Christiania: the 5th Free Cultural Spaces Symposium.
Alan Dearling
Symposium delegate, Abraham Vega slightly (mis)quoted:
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw.
But in lots of ways it sums up what the Free Cultural Spaces Symposium is. It’s a place for exchanging ideas. An exploratory for people to come from around the world and share their stories of growing intentional communities, of squatting, eco-farms, floating cities, artistic and cultural centres.
UK-BBC Radio programme on the meaning of ‘ownership’ including a section about Christiania (start at: 28:44 minutes) on ‘collective’ responsibility and ‘sharing’ in the ownership and running of Christiania: http://bbc.in/1O38L68
Reflections on Boom and the 2014 FCS Symposium from Alan Dearling
A Psy-trance party. A spiritual experience. Shamen and women, braves and a few (very few) elders! An eco-trip into a variety of ‘possible’ futures.
Alan making his presentation at Boom in the Liminal Village
A celebratory set of stages and spaces: the Healing Area; Sacred Fire workshops and stage; visionary art; Alchemy Stage – mostly full-on dancing; the vast Dance Temple; the Chill Out gardens; the Liminal Village with its talks and discussions and various markets and feeding/drinking spots. It’s all that and much more….24 hours each day for six days….
The problem is that you can’t study utopia. The study of utopia is the ethnography of nowhere. There is no ready made existing liberatory society which one can go and study, takes notes on, and then return and try to recreate here. It is also debatable even if one could find such an existing situation that trying to recreate such out of the context where such emerged would be the best of ideas. And that’s the problem of utopian vision, is that it doesn’t exist anywhere – that’s implicit in the word. But there have existed a multitude of examples of cooperative structures and non-hierarchal social practices that have existed through out history. Little slices of liberation and non-alienated experience – what Pierre Clastres describes as the “vast constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would be called power are actually without power; where the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchal subordination.” (1977: 5) And that’s the starting point of reformatting a non-vanguardist approach to the creation of utopian social theory…
The alternative approach that I would put forward for creating a radical visions would be to look at the existing forms of cooperative economics and social practice that have existed through out human history and around the planet, and to try to draw out their underlying logic into a more generalized pluralistic vision. Such an approach draws from an ethnographic practice and approach (though trying to dispense with the more noxious forms and tendencies that such has exhibited by the less ethical of researchers). This would not be just a shift in one’s approach, but the beginning notes of what very well could be an extensive and on-going project. Thus instead of asking “how can we run the economy so that it creates solidarity?” or “how can we manage individual interests and communal interests?” the question becomes looking at different existing forms of practice and drawing from them, rather than trying to impose upon them. The role of vision through this becomes not declaring what should be based upon utopian abstraction, but trying to figure out what could be based upon the experiences contained within existing forms of social relations.
