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The proposed Social Sculpture Academy sees the human being as a social artist at the centre of the work to shape a humane and ecologically viable future in which all human and other-than-human beings are respected and valued and connective ways of living and knowing are explored. Drawing on 4 decades of social sculpture and connective practice work in formal institutions and with communities around the world, the Social Sculpture Academy integrates the radical 'education for liberation' work of Paulo Freire, mindfulness work, approaches to ecological justice and sustainability, and Joseph Beuys' 'expanded understanding of art'. The round table will outline how the Social Sculpture Academy will be the hub for a series of globally accessible on and off-line programmes for change-makers round the world and the significance of its roots in social sculpture and connective practice. It will also consider the importance of an intergenerational faculty of creative practitioners, activists and pedagogic enablers with global cross sector experience and the value of it having a base in Berlin. By enabling the development of our capacities for envisioning, thinking together and empathy; by engaging with different ways of knowing, including indigenous knowledge systems such as Ubuntu in Africa, and through exploring connective political, economic and eco-social forms, the Social Sculpture Academy will contribute to the global movement striving to overcome unnecessary suffering and to reconfigure a just, non-exploitative and life enhancing relationship to each other and all life forms. The Social Sculpture Academy seeks social investment as a new start up - working from a base in Berlin - to develop forms of support for its programmes to be scaled out as a commons, and to maximise the substantial experiential and knowledge 'capital' that its faculty can contribute. Social Sculpture practitioners linked to this initiative have been working with projects and people in many countries, including Brazil, India, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Senegal, Palestine, Portugal, Germany and Holland. We look forward to your participation and support in the scaling out and on going development of this rich resource and of creating a base here in Berlin, for what Joseph Beuys described as the 'permanent conference'.
Social sculpture professor and practitioner, Oxford Brookes University
Shelley Sacks is a social sculpture practitioner well known for projects like Earth Forum, Exchange Values and Frametalks, and for the key role she has played in developing the field of contemporary social sculpture, the inner dimension of sustainability and connective thinking and... Read More →
