Happening at the same time, across the Green Line: singing for harvest in south Nicosia and north Famagusta, 2021. [videos]
On the significance of bread making and eating together as part of a Connective Artistic Practices workshop focused on costume-making, Feb-March 2024 [video]
Practicing a traditional game as part of the Connective Artistic Practices: the art of learning through nature and co-presence for all ages, March 2024. Organised in collaboration with Phytorio- Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association. [video]
Stuffed pumpkin flowers with rose petals, lemon blossoms and garden herbs with Othonas. Pyrga, 2021. [video]
Planting ocra while singing a pirate song & realing all the seeds were thrown in the same place (right).
Livia Moura turning "bad words" into a healing song for Jano, at home / the 4th Eimaste Ixodos Artist Residency, c. May 2023. [video]
Connective practices in community-integrated arts, nature-
and tradition-based learning and care, across the divisions of Cyprus
curated by Chrystalleni Loizidou
created in community with Hülya Koçak Dede, Sylvia Hadjigeorgiou, Konstantina Kasina, Livia Moura, Christina Tsene, George Biskos,
and the Eimaste Parents Cooperative
This visual essay illustrates an excerpt from our book chapter inspired by the Connective Practices Symposium. The book chapter is entitled "What might a radical childcare politics look like?: Making kin despite schooling, towards community-integrated learning and care, across the divisions of Cyprus" written for Deep Commons: Cultivating ecologies of solidarity and care beyond capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and the state, edited by Matt York & Marina Sitrin for CUNY Press (forthcoming, 2024)
A spell: from practice to theory
In the beginning there is flow. There is the “being in the rhythms of nature”, the “being in social connection”, with uninterrupted experimentation and creativity, the feeling of the elements and the seasons, the observing and the doing, the running and climbing and picking fruit and making shelter. And getting dirt between your toes. There is the joy and gratitude of harvest. But then the care-work that reproduces “being in the rhythms of nature” is imprisoned by top-down notions of education and productivity. These impositions dominate the doing and life, so they separate us from flow and from our rhythms. Being and doing are turned into work and people into things. Thus the world is crazy, and revolts are practices of rediscovering connection and rhythm.
Excerpt from the Eimaste Connective Practices Toolkit for Community Flow Between Families in Transition;
inspired by Massimo de Angelis’ editorial intro for the Commoner, 2012
Planting ocra while singing a pirate song & revealing all the seeds were thrown in the same place. Aglantzia, 2021. [video]
Let this piece be a call to life, a call to de-projectify and radically de-institutionalise. A call to heed the advice of Brazilian indigenous leader Ailton Alves Lacerda Krenak “not to take the children out of the room” so that we stay connected to their and our needs and hold their abilities and their interests (their mess, their energy, and their openness to possibility) in our heart as we choose to occupy a present and build a future together with them. Let this be a call to start living out solutions to this systemic crisis of childhood and so, inevitably it seems, to allow ourselves to become academic “matter out of place”. Let us unapologetically allow tears and laughter to disturb conferences, exhibitions, seminars, and political decision-making gatherings. Let us face and undo the fear of the mess and freedom of childhood and the alienation that has taken hold through the rampant capitalist, patriarchal, deeply discriminatory and unnatural institutionalisation of what my friend and artist Livia Moura calls “infantophobia”. Let us, thus, undo the disconnection from our need to care that has been allowed by the exclusion of children, of the elderly and of the disabled, from most settings of supposed productivity. Let this be a call to give ourselves to the hard work of harmonious cooperative flow, embodied lived experience and care that puts the child (and the child within us) in the centre and builds life around that. A call to see childcare, and care generally, as commoning, to laboriously, patiently, and forgivingly build local connections and circular exchange economies that may, eventually, allow us “not to park our children while we go to work.”
This piece was cobbled together in the middle of the mediterranean summer, by a single mother who couldn’t bear to keep her five year old child in an air-conditioned kindergarten during July, and would like to believe that had she been able to organise more humane conditions of childcare (or had she been successful in setting up that forest school or that waldorf school, or a stable-enough parents cooperative) then she might have been able to organise a more participatory writing process with the others in advance. This piece, by an individual, presents a mosaic made up of the conversations and visions of a group of people who have been coordinating to pool resources and raise children together in a spirit of freedom and creativity. We’ve only been able to bring this vision into inhabited reality as a series of exceptions, for two or three days at a time, at the end of which we eventually return to our habitual reliance on less connected arrangements and services, including the school system. Here we pick up key learning points from our stints of practising childcare commoning, take elements from our days of being together in flow and we invest in them, articulating our ideas on how to extend and normalise them.
We wish to understand and transform the conditions that are trapping our families in cities, in increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain childcare and learning arrangements, that are depriving us of a robust and stimulating social context, that are keeping us on the bus or in the car for too long every day, or holding us too long in front of screens, or making us resort to eating take-aways too often, or causing us to despair when we face illness or injury or depression, or making us realise that there’s no one around to help us maintain important boundaries with our children or others. Our aim is to share what we have learnt so far: things we hold to be useful and hopeful practices that show a way out of this mess. A way out of this global, isolating, infantophobic matrix that is feeding into what can be called the edu-war-health industrial complex, now happily aligned with an exploitative tech and media industry. A situation that has globally turned parenthood and childcare —or bonds of care-giving more generally— into predicaments.
It is a fact, albeit one that sounds like an NGO funding application tagline, that this group came together from different sides of an island divided by militaries, an island facing layer upon layer of separation and alienation. A condition aggravated if not constructed by governmental entities intent on keeping us apart culturally, extending even to the exclusion of the other’s language in each side’s schools. Our coming together was no civil society initiative. Rather our friendships are based on shared feelings about learning, trust, and humanity, initially developed through our families' circumstantial interest in Rudolf Steiner’s pedagogy, that evolved into efforts to be part of a series of temporary alternative school initiatives, eventually settling into kinship and cooperation in life. The tipping point for composing and sharing our findings arrived with Falk Hübner’s call around the notion of “artistic connective practices,” and the push to organise our practice as a call for an activist audience came through our determination to somehow participate in the Deep Commons conference in a way that was compatible with our duties of care.
As students and practitioners of education through art, environmental and science education, traditional handicraft, as researchers of memory and ritual, and as human beings, we had been looking for ways to meaningfully come together–along with our families–no longer thinking in terms of “projects”, “workshops”, “documentation” or “facilitation” but simply looking towards life. In the last couple of years, we shared the urgency of defying forces of division, forces aggravated by the pandemic and new wars. In this chapter we share our progress toward a kind of reparation or re-enchantment, that is beyond an argument for educational reform, beyond newfangled parenting discourse, beyond a political argument for upsetting the conditions of alienated labour or commons theory, and towards a more grounded and arguably Situationist shift in mentality and practice.
Earlier versions of this piece were framed in relation to the question whether there can be lasting social effects in community art, in the work of socially-engaged art projects or projects of the third sector (charities, non-profits, social enterprises, cooperatives, etc). And so, the work described here responds to the clarity many of us now share, with our illusions shattered through the pandemic, that projects like the above, running on the latest trends of academic keywords, exploit or burn out the momentum around potentially powerful ideas, remove spontaneity and social connection, and tie up the creators not only in social isolation, but also in institutional mazes of bureaucracy, “impact factor” reporting, and budget documents. How do we handle, then, this revelation? That this way of working and the way of life it relies on or necessitates (Nay! Reproduces!) are fundamentally incompatible with our needs and duties of care? The first thing to do is to act and speak from the heart [...]
On natural learning through unself-conscious participation in ancient community practices. Documentation from family weekend organised by traditional dance instructor Argyris Argyrou, Paralimni, Jan. 2024. [video]
Images from the Connective Artistic Practices Workshop: the art of learning through nature and co-presence for all ages. feat. Nafsika Demetriou, Feb-March 2024. Organised in collaboration with Phytorio- Visual Artists and Art Theorists Association. [slideshow]
Towards a parents cooperative for families in transition out of the city / to a new country / out of the nuclear model, Aglantzia 2019-2024. The cooperative merged with a Waldorf-Steiner pioneer school initiative which survived, as such, for less than one year but became, in principle, the foundation for the ethics, pedagogy and affection behind this visual essay.
How does one capture or explain the connective magic of children playing naked in a stream? Flasou, 2022. [video]