Starter Culture presents Stories at the Edge of Collapse

Sexuality, eros, rape, power, abduction, incest; the underworld is a hot mess!

Underneath our culture's obsession with sex and unhealthy power dynamics (and unfortunately the blending of the two) lies a story of Eros or Life energy. In this storytelling evening, we will ask:

• What older layers of story are held within the current version that we might decolonize and compost to reveal deeper Earth-centric truths within?

• How might this story’s journey to a patriarchal tale reveal to us our own journey of how we got where we are and the becoming that is possible in these times?

• How does this story point to our own responsibility to “do our work” with power, privilege, class and social norms, in order to liberate us into the Life-Death-Life cycle that is Earth’s continual transformation?

• And what does all of that have to do with the polycrisis?

Between the extremes of salvation and surrender lies a third way, a cyclical way, a way of honouring the Life-Death-Life cycle at the heart of Earth's renewal. How might this story and the cycle it reveals be a guide in our times of crisis, collapse and transformation? What if the response of trying to save Earth (or the humans or another species)  or of simply surrendering to the collapse, were both part of the same logic? We propose that a change of consciousness is needed in order to dream this third way forward, beyond the binary of save or surrender.

"My sense of things is that both 'the soteriological' (a theology of salvation) and 'the notion of surrender' - like two extremes of a pendulum swing - maintain the same logic of control. The One-that-saves-the-world isn't very different from the One-that-surrenders-to-it. Something managerial persists. Anytime the question turns on how to surrender, the idea of a coherent self that must choose to surrender is reinforced.

I am trying to gesture beyond salvation and surrender. There's a space between those default approaches that feels creative, generative, but frighteningly composting."

Bayo Akomolafe

This is composting power-over culture into relational culture. Please join us for the conversation and the dreaming at the edge of collapse, it matters that you come, that you bring your voice and heart to the questions of these times. Together, we can e in the discomfort of composting and the wonder of Beauty.