In Adrien Shirk’s book Heaven is a Place on Earth, she write about the way in which utopian projects transmute like this: “They don’t often end or fail in the ways we think they do, they often live on in some other form” (with her example, maybe an ur-example, being Black Mountain College. One of its unexpected offspring, the School of the Alternative, led me in a roundabout way to many of my current collaborators). I’m compelled by her description of these projects as engaged in “a continuous round of low-stakes testing” as part of a fluctuating network that persists, shares resources, supports itself, and maintains a shared ancestry or heritage. These geographically and temporally specific projects are all interconnected via people who hold bodies of knowledge. As projects senesce, their resources can stay and keep moving through the ecosystem if that ecosystem is alive. As a matter of fact, this is how we know an ecosystem is healthy, dynamic, regenerative – if resources circulate while the organisms in it live and reproduce and die and live again (Maggie Nelson also talks about this process of churning in On Freedom– this is the work that artists do, and I want to pay attention to it).

In one of the case studies I’m most interested in investigating, I want to trace the path that led me to School of the Alternative, which sprouted from Black Mountain College, where Buckminster Fuller cultivated work that became part of the foundation of the Schumacher Center. I’m curious about how, or if, my colleagues at either of these institutions think of themselves in relation to each other due to this shared ancestry. Do we have a way of finding collaborators, our shared visionary siblings, across space and time? I believe that this understanding, this sense of oneself as part of a continuous network, is the difference between assessing our projects from a place of despair, as a series of failures; or through a lens of futurity – seeing the source materials for the next unforeseen eruption of life & possibility. My hypothesis is that many of us need this possibility in order to keep going. I also need us to keep going.  

What I’m looking to create is a method of pointing to bodies of knowledge that exist, but whose trail may be growing cold, or who are invisible from our current perspective. I want to mark the trail back to where it can be picked up again. I believe that a great deal of this knowledge cannot be adequately transmitted digitally, or in the form of a video or a blueprint. But I believe the signal can be transmitted through open, distributed, autonomous systems, and that’s what I’m proposing to investigate with this initial pilot funding.

Enabling Persistence: Support for documenting projects of liberatory education on the land

Additional Project Background