Autumn Season – Power Dynamics

We at the CitizensLab are on a collective quest and action-research to cultivate new forms of relating to one another, of taking care of our commons and reinventing forms of democracy. We see the need for deep cultural transformation and radical changes in our social and individual behaviors and social norms. It is therefore imperative to address the topic of power dynamics, look deeper into the power relations we are constantly producing or being affected by.

We entered the Autumn Season of our online Learning Journey, the time where we harvest the sweet fruits of the summer and prepare to let things die that don’t serve us and the world anymore. It’s a time where we learn to navigate the unknown and create space to be able to listen with new ears, see with new eyes and invite in the wisdom of our bodies. For each session, we invited a wisdom holder to share a little about their own story and relationship to this big topic as a way of inviting different perspectives.

Awa Ndiaye`s spoken word poems and her life experiences invited us to reflect, understand and see the intersectional and systemic dimensions of these different forms of power. The poems are full of satire and are playing with different ways of framing narratives and experiences.

To get deeper into the topic of power dynamics we invited Camille Barton, an interdisciplinary artist, educator and embodiment researcher, who uses afrofuturism to imagine creative interventions towards systems change.
Camille pointed out the importance of placing our bodies at the center of social change and transformation, to overcome the cartesian dualism that sees a separation of body-mind. They emphasized the need to become more aware of our embodied wisdom and the embodied interactions that inform our way of making-sense and interacting with the living world.

Camille presented the legacy of colonialism and how it is structuring most of the ways in which we interact with the world today. They emphasised how its power-over structures show up in the systems of oppression of supremacism and capitalism, generating the individual and collective traumas we have to start healing from. It became clear that we need to embrace a holistic-embodied approach that supports us in having agency and making the shifts and changes in regards to how these legacies of colonialism show up in our interactions with other people, the more-than-human and the ecosystem. Camille concluded with speaking to the importance of grief tending practices. Feeling grief is a natural by-product of the oppressive power dynamics we find ourselves in and we need to make space to feel this grief in order to heal.

Anita Paalvast introduced the art and practice of Aikido, a modern Japanese martial art form that can support our daily practice of feeling a more grounded and centered ability to handle the powers within ourselves and around us. Aikido is about finding harmony and going beyond the fight, the triggers, the conflict, not only with our thoughts and minds but also and primarily with our bodies and emotions.

We all have a dominant way of reacting to triggers as primary responses (fight, flight, freeze) and emotions that influence how we interact and relate.
Aikido principles, mindset, and skills offer the ability to practice inner calmness, to be able to focus on what is really happening in the situation, to be able to make choices on what to do or not to do. Aikido enables us to practice the capacity of being centered in a moment that triggers us to expand our awareness and ability to make choices.