18 Mar 2015
Today’s blog is a podcast recorded in poet Matt Harvey’s composing shed in his garden in Totnes. A few weeks ago, SWIMBY The Musical (original working title ‘Transition Town: The Musical’) raised over £10,000 in a Kickstarter appeal, and this was followed by some Arts Council funding.
So now the team of Matt Harvey (poet/lyricist), Thomas Hewitt Jones (composer) and Chloe Uden (producer) are hard at work actually writing it. So we met in Matt’s shed to find out where they’re up to and what happens next.
They are still needing some funds, so if you are inspired to help them out, do get in touch. They’re on Facebook and Twitter. (You can either just play this podcast, or download it to listen to at your leisure).
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16 Mar 2015
Bristol was the first official ‘Transition City’. Transition Bristol has been instrumental in many pioneering initiatives in the city, such as the Bristol Pound, the UK’s first Peak Oil Report produced by a city council, the Food Resilience Plan to name just three. Last Saturday the penultimate Transition Roadshow came to Bristol and both looked back to the group’s beginnings as well as forward to what comes next.
Hosted at the Trinity Centre, ‘Transition at Trinity’ attracted over 100 people from both within Bristol and from further afield too, and was a mixture of workshops, downtime, group activities and talks.
The opening process, led by Angela Raffle, involved getting people to meet each other, find out why they had come, and to see where everyone had come from, by getting people to ‘map’ themselves in relation to each other.
This led into the first workshops, a choice between Sarah McAdam talking about ‘What is Transition?’, and Sophy Banks introducing the Transition Healthcheck. I went to the ‘What is Transition?’ one, which also included a potted history of Transition Bristol. An excellent overview of what Transition is, which also managed to weave in the Transition Healthcheck.
Lunch was provided by Moveable Feast, a social enterprise working with asylum seekers, a delicious Iranian dish. After lunch there was a choice of three workshops. The choice was between ‘Becoming the ‘Perfect Activist” with Sophy Banks, ‘Innovative problem solving – using a constellation technique’ with Jenny Mackewn, and ‘Building Collaboration and making the whole greater than the sum of the parts’ with Maddy Longhurst and Sarah Pugh.
After a cup of tea, and choice of the amazing cakes that many of those attending brought with them, I gave a talk about Transition and how it is building to be a really powerful model for a different future, one that leaves two thirds of fossil fuels underground in order to create something fantastic above ground. I started by quoting from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (you had to be there).
![My presentation on the need for "places of possibility".](https://www.transitionculture.org/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/3194fd86cc_b5.jpg "My presentation on the need for "places of possibility".")
The day then wrapped up with a closing session reflecting on something that had surprised us during the day, and something we would be taking away with us. This was one of the best of the Roadshows that have happened so far, and one that generated a great deal of enthusiasm and revitalisation. The sign of any good event is that people stand around for ages chatting afterwards, and as I dashed out for the train home, it looked like lots of people were going to be continuing those conversations for some time.
Congratulations and thanks to the Transition Bristol crew who made it happen: Angela Raffle, Ciaran Mundy, Jez le Fevre, Kristin Sponsler, Sim Osborn and Tom Henfrey. Heroes all. Thanks to Chris Bettles for all the good photos above (I took all the rubbish ones). The final Transition Roadshow takes place in Berkhamsted on 19 April. It looks like it will be a cracker too.
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16 Mar 2015
Juan del Rio is the author of the recently published ‘Guía del movimiento de transición’, the first book about Transition in Spanish. He has been involved with social movements and Transition for the last 10 years, and is part of an initiative in his town of Cardedeu near Barcelona. We thought we should hear a bit more about the book and how it came to be, so we gave Juan a call. We’ll start with a short video of him presenting Transition to people in his community of Cardedeu.
Why did you write this book?
For many different reasons. First of all, because I thought it was very interesting to bring the Transition model with the different, interesting experiences that are going on in Spain and to build with it a book that could help with the change of many communities that are already working in Spain.
At the same time, I thought it could bring a lot of energy to maintain the momentum of the movement in Spain, because on the one hand it’s growing, but on the other hand there are a lot of difficulties and barriers and so many other things. Also because in Spanish-speaking countries we have a lack of a tool like this one, talking about Transition adapted to our own reality, and in Spanish.
So I thought that it would be nice to bring together my learnings of the last few years with a lot of research from other Transition initiatives, and many other experiences and initiatives from all over Spain and other places. Lately I’ve been able to say that there is a very nice personal challenge, so I thought – why not, let’s go ahead.
There have been a few books on Transition published already. But this was written in Spanish, with Spanish-speaking people as its audience. How have you communicated Transition to that audience? Is there a Spanish approach to Transition and if so, how is it different?
I’d say that Transition is Transition everywhere. Wherever I go, you can see people changing their own reality, changing their own places. We have to say that Transition is made by the stories of the people. So the first point was to explain, to tell these stories of the people in Spain. It seems much closer to their own reality. They really feel recognised in their own stories.
Also by talking about the context, about the situation in a way that I could include not just the global problematics but also including the perspective of southern European countries with the economic crisis etc. And also including resources more adapted to the Spanish and also Latin American context and explaining the connections between different initiatives and movements, not only the Transition movement in Spain. One of the aims of the book is to build bridges between different movements in Spain.
It’s difficult to say if there’s any specific way from Transition in Spain. I guess that it wasn’t something that I thought before, but I’m sure that once the book is read by many people, I might be able to recognise these specific aspects that make Transition special here, or different, let’s say.
What are your hopes for the book?
First of all I’d like to help people and initiatives with their own Transition process. This doesn’t mean that the book has a solution, not at all, but within this long Transition process that we are working on now, I hope it can bring some useful tools and information, and also to make the movement more visible in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries. And go empower the initiatives: sometimes they feel a bit alone, and when I was interviewing many people for the book because I want to show many different projects.
I was saying to them – look, how nice, how important what you are doing is. They were more like “I’m just working with my gardens or with my local community etc”. But I think this kind of thing really can empower them, and try to show what is happening around us. That’s why in the book I talk about this new Transition that’s happening around us.
More specifically, I talk about new Transition at the beginning, in the introduction, because we had in the 70’s the transition from the dictatorship to the democratic state. So that’s why, when you talk about Transition, when you see the word ‘transición’ in Spanish, 95% of people would relate that word to that specific moment in the 70’s. So I thought it was important to explain this, and I hope it can be useful. That’s the main point, and for a next step, just to continue with this process in Spain.
You use the word ‘Transition’ in the title. Given there must have been a process in Spain on deciding whether to use the word Transition or not, in the book you decided to use the word Transition, how do you hope to overcome some of those historical associations?
Language is very powerful and the meaning of the words change. So of course you need to find a way, because for me Transition is a specific key word for the book, definitely. But that’s why on the cover we talk about “the guide for the Transition movement”, because the word ‘movement’, even though it wasn’t in my idea for the title, it was a way of saying “this is not about the Transition most of us know, but another thing, a movement that is already happening right now, and not only here but in many different countries”. So that was more or less the challenge, let’s say.
Can you give us a sense of the current state of Transition in Spain? How’s it going?
As a movement, it’s definitely growing, as with many other projects and initiatives, with many different names or brands, or however you want to call it. But also it’s this situation when the system is starting to collapse or at least struggling with many different problems, that you really need to surf the waves.
At the same time, there are many initiatives, but it’s very difficult for them to consolidate themselves to really go forward, because they have difficulties finding resources, but also because we are trying to be a new kind of society. We are not used to working in much more collaborative ways.
We are starting to learn about how to make decisions in different ways, about how to do things in a more particular way. So I’d say that there’s a lot of energy that in an organic way is flowing to make initiatives appear, but not all of them succeed and this is the situation.
Specifically, we have between 50 and 55 local initiatives in Spain, and the Spanish Transition Hub has been working for about the last 2 ½ years. Now it’s pretty much consolidated and we are working on many different projects. I hope this book is going to help to make this Transition a little bit stronger in Spain.
You’ve been involved in various forms of social activism and also acted as a Transition trainer. What’s your sense of what Transition brings to activism and for social change that’s unique or maybe wasn’t there before?
The emergence of this recipe, putting all these ingredients together, makes Transition special, at least in my opinion. Things like the balance between this inner work and these outer and more pragmatic projects is something in my opinion very strong, and makes the Transition movement very special.
Also this balance between how to acknowledge that we have very strong problems like peak oil, climate change, economic crisis etc, but at the same time not being so catastrophic as to say – this is there, I’m not denying it, but at the same time there are possibilities for things. So this constructive way of working with these problems and bringing hope to the community is something very strong and I think it’s something very useful for the Transition.
I could say that there is this focus on practicality that I think specifically brings something in a context like Spain, that we are discussing whether we want things to be perfect. Also, the participatory tools and methodologies that it brings to the group, this is something very rich that many of the social movements are starting to learn a bit, but it’s something key from the structure of Transition, and a very important tool. It’s more like the emergence of everything together than any specific thing, in my opinion.
Lastly, this is the first book you’ve written. How did you find the process of writing this, how has the experience been?
I’ve written many different things, but they were always fairly short. For me, writing is like travel. Until now I’ve been travelling for one week maximum, but now I’m travelling for one year. During this travel I’ve had many different stops, visited many different places, had different adventures, good and bad days. I found friends on the way.
I would say it has been intense, I’ve learnt a lot, and it’s this process of how to put into words the things that you have been experiencing during the last years, that it makes something very magical to write a book. But I have to say, on the other hand, it’s very tiring too. Maybe at the end of the book I was even thinking – does what I’m writing even make sense? Is it too depressing for people? Because you are alone, it can be difficult.
It has been like a birth, and it’s out – I don’t know if you say in the UK that at least each person could plant a tree, write a book and have a child. I’ve done the first two, but somehow this feels like my first child. So I’m very happy.
[Here is the podcast of our full conversation].
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9 Mar 2015
Sarah Corbett runs the Craftivist Collective, which she describes as “activism through needlework” and “slow, gentle, joyful activism”. The term was first coined by Betsy Greer in 2003 as “a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper and your quest for justice more infinite”. Given that our current theme is Social Change and the Arts, we thought it could be worth a chat, so we caught up with Sarah via Skype to find out more.
What is a Craftivist?
I didn’t coin the word ‘Craftivism’, but we’ve got a particular approach to it where, for us, craftivists tend to be people who are either burnt out activists, people who have done loads of activism and feel completely wiped out and struggling a bit with trying to get the motivation to do it again, also people who are often quite nervous about activism.
They want to make the world a better place and they believe it can be better, but they might be more introverted, more shy and quiet, tend to like doing crafty things so might be a bit of a loner or just a bit of a worrier, a person who is a bit nervous of traditional activist groups, which tend to be quite loud and extrovert and sometimes quite angry and threatening, or quite negative. So our craftivists tend to be within that bunch, but we’ve got a massive eclectic mix all around the world.
I wonder what’s the history of it as an idea? Is there a rich history going back of this, do you think?
I grew up in a low-income area with lots of activism happening, I was squatting from the age of 3, so my background is being around activism, seeing where it can win. Doing stuff in politics at school and activism at university and then working as a professional campaigner for NGOs.
I got into the craft side as a reaction to a lot of the angry or quick activism that I didn’t think was always that effective. So I merged the two. I didn’t have a clue that there was a history of craft and activism, to be honest. I knew Gandhi had a spinning wheel and I knew the Suffragettes had their banners and the unions had their banners, but I was very ignorant on it. There’s definitely a massive history but I’m not the expert on it: I’m learning more and more about how it’s been used.
Ours is quite different in that everything tends to be small rather than large. We don’t make giant banners, we do quite subversive, guerrilla craft. We think about what is our involvement in the world, when can we be helpful not harmful. What do we buy? Who do we vote for? All of those things.
It feels quite different, which is why I started doing craftivism. I couldn’t find anyone using craft in activism. There weren’t any groups or projects. There was lots in history, but there wasn’t anything I could do, so I started doing it.
Can you give us a sense of what you do? What are your favourite projects that you’ve been involved in?
There are three main ones that I really like for different reasons. We stitch on ‘fabric footprints’ to keep for ourselves. Because stitching takes hours to do, it’s hand embroidery so it’s very repetitive, it’s really good to focus on one issue of what journey we’re on as global citizens, what impact are we making on the planet step by step, and that’s for people to keep somewhere in their home that they can see to keep reminding them to stay on the right track and be intentional in their living.
That’s fascinating because that’s quite a soft way into activism which isn’t too scary. People don’t need to have lots of knowledge about particular issues like fracking or climate change, but they can think more holistically about values and morals and making the world a healthier place.
My particular favourite is I made a handkerchief for my local MP at the time a few years ago because her office was ignoring all my petitions and told me to stop contacting her, which I was quite angry about. It was a good challenge because it was good to think – why doesn’t she want me to contact her? It was clearly because we had very different ideologies and she didn’t see me as someone to win over to vote for her in the next election. She really just saw me as a bit of a slacktivist.
So I embroidered her a message on a handkerchief that was very timeless and encouraging – I know being an MP is a tough and a big job but please use your power and influence for good, with lots of smiley faces, “yours in hope from Sarah” and my postcode so she knew I was a constituent.
It was the only tool really, that I went and met her because she has to as I was a constituent. I gave her this handkerchief and she immediately warmed to me and opened up more about why she was an MP and what she wanted to do. We figured out where we could work together, we could challenge each other in a more loving, respectful way where we disagreed, which helped me understand where she was coming from and some of the barriers around some of the things she had to do. She still has my hanky on a pin board in the office and I’m known as “the hanky girl” in the office.
It seems quite cutesy and a little bit lame in a way, embroidering a hanky for an MP, but the relationship I’ve built with her from that catalyst of creating this beautiful delicate small thing with my handwriting just with backstitch over the top has really built a relationship with her of honesty and seeing where we can work together. And we have worked together on quite a lot of stuff which I didn’t think we would. I’ve learnt a hell of a lot on where she comes from in other ways. We don’t always agree, but it seems like we’re much better at being critical friends than aggressive enemies. Often as activists, we tend to sit in the park of aggressive enemies, sadly.
And then we do lots of street art and things as well that’s small and provocative, not preachy. That’s quite good for social media and we now have people all around the world doing our projects. The street art helps with those conversations, creating those conversations with people around issues they might not normally talk about.
What does craft, and using our hands in a creative way, do to us? I was reading recently that the average national attention span over the last 10 years has fallen from 12 minutes to 5 minutes and they’ve put a lot of that down to smart phones and iPads and Facebook and all that kind of stuff. Can craft be an antidote to that? Could you think of it as a kind of digital detox strategy?
Definitely. That’s one of the reasons I started doing it. I picked up a craft kit because I was travelling a lot with my job and I couldn’t read on trains because I was getting travel sick, and I was constantly online so I had huge targets. I was working on a DFID project at the time and I was emailing whilst texting, whilst writing stuff, whilst doing documents. It was ridiculous really.
I, like many people, have itchy fingers to physically make something or be creative and I immediately noticed that when I took up craft I was specifically only talking about hand embroidery and cross stitch, not woodwork or glasswork which are different things. The work I’ve heard from clinicians and neuroscientists I’ve been lucky enough to work with suggest there are very unique benefits of craft in that the repetitive nature of activities like hand embroidery naturally slows you down, reduces anxiety, helps with depression, helps you feel empowered, you’re physically making something which is different to being online, and I think all of that is so useful for people trying to do social justice.
Often, we’re doing things online and we don’t see a tangible difference. Often we’re reading quite depressing, worrying things that we need to and want to read and understand, but it can get us in a downward spiral. So to be able to craft whilst learning about these complex issues really helps us stay sane, stay positive, see that we can physically make a difference because we’re making things. And it slows us down. We’re not being distracted.
We can spend hours crafting and thinking about the complexities of different issues and how it’s all tangled up, to see what our role is and what we can do, and to stop and think strategically as campaigners and not just rush off and do things with good intentions that, sadly, might not always end up with the best results. It’s a really useful thing o do.
My craft idea has become the global Craftivist Collective now very much by accident. Because I started doing it on my own, people started sharing it online because it was interesting imagery, it was hand embroidery. I started it 6 years ago. 6 years ago there wasn’t much craft online, contemporary craft that people wanted to share, so it was quite sharable. And now we’ve got thousands of craftivists around the word because it translates really well online.
So I wouldn’t say you should hide away in a shed and do craft. I’d say do that and come out of the shed and Instagram it and Pinterest it and share it on Facebook and use it as a tool for conversation, rather than as a goal in itself. It’s there as a tool and a catalyst.
I remember I watched this fantastic film that was a black and white film made during World War II, one of the public information films. It had this scene of someone giving a talk to a Women’s Institute group in Derbyshire in some village hall somewhere, and all the women looked like something out of Monty Python, with these big coats and hats on, and they were all knitting. Every single person in the hall was knitting. Everybody used to do all that stuff, but we’ve lost it more and more. I wondered what you think as a culture we lose when we stop using our hands in that way?
What’s amazing is over the last few years you see more and more young people and older people knitting on trains and in conferences. There’s more and more evidence now, which is brilliant, about how using your hands while you’re listening in a lecture or while you’re with people helps you soak up more of that information because your brain is alert because you’re using your hands and not just sitting still and wandering.
Also, while you’re crafting together, what’s very unique about hand stitching as well, more than lots of other creative crafts is that you don’t need eye contact, so if you think about lots of activists meetings, it can feel quite intimidating for someone new or shy to say anything, because you’ve got to give eye contact and if you look at the table people think you’re rude because you’re not focusing. While you’re crafting, you don’t need to look at each other, so you can listen more intently, and you can share things without having to give eye contact.
I do workshops all the time, all over Europe sometimes, which is amazing, and the things people open up to, they would never have said: “I’m thinking about this”, or “maybe I got it wrong”, or “I hadn’t thought about how my clothes are made before, how awful”. They’ll open up about this stuff because they’ve got craft in their hands. I do worry a lot; I work a lot with young people and lots of different ages, but young people especially want to have these deep conversations but don’t feel they have any tools to do it.
So whereas my mum and my grandmother will know that craft has some of these benefits, because they would have experienced it, a lot of young people haven’t done textiles or they’ve just done machinery textiles, or CDT, so they don’t know that these are great tools for slowing down, thinking critically, using it as a way to have conversations with people and ice breakers. They just think everything is online. They just get thrown online tools and apps, rather than being told – maybe we should stop and think and get offline a little bit.
So I do worry, we live in such a busy, fast-paced world, people are craving to do something with their hands and to slow down, but aren’t quite sure where to look.
What are the things that inspire you most in terms of what other people are doing, particularly in that world of where activism meets the arts?
At the moment what I worry about a lot is people just doing, doing, doing without thinking, which often we do because we’ve got stresses and deadlines and so many things to do. What I love is when people have spent hours making something that’s very thoughtful. They’ve thought very clearly about what text to put on, who they’re going to give something to, the message they want with it, is it a gift, is it a tool for different things.
I did find that fascinating, that people have made the time and prioritised the time to say – I’m going to take a step back from this crazy world and think intentionally about what am I doing, how am I feeling. Being a bit mindful is a good thing, as long as we don’t navel gaze, which mindfulness isn’t about, but sadly the Western world has co-opted that world so it feels a bit individualistic.
One example is Lucy Neal’s book. I saw Lucy at our Well Making event a few weeks ago and the time and energy she spent on making this lovely book and meeting all these thoughtful people. She made the book not because she had a massive book deal, deadline and a big advance, but she saw a need for creating a tool that would encourage and empower and equip people to be intentional and be more thoughtful in the actions they take and how they treat people, and what we can do as global citizens as well as local neighbours. It keeps me going.
Do you know of many Transition groups who you’ve overlapped with or have got involved with craftivism? If so – which, and if not, what would be your advice for any Transition group reading this who might think – that sounds really good. Where would they start?
Have you heard of yarn bombing? It’s also called “knitting graffiti”. People often think craftivism is knitting around lamp posts because if you Google ‘craftivism’ that’s what comes up first. Any group or individual I talk to, when they say “what can I do?” I always remind them that craft should be the tool to do activism where it’s appropriate.
Sometimes it’s not appropriate to do craft, it needs to be a march or a petition, or a quick action or something. But it’s a tool for activism, rather than having craft as the task master. So if you love craft, it’s very tempting to squeeze your love of craft into using it for a good political cause. We need to stop ourselves from doing that and be much more strategic, and say “what’s the best use?”
So for some Transition Town networks, it might be that if you’re setting up a new group and you want to break the ice, get everyone to bond together, then our “footprints” is a lovely one to do where you get to know each other while you’re stitching: you talk about what message you’re going to put on your footprint, what are you most passionate about, how do you want the group to work, what can you offer the group. It’s a lovely comforting tool to think about uncomfortable issues of global change, but also how we can be effective together and have those conversations.
We’ve also got kits to do our little mini protest banners, where if you’re aiming for your town to really change its ways then you can plant these small bits of street art off eye level that provoke, not preach, and it could be a really lovely way to get people noticing that you’ve got this Transition network and you’re trying to change the world for the better, but you’re doing it in a very gentle way.
What we tend to do is our default, which is craft: let’s make a massive banner and scream down megaphones and tell people we’re here and you should join us. That doesn’t tend to work so much nowadays. It’s much more about individual conversations and word of mouth and being a little bit more sneaky so people don’t feel like you’re vying for their attention like everyone else, and I think craft is a very slow, organic tool to see what can happen, but be patient with it, use it as a slow and meditative tool. Don’t just go big and loud, which is the obvious. What’s often more effective is the small, quiet, humble actions.
Sarah is just one of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right). The book is published at the end of this month.
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2 Mar 2015
Welcome to our month on Social Change and the Arts. It’s a theme that has been long overdue for exploration. It could be subtitled “Why the Arts need Transition, and why Transition needs the Arts”. The trigger for our finally sitting down to give it the attention it deserves is the impending publication of Lucy Neal’s brilliant and remarkable new book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered’ (published early next month). Over the next 2 months we will be exploring the relationship between Transition (and other approaches to social change) and the arts, speaking to some of the contributors to the book and hearing about some inspirational projects and artists.
The book quotes Suzi Gablik, in conversation with James Hillman, as saying “the notion of art being in service to anything is an anathema. Service has been totally deleted from our viewpoint”.
That sense of service runs deep through Transition, and Lucy’s book puts it back at the heart of arts practice. It promises to be a fascinating eight weeks. It starts with an in-depth interview with Lucy herself about the book and about the overlap between Transition and the arts world.
In this post I want to reflect on one of my favourite places where Transition and the arts have overlapped. But first I wanted to share a section from the piece I wrote for the book, which reflects my sense of why the arts matter in Transition:
“When we started Transition, I imagined it as an environmental process. Now I see it as a cultural process. What does the culture of the place you live need to do in order to be best prepared for change? Transition can start to change that culture, introducing an invitation to work with other people who ordinarily you wouldn’t meet, and to create something extraordinary with them.
It reweaves connections, it brings people together with a creative impulse. Some might say, ‘Well that’s all very well, but in the context of the challenges set out earlier, it’s a drop in the ocean’. They may be right. But my sense is that Transition embodies the possibility of something that few other things can achieve. It is about what is currently politically impossible becoming politically inevitable. Transition can start to change the tone, change the background buzz, change the sense of what’s possible.
It has a tremendous ‘power to convene’, to get all manner of people in a room together, dreaming, planning and doing. It does so in ways that aren’t what people expect. Transition ‘shops’ on High Streets that invite people in to share their hopes and fears for the place, Open Space events where the agenda is created by those attending, fuelled with tea and cake, pieces of community theatre that invite people to be part of not just imagining the future, but spending time in it, walking around in it and discussing it with others who have also made that journey.
What we are seeing emerging around the world is a new narrative for these times. A narrative that says these are extraordinary times, and times that demand us to be extraordinary. A narrative that invites us to be entrepreneurial, to not just dream of a new economy, but to bring it into being, business by business. A narrative that isn’t about each place starting from scratch, but connecting communities in a ‘learning network’, in which ideas, successes and failures can be rapidly communicated around the world. A narrative that invites us to come together in new ways and to work alongside other people to transform our small corner of the world. You could think of it as the ultimate form of ‘impact investing’.
Perhaps one of the key parts of this has been how Transition has, from the start, consciously seen the arts as being central to its success. The arts can powerfully make the kind of future we want to see become an actual reality around us. It can invite us to step across into the future. It can open us to new possibilities and it can celebrate and document what we’re doing in playful and creative ways. Ultimately, it can spark change, and change is what we need right now. What Transition does is to give that a narrative, a context. What is most heartening, around the world, is to see how many people have already started to step up, and how much fun they are having in doing so. You will hear many such stories among these pages, I hope they inspire you to become part of them”.
While there are many things I could choose from, one object stands out for me when I think of the power and potential of art being in service to Transition, and of Transition being in service to art, as well as harnessing the power of storytelling, good design, place and culture. It’s a local currency note from London. The Brixton Pound £10 note, the one featuring David Bowie. Notice how you had already heard of it and, most likely, could already visualise it. In the event that you didn’t, here it is, among its fellow notes.
It’s bright, it’s simple, it’s colourful. I have taken it to many places. What has often amazed me is how its reputation has gone ahead of it so that, on at least 4 occasions, just my holding it up during a talk has generated a round of applause. When I went to Paris recently and visited a project run by Le Pre Saint Gervais en Transition, we were visited by the local Mayor Gérard Cosme.
Did he want to have his photo taken with the group of people there? With me? Not really. The key thing he wanted was a photo of himself with the Brixton Pound £10 note, “the one with David Bowie on” (see photo below). Sometimes after big talks, a group of young people will come up, wanting to take a ‘selfie’, and usually ask for the David Bowie note to be in there too.
It made an appearance in the recent excellent ‘Scala Mercalli’ programme on Italian TV on Friday evening (watched by over 1.1 million viewers). It starts conversations. It embodies the sense that a Transition future could be more fun, more delightful, than the alternative futures currently on offer. It embodies possibility. It is delightful. Why would anyone want to settle for the dull money currently on offer, when we could have bright funky money with David Bowie on? No, seriously … why would you? And if you won’t settle for that, why settle for anything else? It opens the possibility of actually refusing to accept the planet-trashing, attention span wrecking, community atomising, wealth concentrating crap that makes up so much of what we accept in modern society.
In his brilliant TED talk from 2007, James Howard Kunstler talks about ‘Places Not Worth Caring About’, and as modern architecture builds more and more of them we end up with entire places no-one cares about. And that has very harmful impacts in terms of peoples’ wanting to make the world around them a better place. If you’ve never seen it, and fancy a hilarious and enlightening 20 minutes I couldn’t recommend Kunstler’s talk highly enough:
My point is that we need more things in our life that we care about. Personally speaking, I care more about a Totnes £21 note than I care about a £20 note. The things Transition does, whether urban gardening, new food markets, Transition Streets groups, are all about creating things that people care about. The remarkable ‘Transition Town Anywhere‘ activity Lucy and others facilitated at the Transition Network conference in 2009, where 350 people built a living, working High Street economy from string and cardboard left me caring far more deeply about my own High Street than I had before. And art and design have a vital role to play in that.
Lucy’s book quotes Isa Frémeux who says:
“Building alternatives is always an act of hope – the embodied refusal of the present”.
This simple bank note embodies that. Every revolution needs its icons, its tokens, which embody much more than appears at first glance. But it’s about more than art and design. It’s about what those things can act as a gateway to. I always loved Jean DuBuffet’s quote:
“Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called”.
For me, the moments when Transition most touches and inspires me are the moments when it “forgets what it is called”, when it comes up with unexpected and delightful approaches. A £10 note with David Bowie on is a perfect example of that. So is “a shop with nothing for sale but lots on offer”. So is a project to plant fruit trees that is also an art project with oral histories, tours, poetry, maps and storytelling. So are the hundreds of thrilling stories that make up Lucy’s book. Over the next two months we’ll hear other examples too. May there be many more of them, and may this month blow your mind in terms of what you think it is possible for Transition groups to do.
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