Opening Up Desirable Futures: The Importance of Imagination and More-Than-Humans — France

At the beginning of February, I arrived by plane via Lyon, by train and finally by car to the village of Sainte-Eulalie-en-Royans and the site of the project in the newly renovated premises of Gîte à la Noix. All the project participants were already there, people from Britain, France, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, and also from the Czech Republic. There were the most of us from the Czech Republic in the group. The organizer of the project, the French Rapugada, was represented by three ladies Lilly, Marie-Lou, Maitilda, plus Emily, who took care of the excellent mostly vegan organic food in the kitchen.

 

The very next day, we got down to work and the activities aimed at getting to know each other, introductions with a number of organizational and informative inputs – it was necessary to get the information about what and how will happen in the next 11 days. The main idea of the project could be summarized as follows – We are currently facing a number of major challenges, whether it is the climate change, the protection of the environment and mental health, human rights, armed conflicts, etc., which are interconnected. Imagination and radical utopia is one of the ways to strive for individual but also societal change.

 

In the first days, in the activities, we dealt with the overall socio-political context of functioning in our civilization, issues of dominance, equality, cooperation, competitiveness, perception of marginalized individuals and groups, as well as what one imagines under the label “More Than Human”, and in this way we created a joint synthesis of the ideological overlap of the project. In the meantime, we strengthened team spirit with various activities, mostly movement improvisation.

 

Almost every dinner was made by a group from a specific country. At the Czech dinner, others could enjoy potato soup, semolina porridge and apple strudel. We gradually incorporated a morning ritual into our program, when everyone found their place in nature and spent fifteen minutes there alone, meditating or otherwise contemplating and deepening the connection to their inner self and the surrounding nature – More Than Human. After that, we devoted ourselves more and more to different aspects of imagination. We drew a lot from Rob Hopkins’ book, which we studied together and then presented in the collective. The passage where the link between stimulus deprivation and increased creativity and imagination was particularly interesting for me. Similarly, the connection between the destructive effect of the use of modern technologies, social networks on the centers of the brain that allow us to think creatively, have ideas, and also the link to the nutrition of these centers was very beneficial, not to mention the way of theatrical performance that we had the opportunity to obtain this information. The overall response to this author and his book was great.

 

The summary of the work could be summed up: “Children’s play, imagination is a powerful political tool. If we don’t have dreams and can’t dream, nothing we need can come through”. We also did imagination as a group at the nearby waterfalls – Cascade Blanche. We had two and a half days free and we used them to walk together in the rocky neighborhood. Between the villages, in addition to the fields, there were also numerous walnut orchards and the woods were overgrown with greenish moss and ivy.

 

One day, the organizers drove us a few kilometers further and we could walk through the beautiful karst caves of Choranche, through which a turquoise stream flowed. We went through the whole tour in complete silence, and twice we experienced a minute of absolute darkness when the lights were off. Absolute darkness was an extremely interesting experience. We went to the surrounding forest on a medicine walk and enjoyed the nature and made collective sound improvisation for a group harmonization with pure joy. The next activity concerned the creation of our own myth – by free association, we each randomly selected 12 words and fifteen formulations from various English-written books, and then compiled our own myth from those.

 

In the second half of the project, we already started preparing our collective utopia in two subgroups. After challenging group dynamics, we finally led the other group through a joint program and the result was very pleasant and fulfilling. We learned to express emotions through natural elements, to worship nature together by chanting mantras, to understand our natural needs by connecting to our animal reflection. On the last day, we just evaluated, gave each other feedback, closed and cleaned up, so that the next morning we all scattered in our direction back home.