succeed?
It might be that these social architects request different listening and engaging spaces, so that they can bring their gifts: circles rather than stages, chairs rather than stools, with a better balance between speaker and audience engagement. And maybe even a closer weave between music, comedy and other sensory experiences in the process. Harvest Kaplankaya is well on these paths: it should be one to watch as a model for community events everywhere.