Mutispecies embodied dialogue posibilities

There was a 2.5-day workshop outside of Bogotá. The name was “Multispecies Technologies to Cool the Earth.” The place was amazing, full of trees and gardens. There was an incredible and sacred building, the Toroid, a structure built during a minga, where many people participated. This building was built to be a Casa de Pensamiento (house of thought).  Sabios and chamanes, wisemen and shamans, from different Indigenous ethnias of Colombia came to open the space as a sacred one. 

Images taken from Construcción Toroide — ORGANIZMO

Most of us who attended the workshop were city people (probably all of us). Most were around my age, some a bit older. There were a lot of artists in the group (we were around 12); they were the majority. Some others were probably more into ecology. When we arrived, there was delicious vegetarian food for us to share for lunch (delicious!). I think I was among the last to arrive, so everyone was already sitting at the table and had to open a space for me. I felt seen, like when you arrive at a place where you don’t know anyone. We were mostly strangers, so we started with a round of presentations while we were eating.

I still remember the feeling of nervosity about having to say what I studied. Maybe I didn’t have to, but that’s what people do. It supposedly says a lot about someone. But not in my case. I feel that, in my case, it maybe does the opposite (are they going to see me differently? are they going to think of me as the economist stereotype that comes to my mind?). At this point in my life, I usually add a note after saying my career: “I studied, but I’m not an economist,” or “I’ve moved into other social but less hard-core economisty areas.” I did the same with them, suggesting my particularity, which probably also hints at some of my conflicts.

Someone responded, smiling, and said: “I’m a programming engineer and a poet.” He was one of the teachers at the workshop. I was amazed.

The workshop was based on a fictional case about a land dispute between people and nonhuman species. There were some former FARC women combatants who had demobilized in the 2016 Peace Agreement and had received some money to start a productive project.[1] They bought cows and wanted to start a small dairy business. There was also a group of carbon-dioxide bonus businessmen. On the nonhuman side, there were the bees, the orchids in the forest, and the Toroid.

The land where this fictional case was set was the real place where we were - Organizmo (Organism)-, an ecological initiative founded by Ana, an architect working with sacred geometry, ecology, permaculture. The place is more than a just a place, it is a Regenerative Training and Intercultural Knowledge Exchange Center.[2]

We had to work in groups and spend the weekend inhabiting the space from our assigned role, using Ojovoz - a digital and very simple technology to document the space through images, sounds, texts, GPS. All of this would become part of the moment when we’d gather in dialogue, trying to decide how to organize and move through the evidently conflicting scenario.

This was a micro and fictional example of the kind of conversations that arise everywhere in the country - at any region or at a national level, in Congress, or every four years with each new government plan. It was essentially just the same as the content of the multiple conversations I’ve seen in my work in dialogue spaces. At the time I went to this workshop, I was already part of Valiente es Dialogar, and had been working in this initiative for about half a year. You could change the details, but the essential underlying question was the same: how do we address difference?

What struck me about this workshop was how it was framed. We would go out of the busy city life to take time to inhabit this experiment. More than that, I was amazed by the fact that the orchids, the bees, and the Toroid were active participants in the dialogue. They had a voice. In fact, I decided to take the place of the Toroid, along with another guy named Lucas. What was it going to be like to spend two days imagining what it is to be that incredible and sacred building? What would it mean to try to connect to the Toroid’s agency, sense it, open to it?

It was a mind-blowing experience (literally) - one that would make up another text.

I was moved by the freedom. By the space we were creating to explore and invent other technologies that could help us do what we keep (and always will) needing to do: address and transform conflict.

It made my work in dialogue feel too narrow, too limited, too short. The limits drawn around the humans, - as if the world stopped there. The word and verbal based technology of dialogue, with its most bold and creative strategies being the use of personal icebreakers to help people break free from their rigidity, to open to socialize with someone apparently very different.[3]

But this was different. It was multispecies. It was theatre. It was ritual - we had different ritual moments at the Toroid. It was digital - we used a collaborative mapping device that offered a new angle to the discussion. It was personal - the sharing, the listening, the presence with each other throughout the weekend.

And, it was dialogue.

I won’t lie: I don’t think we managed to find an answer that “solved” the fictional land situation. But the dialogue had other layers we could delve into. There was definitely space to widen the view.

Of course, as a fictional space, there were no real ex-FARC members or businessmen with loaded life experiences, prejudices, wounds, egos. And beyond that, being there, we were all mostly green-minded, sensitive beings. Not everyone signs up for that kind of workshop.

But I did, and I came back to work the next day noticing the emptiness, the craving, the potential, the possibility. My fast and often extremely active mind wandered far. What if you could organize something like this with the dialogue group I work with? I got excited about the idea (how much it could do!), but quickly burst the thought and reminded myself to keep my feet on the ground.

No, these people are too rigid, too in their heads, too attached to doing “serious work.” And they’re too busy to spend two days opening up to something this eclectic. (These are all prejudices speaking, because I never really proposed it besides informal talks with some other that participate) But probably, my prejudices are not that far from reality. I recall past colleagues from my years in this field being very reluctant to try new ways of doing things, especially if they felt too experimental.

I feel trapped, I guess. Why am I in a place where I’m only using a part of the tools I know I could be engaging with—tools that could open up so many more possibilities?

Notes:

[1] At the moment of the workshop Colombia had multiple initiative in the country of this type, across very different economical activities. An estimated of 13,000 FARC combatants demobilized with the Peace agreement and had organized in different cooperatives to create businesses that could sustain them in their civil life. This process has been complex in terms of financial realities, opposition from some sectors in society, delays or obstacles to the support that was supposed to come from the State, among many others.

[2] More about Organizmo in: Visión — ORGANIZMO

[3] I am thinking here exclusively of activities proposed in Valiente es Dialogar.