Hub Lovin’ with London Love Is

Join us on the 14th February (Valentines Day!) at the Hub Kings Cross to participate in a new social art movement. Mindful Maps and the Hub Kings Cross are co-ordinating and hosting this event, which will be facilitated by Vipul Bhatti from London Love Is… 

London Love is … is a social art movement that forms ‘Stand with Us’ human chains across the city. The focus of this participatory campaign is to engage people to celebrate by connecting and sharing, empowering to build, and to create together for one other. Previous human chains have been held on public spaces, this is the campaign’s first enclosed event.

The Hub Kings Cross is a space open to sharing, one that connects and creates ideas and builds on a vision. This human chain event will increase interconnectivity in the space, exploring another way to find our places, re-shaping it to find other creative possibilities and even new collaborative beginnings.

London Love is… and the Hub Kings Cross hopes you can join us on the 14th to Stand with Us. The human chain itself will take form up-to 25 minutes. A short talk and creative exercise will take place before.

London Love is… is a partner of the global campaign Peace One Day, which aims to have one day every year of non-violence and ceasefire.

Venue: The Hub Kings Cross, 34b York Way.
Date: 14th February 2012
Time: 12.30-1.30pm

For more information, email: sarah.cook@the-hub.net

Sisters in Conversation

On Saturday 28th January I was graphic harvesting at Sisters in Conversation; part of the Ubele Initiative. The workshop took place at the Women’s Resource Centre and attracted 24 African and Caribbean community leaders, activists and change agents, plus a hosting team of six of our women, drawn from all over London and beyond.

As one participant wrote on her Facebook page this morning:

“It was a fabulous day and I even changed my plans to stay until the end! I met a potter, writer, singer, entrepreneurs, business advisor, film-maker, photographer, graphic recording artist, administrators, consultants, an academic and university graduate….. and we feasted on fruit, ‘Cummin Up’ lunch & ‘Black River’ chocolates!”

Mindful Maps has provided support to Ubele since it’s conception nearly a year ago, and has documented several of the critical friends sessions. Images of these are in this flickr set. 

Comparing this event’s visual to those created in past sessions, it’s clear to see the language generated in a female-only session is very different. Anger and aggression were still extremely present, but the overarching vocabulary seemed to be about reconnection, trust, healing, empathy and support. Things that struck me particularly were:

• The parts of the conversation about storytelling, people wanted to tell their stories and find a home for them. This would preserve oral history and pass on important information to future generations. The women also wanted to be able to access stories of people like them so that they felt less isolated.

• A statement I found written on the back of a napkin (which I fed into the main visual). It read: “begin the journey of self healing, self discovery and self empowerment“. This isn’t the same kind of statement which came through in the mixed gender conversations.

• A language of parenting, nurturing and cultivation. Again because of the female environment this element was much stronger. This resonates with the project’s inter-generational nature.

• A need to be vulnerable. Several women mentioned vulnerability and how the image of the strong black women sometimes is unhelpful as it limits space to be vulnerable. Here I am reminded of the work of Brené Brown’s and Deborah Ravetz.

• A desire to find a sense of the whole, not re-inventing the wheel all the time but pulling together things people are already doing, and their stories. At the same time I felt a strong urge for a radically different approach. Could it be that Ubele is part social technologies such as World Café and the Change Lab (Reos) for moving conversations forward and initiating action), and part pulling together what is already out there and has already happened?

• The empathy and expression in the room. Being around so many strong women freely expressing their emotions and stories was awe-inspiring, deeply moving and personally healing.

Sisters in Conversation has got me thinking about how a group of women can co-design a change process and co-create a future that is very different to those imagined by mixed groups. This article on Theory U and the feminine principle was distributed in the welcome packs.

Although there was a process planned for the workshop, certain parts of it expanded to fill the day. For the facilitators Yvonne Field and Yvonne Christie (or Yve x 2 as I like to call them), it didn’t feel right (or indeed possible) to push participants through a pre-defined process when people were having such passionate and emotional conversations.

As the author of the above article, Arawana Hayashi writes:

“There is a habitual tendency for many of us to focus our attention on content – on the words, on the figures, and on the actions. Feminine principle invites us instead to notice the space or the background. It expands our attention to the atmosphere or the environment. It invites us to notice the space out of which expressions arise.”

It is feminine qualities within the hosting of space and conversations which allow real connections to happen.

Organisations often pretend that gender is a neutral issue but I don’t believe this is helpful to creating a balanced future (which of course involves the masculine principle too), quite simply because it isn’t neutral. One of the next steps for Ubele is to host a Brother’s conversation, then a mixed one. The outcomes of this will be interesting to compare to this session, and I hope that visualising these meaningful conversations will continue to help Ubele evolve and grow.

Read more about this event on the Ubele blog.

Collaborative Consumption: RSA / Nominet Film Trust Competition entry.

In collaboration with Throughline and KILN, Mindful Maps has been having a lot of fun co-creating a short movie for the RSA/Nominet Trust Film Competition. The movie animates an RSA talk given by social innovator Rachel Botsman, co-author with Roo Rogers of the popular book, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.

The movie was animated by Brendan at Blunt Films, and features original music by Tom Verney and Jonathan Impett.

On Documentation

Images: from my Graphic Harvesting in Everyday Environments sketchbook. 

A post about documentation has been brewing for a couple of days, this is a large element of my practice that I’ve wanted to clarify thoughts on for some time.

I use visual documentation (along with other methods) as a tool for practice and life. See some examples here. In my 1-1 Mindful Mapping sessions with people, the maps we make together are a document of their personal journey. Images I make for my own art and illustration often contain elements which have come from journalling or writing down dreams.

Other documentation tools I like to use are Julia Cameron’s morning pages, journalling,  blogging, Evernote, iPhoto, mood boards and tools from the Metadesigners Open Network.

When we document our experience, the creative process is expanded and we create reference points from which to navigate our journey. Documenting in the simplest of ways (keeping a diary, a photoblog, a sketchbook) can not only record our experience but help shape it.

In this blog post on MyUrbanist, Chuck Wolfe makes a great point about this. I would recommend reading the full post as it’s genius, but for some context Chuck makes the below comment in reaction to published skepticism about the validity of citizen fascination, compilation of urban decay or hidden infrastructure in comparison to ‘academic documentary efforts’. He writes:

“Rather than simply receive and review such messages (or debate their validity), why not document your own choice of how to live? Why not create your own urban diary?”

Documenting everyday experience (urban or otherwise), in the real world is something I find particularly satisfying, because it makes the mundane interesting and life exciting. In a workshop I facilitated in October called Graphic Harvesting in Everyday Environments we looked at how to use drawing not to make “good art” but as an observation tool to help participants become more present in their experience. This year I will run more of these workshops, and start turning them into a course.

Images from a walk though Chalk Farm, finding a little park I didn’t know existed. From going into documentation mode we discover new places and learn things (like the fact there’s a nice little food market in Chalk Farm on Sundays, or that Sylvia Plath lived there).   

Paradoxically, by letting go and seeing documentation as a tool for deeper awareness and focused direction (rather than “good art”), we can actually increase our artistic ability.

Michael Avatar, author of How To Be An Artist writes about how documentation relates to the artistic process through helping us see more:

“You are an information gatherer, you are an eye. Everything you see is interesting. Learn to believe in this and fashion your world towards the recording of that data [...] The more you go into this recording mode, the more you will see. So detail becomes important. The glistening lino floor of the underground carriage, the colour of the sky at particular times of day, the debris and the litter on the streets of your town. All is available and miraculously all is free. Take advantage.”

Later in the book he states:

“Art is everything that you see. Look through your eyes at the world and make a statement about what you observe”

So give it a go. Write one thing down you find interesting a day, draw your dreams, take a daily photo of something different on the same journey, start a blog about how you’d like to live. Make an installation of all the tiny green objects you can collect over a month, you could even go onto write a story about them. Document your world for the sake of expanding awareness and the results may just surprise you, or take you in a new direction.

This piece is cross-posted from September Sun.

Fesitve wishes from Mindful Maps

Happy festive season everyone! However you choose to celebrate (or not) I wish you a few days of healing reflection, loving kindness and connection with the most important people in your life. I’d also like to say a massive THANK YOU and send a virtual hug to all the friends, family and collaborators who have supported me in starting up Mindful Maps this year. It’s been about 8 months since making it official and the response has been mind-blowing, your encouragement has really kept this going over the ups and downs of early self employment

My Christmas wish is for this practice to keep growing, evolving and putting down roots. Here are a few things emerging for 2012 (projects and otherwise) that I’d like to share with you.

What 2012 holds for Mindful Maps:

• Exciting new collaborations with Emergent Research, Be Amazing Today, Ivan Nascimento, Kiln and others including some housing associations up North.
• Writing a business plan and orientating Mindful Maps towards creative learning and living.
• Taking Come To Your Senses to the next level with Auralab.
• Co-creating the next Visual Camp.
• Working towards a new and groovy website/archive/learning resource, hopefully with Asilia.
• Building the Mindful Maps community through partners and increased communication including turning September Sun into a newsletter/regular publication.
• More workshops, including ‘Graphic Harvesting in Everyday Environments‘ which I am considering expanding into a course.
• Lots of 1-1 Mindful Mapping following the launch this autumn.
• Developing my own practice as an artist – more making, doing and going to classes. One project currently on the go is a an illustrated book about female voice (so expect lots of tweets tagged #femalevoice in 2012).
• Integrating empathi into Mindful Maps as an art/craft project and online shop.
• Create and make available visual tools for learning, life and practice.
• Explore more body-related, physical practices and play.
• Find formal mentors and supervisors. Any volunteers?.
• Contributing to creative learning and social change conversations in the UK and globally. Expect a lot more noise.

If any of the above spark inspiration then I’d love to hear from you.

Enjoy, and as Bill and Ted said… Be excellent to each other!

Image: section from a painting by yours truly.