Revision Summit 2018

With the words of the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee: “the web has failed“. The abuse of our data has far-reaching consequences for both our digital and offline lives. Blockchain holds the potential to change it, for better or for worse. Let’s discuss its impact on digital identities, data ownership and on the very core of human rights.

In the professional world, interactions take place predominantly on the verbal and intellectual level. An assumption underlying this circumstance seems to be that language and intellectual exchange is somehow objective and universal while physical or emotional exchange is not. The notion of Somatic Intelligence suggests that even subtle physical exchange can serve as a much more direct tool to communicate and to identify unconscious behaviours, patterns, and projections affecting verbal discourse. In this roundtable we want to discuss ideas around the supposed objectivity of language and how insights from body work and movement can help establish a more complex, truthful, and clear exchange and understanding within a group. Naturally, the session will begin with a handful of playful physical exercises to illustrate this argument and to create a common point of departure.

Moving towards a more human-centric digital age also involves focusing on diversity and equality. The empowerment of women remains an integral component of social change. This roundtable will focus on the issues women face on a daily basis, and what actionable paths are possible to bring about safety, power and equality for women. This is a topic that should be approached from an intersectional lens, considering how secondary and tertiary marginalised identities, such as race and sexuality, create additional prejudices for women. Defining feminism itself is also an integral part of the process, and to understand how feminist thought and action have a direct benefit to all of humanity, regardless of gender. Amongst talking about women’s empowerment, we also want to explore gender itself - to understand the characteristics associated with women (or men) as cultural and internalised qualities, rather than natural or biological aspects. From issues such as privatised as domestic violence, to the structural rigidity that continues to detract power from women, we hope to set in motion conversations and actions that will accelerate the feminist agenda.

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'.