Creating a new world

This week I finished a small project in a primary school.

I’ve done a lot of school-work over the decades, but not so much these days. However a couple of years ago I was offered a place on a cross-border initiative designed to embed creativity in schools - an initiative run jointly by Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It’s a very well designed programme, and well run too.

I’ve just completed my third project - two have been in the Republic, one in the North.

Because of my background, I work across ‘drama’, ‘movement’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘visual art’. In other words - pretty much we work in unfettered creativity.

The programme asks artists not to start a project knowing what they intend to create. The journey of the process needs to be decided, and guided by, the students and the teacher (as it’s also intended to empower the classroom teacher in the skills of running creative projects).

The project I just finished was in a very diverse, multicultural school, working with 11-year olds. Some were recent arrivals in Ireland, some from disrupted or traumatic backgrounds. Others carried the complex experience of living in relative poverty in an affluent culture.

It had the potential to be difficult, disruptive and confrontational. This risk was enhanced by the continuing thrum of racist rhetoric from flag-waving hypocrites at the national and social media levels - a thrum that recently burst into violent flames in Belfast, with Musk-inspired racists trying to burn ‘foreigners’ out of their homes.

Yet the classroom was calm, joyous and beautiful.

Not knowing what we were going to make over the weeks, I started from a simple fact: I’m half a century older than they are. We looked back to 1976, (ABBA was number one……) and then started to imagine forward half a century.

Their imagining of the future was instructive - they saw a world of no jobs (‘robots’/AI had taken them all), environmental degradation, lack of opportunity.

This felt a little like a dead-end, so I suggested we went to another planet and set up a new society there.

What would the landscape be like?

What creatures would exist?

What were the first ‘laws’ our new society should adopt?

What were the personal qualities each person needed to exhibit in order to be a ‘good’ person.

I did not create any of the answers, I just asked questions and gave them tools to imagine with.

They talked of everyone having access to good healthcare, a basic income, clean air to breathe, a home to live in, a ‘right to an amazing life’. They wanted everyone to have a lot of chocolate cookies.

They suggested the importance of kindness, making people laugh, respecting difference, working hard, caring for other creatures.

Given free space to imagine, they imagined a kinder and better world - one that the racists and oligarchs would claim is impossible or naive.

Kinder and better is neither impossible nor naive.

What happened in that classroom was the result of the culture the children are absorbing in that school. They’re learning to be cooperative and respectful of difference.

This is the point.

We’re all encultured. We’re shaped by where we are, and by how we interact with others. We’re shaped by the beliefs we come to learn are ‘normal’. We’re shaped by what we witness as acceptable behaviours, and by what consequences we see people face when they depart from the acceptable.

We’re each unique, but we’re also each a product of the culture and environment we inhabit.

For most of human evolution, human culture has been collaborative and communal. It has been similar to many of the ‘imaginings’ of the children I’ve just worked with: kindness, mutual support, respect for difference, laughter, creative play.

The children I shared time with over these weeks are fully human in a way that our culture of competition, over-consumption, and struggle seeks to crush. They’ve not yet had their humanity shattered, despite the very real struggles many of them have faced in life. They’ve been - and continue to be - nurtured.

Some of them, of course, a few years from now, may be waving flags and screaming insults at people they name ‘other’. Some may be immersed into toxic masculinity. Some may have forgotten they can make a difference in this world. Some may have become fully encultured by the anti-humanity of late-capitalism.

Ultimately our project became about empowerment - as creative processes so often do. The ‘personal qualities’ the children imagined for a future society are ones they can commit to, in their daily lives, right now.

The ‘other world’ they imagined can become real.

Fifty years from now will be shaped by what millions of people like them decide - day by day.

The fabric of effective, healthy interconnection they imagined for their future world existed, moment by moment, in the classroom we shared.

Half-a-century older than them, I’m reminded that we make the world in every conversation that we hold.

And that the world can be beautiful.

Warmest Wishes to you

John

I put some of my art work on a new site - it’s not a ‘sales’ site, but lets you see a timeline of recent works, and the different series they each are part of.

You can find it here: https://washboat.art/artist/john-britton-fanad-art