Reflections on Utopias Bach
& the Deconstructed Conference

 By Sarah Holyfield, July 16th 2022

Some notes on how I’ve been thinking about things of late – and how coming to gatherings of Utopias Bach has been for me.

This is such a time of overwhelming dysfunction and fear out there in the world, but life here in my bubble appears to be fine and safe - on the surface – with somewhere to live, food to eat, my own little problems to deal with, and being part of the natural world.  I want to be able to think of myself as being part of an interconnected, beautiful, complex and rich world which includes everything from the microscopic to the cosmic, where each element exists and belongs in an intricate web.

Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about the ‘chain of reciprocity’ – and the ‘Honorable Harvest’

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”

But we are being confronted with disaster on many fronts at once – climate change, inequality, a pandemic and war, all of which are intimately connected. A sort of mechanistic paradigm is slowly and surely infiltrating and taking over everything that we thought to be a constant part of our world - the forests and seas, but also the looking-after-each-other things like health and learning. This paradigm is the polar opposite of the gift economy. The neoliberal market now decides.

How to challenge and resist the huge monolithic forces that are being so thoughtless and destructive is a big puzzle and conundrum, and Utopias Bach has been so inspiring for me in offering a way forward.

“Some of us feel so disconnected and alienated by the scale of environmental problems, and the inhuman carelessness of multinational neoliberalism that we need the physical intimacy of the small in order to regain our agency”. Wanda Zyborska https://www.utopiasbach.org/socially-engaged-art

Everything is made of small things –

A meadow is made up of blades of grass

A tree of millions of leaves

icorrhizal fungi enable the ‘wood-wide’web’

A virus infects the whole of humanity

And termites can bring down buildings

And patterns underpin everything – ripples in water and in rock -

We get used to what we expect to see, change can be slow so we’re not conscious of the patterns we take for granted – but can the surprising and unexpected cause a shift in our paradigms?

The underpinning ethos at Uptopias Bach of kindness, acceptance, space, exploration and intelligence reminds me of political and feminist activism in the 70’s which had a profound social impact in the long term.

At the Deconstructed Conference there were many activities and ‘micro-utopias’

As a method for participation, micro-utopias create experiences that shift expectations by expanding the ‘realm of the possible’. the idea is "you never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Relational Aesthetics (1998)[5], Nicolas Bourriaud, quoted by Wanda Zyborska in her blog on socially engaged art and Utopias Bach

Utopias Bach seems so relevant to me at this time as a way of exploring how participating in activities at a human level can help us find a way into the future.

‘a learning community around the role of socially engaged art in working small scale in the face of existential threats (climate change, eco-system collapse, inequalities etc)..  with Art as a means for creating and recreating new relations between people, and animals, plants, environment' - Lindsey Colbourne

See here for more on Dadadeiladu’r Gynhadledd - Deconstructed Conference