Living justice for cultures of belonging
Restoring ways to live in balance with each other is to recognise that racial, social, ecological and food justice are inextricably entwined. Living justice is an ever-emergent opening to the possibility of living within a being-and-becoming as part of the naturecultural. This reaches towards an ethics of care and solidarity in the everyday.
Hands in Soil as part of Re-Birth with Kofifi theatre company at NIROX Foundation, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa
Convivial Rituals for personal and collective healing
Through collaboration Cultures of Belonging has evolved as a body of contemporary rituals for personal and social healing which are convivial and liberatory. These rituals of reconnection with each other and our non-human world are rooted in the matter of soil, land and food. Cultures of Belonging envisions, contributes to, and practices healing and liberation as an artful and embodied matter of the everyday.
“The rituals served as refugia, as ‘safe habitats’ and bounded, performative encounters wherein the bodymind experiences being-with oneself, other people, matter and place as a conscious process of regenerative worldmaking.” Reflections on ritual praxis in Patricia Gaya’s chapter Towards Ever More Extended Epistemologies: Pluriversality and Decolonisation of Knowledges in Participatory Inquiry.
Soil & Psyche
SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE, SOUTH AFRICA
Passing a bowl filled with soil round to Agroecology students, was the start of a ritual workshop on the theme of self-development. We invited the student-farmers to handle the soil and respond, either silently or out loud to the question ‘how will you be tending to the soil in your own being? At the end of the round, this soil enlivened by the intimate and profound sharing was then scattered in the grounds of the Sustainability Institute.
Agroecology Indaba
SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE, SOUTH AFRICA
The Indaba offered a day of experimental, artful and co-operative approaches to stimulate creativity, collaboration and collective ideas. Using collage as a socio-political and imaginal and poetic method for planning on the ground, agroecology students were in an envisioning dialogue with local farmers and growers, educators and trainers. The focus was on harvesting ideas and thinking on how to create pathways for embedding personal development and diversity work within the training programmes.
Pulse, our socially engaged artist residency, was a two-week arc of convivial food sharing, forums, gallery art and installations, films, soil shrines and food rituals. The image below shows participants preparing vegetables harvested from local organic farms by arts students for the Deep Soup Ceremony. The day long gathering took place in the visual arts quad, Stellenbosch University, in collaboration with the Sustainability Institute.
‘Pulse brings to the table the culture within agriculture, the celebration and connection of food to ritual and art. It brings diverse communities together which are still largely segregated along racial and economic lines’
Mikal Lambert, farmer, Goedgedacht Farm
Deep Soup Ceremony
“Who sensed what we’ve lost?
Touch of soil
Food as love
Smells of the fire as place
Conversing without structure
Connections without intent
Sensuality without possession
Discoveries in the everyday
Excitements of solidarity
Happenings, not structures
That’s the sense of place.
Memories surface
Of futures
Where art returns
As way of life
Peace prevails
Conviviality thrives
All have a place
Reconnected
And life unfolds”.
Extract from Convivial Times
by Mark Swilling
Stellenbosch University, South Africa 2016
