School for Designing a Society and the traces left by it

Summer School Report

June 2007

We enveloped ourselves in a potpourri of unusual offerings for the summer school's point of departure. We've been at the Gesundheit Institute, where costume activist "Madd Maggs" literally wrapped us in clown pants and tie dyes throughout the month -- so logically we had a clown pants fashion show, with most participants opting for the "waist around the shoulders" look (see right). This came in tandem with the "art everywhere" exhibition, which included a showing of the month's returns on art projects that included painted shoes, stencils, hand-crafted paper, political wedding dresses, wish flags...

The final week included an invitation to each participant to "take the floor" and present their work. Presentations included an art installation, a performance, a writing workshop, several project proposals, original poems, original rants, group projects, and discussion.

People often ask us what we actually do to "design a society". The short answer is: we make experiments. This year, one of the design groups created a variety of constructions made out of flourescent notecards as analogues to social and linguistic structures. On separate notecards, they wrote statements of desire for a different society. At the end of the month, they laid the notecards with desire statements alongside of the constructions that they'd designed out of notecards. The notecard sculptures were offered as a potential architecture for implementing a desirable society.

Another design group created and distributed a 26-page zine entitled "Detour Towards Earth" that focused on social change in relation to global warming. In the second week, the members of this group had found themselves to have come from different societies, and thus to have different awarenesses of problems, and different ideas about how to address those differently perceived problems. The zine provided a nest wherein this variety could be enjoyed, and differences could rub up against one another, instead of the usual a-versus-b scenarios.

Theater composition was also used to treat ecological crisis with creativity. Qilo and Andrea of the Change of State Performance Project performed their new one hour theater composition Take This House (and float it away), which is set in Sacramento, California -- a low elevation city protected by a levee system in disrepair. Set in the (likely) future, two eccentric characters ponder birds, gestures, and permaculture from their floodplain living room, while a catastrophic storm breaks the city's levees.

Kaz presented a skit about students cornered by compulsory education - he's proposing to start a project in Japan which is called "The Door" that provides struggling students with a place to consider legitimate questions (questions without known answers), think about what they want, and find respite from the competitive world of graded transcripts and social climbing.

Patrick gave a presentation on the history of ILDES, the Latin America Institute for Ecological Agriculture, where he is helping to conspire on a conference on EcoSocial Design for December 2008... see foroecosocial.org.

Once there was a sign posted on the front door of the Dacha building saying "I don't remember if this is the house of memory", and a line of cloth was strung througout all three floors, it became impossible to ignore that Insook and Graziella had turned the house into a participatory art installation called "Community of Amnesia". Participants were invited to write answers to the question "What do I habitually forget?" on cards and hang them on the line in the neighborhood of similar forgetfulnesses. Also there was an invitation to write poetry defining the word "amnesia". The result was a clustering of things forgotten in a difficult-to-traverse Dacha, and new connections between private and public.

Koushalya has proposed a number of projects, including a "World Children's Forum" which she says would be "small" for its first year in existence: only 2,000 or 3,000 children! Koushalya was very generous to share with us her work making documentaries with Accessible Horizon Films, which just released a new video about an innovative school for street children in Tamil Nadu, India. Koushalya has also been involved in worldwide postcard sharing between children and has a standing offer to coordinate exchanges of postcards between children around the world.

Pam, a Mohawk who had spent much of the month reflecting on the situation of the Haudensaunee in the Six Nations Reserve and had come to a harsh realization, presented a story book, and a five-year vision for becoming a activist linking creative expression to developing "hope strategies" with first nations people in Ontario, Canada.

So much more could be mentioned here... Kyra and Hayla formed a performance duo that may be going on tour later this month... Jamie is starting an Art Camp for people with developmental disabilities, that also looks after the creativity and health of the care-givers... Angie wrote a piece describing her life action plan, including a journey to Urbana for the upcoming fall semester... Joanna incited an hour long debate about fighting global warming: should we work within the current system (with giant self-serving corporations) or outside of the current system??? Rather than reduce ourselves to a single "correct" answer, we've begun working in many different directions toward systems we'd prefer.

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