This weekend, the co-initiator of The Alternative Global, Indra Adnan, was invited to take part in the World Human Forum, a gathering of global level initiatives that seeks to draw attention to a new system of human agency coming into being.

The Forum took place on the island of Delos, near Mykonos - the now uninhabited, mythical birthplace of Apollo and Artemis - and one of the most important archeological sites in Greece. While it’s rare for us to fly these days, we decided to participate in the hope of seeing and feeling what we have not yet seen or felt. And also sharing our own vision of what we see arising at this time. What follows is a first reflection from Indra:

INDRA ADNAN: The weekend was a slow unfolding, like the movements of a symphony, moving you inexorably towards the climax. Even the journey invited a shift of perspective. Travelling to Mykonos was to put a sun hat on, to get into escape mode: but it also invited your attention for something new.

On the flight over were two wedding parties: extended families, gathering around a new commitment, a new generation coming into play. Their joy and lightly managed conflict provided a useful metaphor for later down the line.

Sitting down with Alexandra Mitsotaki I was quickly reminded of her own deep motivation, arising from her work in the North of Guinea-Bissau, where she lived and worked with Action Aid. During that time, she witnessed what she describes as a miracle of community self-organisation: where people took shared responsibility for the survival of their home territory. Not only was it a radical distribution of tasks, but it was also a constant and flowing conversation about what was needed and how it could be achieved. Internally, these communities showed remarkable human resilience, born of their shared, long standing struggle with the elements. But also a certain energy, born of their autonomy and conviction in their own method.

At the time, Guinea-Bissau was receiving a paltry £120K from the Global Fund to keep certain amenities going. However, in a moment of funding rationalisation, that money stopped. That loss prevented essential tasks being fulfilled but, maybe even worse, it severed the relationship to a global visionary organisation that recognised the value of their practice and shared it with the world.

This very much reflects the Alternative Global’s experience when working with communities: genius can appear from within a community and inspire others to respond. However, that momentum can easily be lost when there is no witness to the work being achieved. All of us need to see our efforts reflected in our environment, almost as proof that we exist. Sometimes our most important job as AG is to come and acknowledge the originality and energy occurring, which means to write about it - giving it attention and amplifying its power.

Those media forms bring status - vital for any entity struggling to be seen - but also connection and belonging to something bigger than the self. In this way, more activities on a small scale become linked to global movements and global potential, giving extra meaning and purpose to their everyday activity. We’ve often heard from groups doing small town innovation how amazed they are to find similarities in the work of towns across the world.

It also delights these groups that we - Londoners in their eyes - could even ‘get’ what was happening there. They are so used to people with more assumed “power” than they have, simply coming to show them why they are failing and teaching them “better”. But they often lacking any experience of the conditions in that place. Worse, they can extract the best of local insights, taking them away to re-purpose for their own theories of change—without leaving any legacy of that engagement.

Local innovation often comes down to ditching old ways of doing things - the legacy of powerlessness. Or it’s about initiating new patterns of relationship between people in the community. As well as new, often more authentic, forms of agency to bring something new into being.

For example, ways of reclaiming land and empty buildings, ways of bringing food from fields, allotments, gardens and even green patches between roads into centrally organised distribution: these are all forms of generating community wealth, captured through local currencies, and so on.

When our work at AG reveals similar patterns appearing in different part of the world, we record a lot of excitement at the commonality. The prospect of connecting with others on the same path emboldens the vision. And thus it becomes spoken more readily, becoming more infectious in the process. Others with similar low resources but high desire for change pick up on the confidence being expressed and begin to join in. This is what we think of as fractal, cosmolocal growth, accelerated by the soft power of story.

At the World Human Forum, there is also a strong emphasis on the arts as the vehicle for opening up thinking, bringing new currents into our personal and social dynamics. This kind of innovation can often travel faster around the internet as it is more felt, less cognitive, requiring less explicit agreement. In particular when one culture is exposed to the art of another, it causes us to question how others see the world, to try and grasp, even inhabit their view.

As Farooq Chaudhry - co-founder of the Akram Khan project commented at the WHF, this is rarely debated. When a piece of art, music or dance shifts your perspective it’s easier to merge with it - grow through it - than when you are given an intellectual proposition demanding a response. Often in a language more obviously embedded with power structures. Of course, that doesn’t make music innocent: if anything it can be more subversive, recruiting you into a mind-set without permission. Playing and reflecting on the impact of what you have heard or seen are important conversations for any future democracy.

In many ways, what WHF is doing here is an act of witnessing, a bringing into relationship of ambitious initiatives. In so doing they are both confirming the singular value of each project and giving it regenerative possibilities. But also combining more diverse elements in order to bring into being a new form: a new source of energy, agency and attraction.

Delos was partly chosen by the Forum for its place in history as an archeological site, with real mythological power. On the one hand, it was known to be the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. On the other, its geographical location made it vital for trade. Delos became a Freeport inviting traders from all over the world to exchange goods with the least obligations to the interests of the island itself.

We were told that as many as 10,000 slaves were traded in a day on Delos. Standing on that ground, which is now a steadily developing archaeological site, is to think as much about unlearning in the present, learning from the past. Our host Alexandra decided to channel the spirit of Apollo by inviting several space agencies to take part.

The event unfolded like an exposition of the three horizons forecasting framework. The first part asked: what can we learn from the past? We heard from Costas Synolakis a natural hazards professor, Mark Moffett a tropical biologist, John Tasioulas, director of the institute for Ethics in AI and the previously noted Farooq Chaudry. There is no summarising their presentations in this short editorial, but their combined impact blew open the possibility of simple agreement on what mattered or what was true. Instead they evoked the broader reality of multiple perspectives and diverse forms of agency. What stayed with me was Farooq’s unending curiosity about what could be.

Farooq in many ways offers a modern story. As a troubled teenager he was sent to a correctional unit at the age of 14 and describes himself as having been saved by social workers. Without a normal school education he nevertheless got himself into university to study English Literature. But on the first day he abandoned his course to take up dance - his second saviour - in which he trained assiduously and enjoyed a good career. However, without those early formative exercises, his body gave out earlier than he hoped and he shifted to being a producer in the arts - which he, again, feels will be the saviour of us all.

His work with Akram Khan carries its own mythos but his current explorations into China will break new ground. For example, his observation that he has never met another culture that dances as much in every corner of society. See here Farooq’s grappling with the poetry of Yu Xiuhua, whose popularity in her home country tells us more about China than any newspaper will do. Her cerebral palsy is a major part of her aesthetic: engaging with Yu will a high point in Farooq’s life, he says - having travelled quite a long way already.

The second part of the event asked: what is our mission - what are we trying to do? In this section we heard from Athena Coustenis, astrophysicist and planetologist from the European Space Agency, Marianne Poncelet of the Yehuidi Menuhin Youth Orchestra, Richard Dunne, Founder of the Harmony Project, Marshall Marcus, CEO of the European Youth Orchestra, and myself as the political entrepreneur, sharing our ‘moonshot’ new political system.

Again, there was far too much here to summarise within a reasonable word count. But the contention here was somewhere in the desire for harmony—and the challenge of what drives us emotionally apart. Each of the orchestral projects do important work in helping us build an inner orchestra: the capacity for humans to take the many drives of our psychological, spiritual and material needs and weave them into an integrated journey though life. Marshall’s work with El Systema in Venezuela and Europe is testimony to the power of harmony personally and socially.

Even so, as the godess Athena demonstrated, we can be driven by a quest - often unreasonable - to experience and know more than what gives us comfort. We want to be pioneers and go where no-one has gone before, often at the expense of our well being. I talked about the very personal formations, often traumatic, of a desire for agency. In the wider world, many are driven by the need to heal trauma as much as dream of a better society or planet.

The third part of the event aimed to offer some glimpses into a potential future coming down the line - ones we might each of us take on, invest ourselves in. What might the Alpha Generation generate? We heard from Gary Bowles, chair for the Future of Work project at the Singularity University. Kiran Bir Sethi, designer and founder of the Riverside School in India, Brent Sherwood, senior Vice President of the Advanced Development Programs for Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos’ space programme) and Akram Khan, mythologically-driven dancer and choreographer.

Again, too much to integrate here. But suffice to say, a tension exists - between space missions aiming to find new resources for our self-destructing planet (Columbus anyone?), and a more spiritual approach which accepts material reality as the context within which we transcend our limitations as humans. Akram Khan chose to tell a personal story of serendipity that dispelled the limits of time and space. And then went on to describe the theatre as today’s temples—zones where our senses are brought to life, fitting us for the chaos of these times.

India’s Riverside School (from Atlas Of The Future)

In many ways, Kiran set the tone for a hopeful future by sharing her education programme. Design for Change has taken a million young people, often impoverished, from six countries and brought them into what she describes as a ‘yes we can’ mind-set. Kiran’s method is to teach them to have capacity for diversity; how to counter threat with curiosity, empathy and creativity - what we might call response-ability. Her energy was infectious: if anyone had ‘the life force’ in our midst, it was Kiran!

While the live event was an incredible explosion of fireworks from many corners of society’s attempts to face the future boldly, it nevertheless held a constant note of ambition. A sense that more can be achieved to resolve our multiple crises than the mainstream news is currently depicting. At the same time, there was a clear message that not everything will be solved by talking, reasoning or strategising. We have to feel, imagine, intuit our way forward. And any politics of the future will have to engage all the senses, if we are reach a genuinely capacious, properly agentic alternative to our current reality.

More from the World Human Forum here.

Alternative Editorial: From Delos, a politics of the future engages all the senses