An Impromptu the Re(ge)naissance Movement
Rising into the Sun, the New Human is Here Now.
We are an evolving living organism. An unfolding reality. A work in progress. An ex tempore improvisation.
“There is another world, but it is inside this one” noted the poet Paul Éluard. We are standing on the spot where this new world reveals itself, asking ourselves one question “Why did we hesitate to recognize this?”
Once the stone has been thrown. The button has been pushed, there will be no turning back. Nothing will ever be the same again. The New Human is alive. We are going down the slide. Dissembling this matrix. We are all balancing together on this imaginary rope in this hyperconnected world, with one foot in the present and the other foot in the future. Rising into the sun, the New Human is here now. A circular path, from the past to the future, from the future to the past. All that remains is this moment. Anni Albers is whispering in our ear “A longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means within oneself: For creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know.” The Homo Symbolicus. Deconstructing the past, we emerge from the future.
In the existential void, we recognize ourselves as a dynamic and fractal organism, a spontaneous composition in constant flux. We stand at the precipice of irreversible transformation, not as passive spectators but as architects of the New Human. This descent is an ascension; the matrix unravels as we teeter on the hyperconnected tightrope that binds our present to a nascent future.
It is here, amid the cosmic dance, that Anni Albers’ echoes resonate within us, a testament to the thrill of creation that emerges from within, not from without — the Homo Symbolicus. We deconstruct to reconstruct, emerging not from the past but towards it, our gaze fixed upon the majestic tapestry of Earth. It is a conscious web, Indra’s Net, where beauty thwarts collapse and wonder becomes the anthem of our collective reset.
The New Human is dusted off, its visage a Bauhaus relic, a beacon of renewal amid the tumult of extremism and fragmentation. It is the embodiment of the grand transformation from consumption to creation, from fragmentation to wholeness. The holographic universe unfolds, and we stand in awe of its inherent positivity, a reflection not of illusion but of profound collective aspiration.
This pivot from the mechanical to the organic requires our systems to achieve a new homeostasis. It is a tale of symbiosis, a testament learned in the crucible of the pandemic: unity in diversity, and well-being as the ultimate narrative. We stand at the threshold of a new ethos, forging a radical wholeness that defies disciplinary and geographic bounds.
A symphonic collective heralds this vision — a decentralized, regenerative nexus propelling us toward a future where innovation harmonizes with our planet’s rhythms. It is an audacious play, a laboratory of potentialities where art, science, nature, and technology converge in a new aesthetic harmony.
As the Earth faces desolation, we grasp the urgency of innovation that serves both humanity and the biosphere. We are the vanguard, the anticipatory minds weaving a tapestry of new narratives that challenge the status quo and foster an integrative perspective on human existence.
In this emergent paradigm, the Re(ge)naissance stands as a movement striving for emerging ideas that resonate with the circular rhythms of nature, willing to avert climatic cataclysm while nurturing regenerative futures.
This juncture in our history is a clarion call, an opportunity to discern the root causes of our planetary plight and to embrace a cooperative spirit that prioritizes planetary health over insular wealth. We stand on the cusp of potential rebirth or ruin, tasked with the solemn duty to transcend speculation and theory, to actuate tangible change for the real world.
As we rise towards the sun, the New Human is not just emerging; it is redefining freedom in a post-carbon, post-capitalist, decolonized world, a testament to the eternal cycle of regeneration and resilience.
We are staring at each other, gazing at the mesmerizing beauty of this super-organism, the Earth, observed from space, felt from within. Meta, macro, and micro examination of intertwining networks. Heart-stirring. Aesthetic arrest instead of imminent collapse. We cannot continue with business as usual, you say. We all agree. We need more wonder, we believe. It is time to reset and rewire. The cuckoo clocks make tick-tack. Do you hear it? Time does not pass, it moves in a circle.
We are removing carefully the dust from the face of the New Man, the man as envisioned by Walter Gropius, and the new art school known as the Staatliches Bauhaus back in 1919. The New Man arose in an age of rising extremism, mass polarization, and fear. The New Man, expelled, forgotten, and buried with his ambitious dreams and his real utopia is reborn and is alive today, filled with a force of regenerative renewal. The transformation occurs from the inside out.
Tackling our complex systemic challenges and rebirthing our life-supporting living systems require us to collaborate, co-create, and co-imagine new ways of thinking, living, and thriving. We return to the playground. We are fostering this great transformation, from having to being, from degenerating to regenerating, from many to one, from disconnected to united. A civilization’s metamorphosis follows nature’s principles. Graceful, compassionate, intuitive. A shift that relies greatly on our cooperation, collective action, and boundless imagination. A dynamic reconnecting process in which all the whole is more than its parts. The holographic universe. We are seeing a world that is positive at this core. A reflection of our deepest collective hopes — though rooted in wisdom and insights, not in illusion. As we grow up, our understanding of this wholeness is spinning a web from one tree to another. Dissolving boundaries. Destroying separating walls. Blending and blurring the reality edges. The world that we have become accustomed to has been a dream, unrooted, shallow, built on unsustainable pillars. A castle of paper cards: consumption, output, waste, endless growth, linearity, separation of the different elements. Life is all about impermanence, motion, gravity, circularity, rebirth, entropy, organic processes, interconnectivity, interbeingness, oneness, wholeness. By acting contrary to the cycle of life, by resisting the ever-evolving nature of our environment, we have created a thirsty and insatiable machine that requires a never-ending supply of resources, as opposed to nature’s flow. It is time to reinvent. Reconstruct, rethink, reassemble, rebuild, recreate, rehabilitate, remake, remodel, renovate, repair, reproduce, restore, rework, reframe, recondition, reconstitute, reform, remold, reorient, replace, reshuffle. It is time for a capital collective R. The ‘R’, above all, symbolizes regeneration and rebirth. It also suggests resilience, restoration, revitalization, and renewal. Thus, we strive to act as a regenerative evolution engine. An infinite fractal-like structure.
We need to allow our systems to reach a new state of equilibrium, taking a new story at heart and rewriting the script for the future to come. This story needs to be rooted in a symbiosis between all sentient beings of Planet Earth: naturalness and humanness at its core, life’s assumptions based on cooperation rather than competition. COVID-19 taught us that great things can be achieved if seemingly different parts of the system interact, cooperate, and are taken seriously as valuable contributors to a collective effort behind a common goal: well-being for all. This needs to be our guiding metaphor: the wellbeing of all parts, not a mechanical construct, a machine without purpose, but an ever-self-perpetuating, self-organizing, and self-aware system that does not limit itself as a result of top-down or misled hierarchical thinking. Our planetary health. Our planetary flourishing.
We believe that we can only succeed with a collective of like-minded creators crossing their disciplinary borders and geospatial limitations. We bring together a new breed of creators, makers, scientists, and thinkers from many disciplines, working together across disciplinary boundaries, and sharing a vision for a positive, regenerative, and just future. We are the cosmic glue that binds us into a radical wholeness. We challenge the systems we live in, thus letting a new reality emerge spontaneously and effortlessly. At the confluence of environmental, scientific, social, and cultural practices, we propel innovation forward and inspire action to restore planetary health, strengthen communities, and design a resilient, equitable, and more beautiful world for all. Our collective purpose is to explore the interconnectedness of all living things and re-establish a healthy balance between humans, nature, and business. Our knowledge repository is fluid. For this reason, we operate as a decentralized, network-based platform, a network of networks. We are agents provocateurs that release the creative genius required to respond to the rising demand for solutions, stories, and inventions giving us hope for the future of our planet. Thriving beyond survival. Developing scenarios, foreseeing, exploring, and imagining alternative and preferred futures. Investigating and analyzing radically disruptive new value creation models, and initiating experiments, integrally operating under nature’s regenerative principles.
The most disruptive innovations focus on fulfilling people’s needs while regenerating our natural support systems at the same time. Experimentation and play are the core of our work. Our framework is a cacophony of voices. It permeates the space, enveloping and penetrating multiple approaches, techniques, knowledge and experience, wisdom, insight, observation and contemplation. With our anticipatory and visionary eyes, fine antennae, pattern recognition, and super-connector abilities, we have an unparalleled ability to identify what will come next and collect those seeds ready to sprout. We are masters of contamination, cross-pollinating different disciplines, abilities, and types of thinking. We combine practical, analytical, logical, imaginative, and creative thinking in a dynamic, immersive, and experiential process. A constellation of stars in which each single genius mind radiates his or her unique greatness while contributing towards a collective synergetic structure. We focus on pure action. We are visionary yet pragmatic. We are the most exciting climbing wall for all the pioneers out there. We turn conventional thinking on working, producing, consuming, and living upside down. We cooperate as a collective in which each member is personally accountable in a culture of integrity, trust, presence, authenticity, openness, and respect. We challenge and question limited perspectives and limiting belief systems to unleash the full continuum of creation. We generate a wide range of responses, ranging from extreme fascination to provocation. We need the most holistic and integrative view possible of humanity. A new harmony and symbiosis between man, science, art, nature, and technology.
In the new aesthetic form follows both function and nature, it is inspired by nature and operates by incorporating nature’s regenerative principles in its full mesmerizing beauty.
It brings forth the vision of the world of tomorrow as the more human, greener, beautiful world our heart knows is possible. The separation between mind and matter is one of the most underestimated root causes of degeneration that ends in the decomposition of the whole into pieces. Indeed, a much-needed shift is required for human civilization to thrive in harmony with and inspired by nature’s principles. And, if we agree that lasting changes start in transforming the way we think (worldviews, paradigms, mental models, and mindsets), breakthroughs could happen if we move from linear to circular thinking, embracing integration, aggregation, harmonization of complementary forces instead of pushing isolation, separation, division, compartmentalization forward. Nature’s solutions are always simple, effortless, and beautiful. Nature leaps over seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Everything is interrelated. Both creation and destruction, arising and passing away, are part of a whole continuous flow of changing relations, a circle without beginning and without an end “If this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”. So, creation and destruction, generation and degeneration, positive and negative are interconnected and exist as interdependent forces of the same whole. Like the sunny and shadow side of the mountain. Now, the nonjudgemental mind is nonattached and selfless, thereby the experience of the selfless mind is happening and unfolding to it in its emptiness that is fullness, beyond planes or dimensions. The third Chinese patriarch of Zen Seng T’san wrote: “To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.”
Cross-collaboration, co-creation, and experimentation are high-leverage points to raise collective awareness, activate local communities, and provoke beneficial cascading effects to induce a large change in system behavior. We need the poets, the artists, the storytellers, the post-modern troubadours. We need a new story. We need a new dream. We need the co-creators to co-design our decolonized futures implementing a vision to serve 100% of life.
As Gropius stated, “Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.”
2020 has been a year for a tragic balance sheet in the entire world. The EU and other great powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom are progressively losing their ‘raison d’etre’. Things are going to get worse, our supporting living systems are degenerating and degrading, and political-economical systems are on the verge of collapse. The current ecological crisis combined with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals all the leakage points of our linear and compartmentalized global structure. Long-term consequences will impact dramatically the possibility of reaching the SDG‘s goals. From the ashes something good and beautiful could emerge, we have to use this moment to analyze and tackle the root cause of our problems and face the planetary challenges with a new creative and cooperative spirit that focuses on planetary health instead of individual wealth. The planet is on a path that could lead to the degradation of more than 90% of all the Earth’s soils by 2050 according to the FAO. If whole systems transformation occurs as part of direct transmission, direct knowledge, and self-realization, what is our role beyond intellectual speculation, new models, and new theories to bring about changes in the real world of real people? Because we need to change soon or we are going to die soon as a species. Our human civilization will be destroyed if we do not take all the necessary measures and unleash our full creative potential. This is not a doom-and-gloom future scenario, this is a reminder for all of us, the change catalysts, we need to jointly overcome this crisis and initiate a new Era.
Rising into the sun, the New Human is free.
___________________________________________________
Written by Ilaria Forte — @Anatomyofnow Futurist, Ecosocial Innovator & Activist, Transdisciplinary Scientist for a Life-Affirming World.
Discover more under www.ilariaforte.org; Explore more projects on linktr.ee/ilariaforte
Published on Medium 17.10.2020
___________________________________________________
