Collaborations through and with the niche
Initially this place took shape through a withdrawal from socaial and collaborative practices. But gradually a new kind of joint work has emerged from it.
With the strong sense that things are not right in the world, comes the desire and responsibility to effect change. As we know, change arises from organising and collective efforts such as community activities, sharing experiences, demonstrations, and protests. This conviction has guided and fuelled my practice to engage in movements such as environmental, indigenous and queer. But throughout these categories the forms for coming together has been very similar. And there was something about these forms that stood in the way for real connection. Through this place I've come closer to kind of joint work and collaboration that feels true to me.
These collaborations has emerged, evoked by something at this place that we are both called by. Two different movements overlapping at a stable spot, and a turn taking, a calibration between the three begins.
In the short story “Binoojiinh Makes a Lovely Discovery” Page 145 – 149 in the book “As we have always done”, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson retells a maple syrup origin myt. This meeting between a girl, a squirrel is a good example of such calibration. She describes how a young Nishnaabeg girl discovers maple sap while immersed in her environment and interacting with it. She notices and observes a squirrel nibbling and sucking a tree. From curiosity the girl mimics the squirrel and tastes the tree. Betasamosake continues to describe all the knowledges, theories and technologies that follows from this curious exploration. She emphasises self-led learning, driven by both her own curiosity and her own personal desire to learn: “Coming to know in this way is the pursuit of whole body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom, and when realized collectively it generates generations of loving, creative, innovative, self-determining, inter-dependent and self-regulating community minded individuals. It creates communities of individuals with the capacity to uphold and move forward our political traditions and systems of governance.”
In the 1960s, the ethnographer Fernand Deligny founded a network in the countryside of southern France for autistic children. The location was remote, and the housing was simple, with only the bare necessities. The purpose of the place was to try to understand the existence of nonverbal autistic individuals. By using maps of the shared spaces and marking how the children and their neurotypical caretakers moved through them, it became possible to begin discerning patterns and overlaps. These patterns seemed to sketch out a shared space, where the two previously separate worlds gradually began to approach each other. The simply and open-endedly shaped living environment appeared to allow for a kind of flexibility, a wiggle room, where small variations could give rise to overlaps. In these overlaps, a coming-together could occur.
Wi
Debora Elgeholm, Marigold fibrous roots
Maja Fjällbäck, Flaskpost
Tofiq Pasha, Marigold pollen
Wajdan Khan Khattak, Bees hum
Nedine Kachornamsong, Soilworks
Joffe Rydberg, sensory worldbuilding course + Romtopf
Sofie Norstedt, Brudslöja
Group play compositions
Daily routine compositions
Joint cycles (composting, hair-birdnests)
Lecturing with blueberries
