Aesthetic Revolution

With sensational actions that combine elements of theatre, performance and ritual, the worldwide growing movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) draws attention to the extinction of species and the climate catastrophe. Skeena Rathor is in XR’s Vision Sensing Team and is particularly concerned with how the vision of a life-serving future can be experienced.

evolve: You are leading a project with Extinction Rebellion called “Co-Liberation Project and Campaign.” What is it about?

Skeena Rathor: Our work is about creating connections between people and connections between ideas. We ask how collaboration can be an inviting welcoming process and philosophy for as many of us as possible. We want our rebellions to be visionary spaces. And even though we have this vision for repair, restoration and regeneration, pursuing it also reveals our deep separation wounds. Because unless we can reconcile with one another, unless we can belong to one another again, unless we can be in a relationship again with the Earth, we are not creating a space that fills the needs of body, soul and mind. In a way it is about love, fighting for love, freeing our capacity for love.

So, we ask, what kind of agreements, what kind of processes do we need to enter together to make ourselves available for that vision of repair and collaboration? What are the processes that set us free enough to do the work together? The Co-Liberation Project was born from this huge hole that appears in any organizational community that comes from some primary wounding that we have in our separateness, in our aloneness, in our powerlessness, in our story around scarcity.

Disobedience for the Truth

e: In XR you are creating events that are incredibly creative and artistic. They’re like pageants, ceremonies of rituals. Why do you do it that way rather than only having people with placards that have slogans on them? It's not that people don't do that. But how is it that you decided to work in this way?

SR: I can only answer from my little corner in the XR world. I have to say that I see a lot of liberation in the people that XR has been able to hold together thus far. I see a lot of power, freedom and authenticity. And I can feel quite emotional saying it because it's a sacred space with a unique purpose and vision.

We have principles and values that hold us tenderly and dearly, they hold a true understanding of our longing and our needs. This feels like the container for what you are describing as this creative flair, that we do things in extraordinary ways, tell stories and become part of the story by putting our whole body in front of the life-destroying violent systems. XR asks for your whole body to act in alignment with the truth, in the physical act of nonviolent civil disobedience. Something is released in that moment for us, because we act in accordance with what we feel, believe and know.

WE LACK THE SPACE TO ACT IN ALIGNMENT WITH OUR TRUTH.

As human beings, we lack the space to act in alignment with our truth and to act in our love for what we want. To act in protection and care for what we want. That space has been contracted so that we're atomized beings serving a big economy. That's the daily reality for a lot of people. And it contracts your imagination, your humanness, your soul qualities, your capability to love. I think that's how we've been able to get to extraordinary places and do extraordinary things.

I want to tell you the story of the ‘Grief March’ last October. It was the most well-attended act of civil disobedience that we've ever had with up to 25,000 people. There was a pageantry to this grief march, as you described, because part of it was an animal extinction grief ceremony and funeral march. We had some speakers from the global south and indigenous cultures that were talking about the tears of Earth, of the Great Mother. We sang songs together and it was a pilgrimage through London. It didn't feel like a march, it felt both vital and full of human feelings of sorrow, but also joy and purpose. It was about being in a true feeling and turning up for something rather than against something. We were turning up with the raw superpower that is grief and asking for something from that place, rather than what we've done across the left so far, which is turned up in rage.

e: These events are participatory, but they're also public displays or ceremonial or pageants. So, there's also an aspect of bearing witness. There is a giving of something through embodiment, through color and symbol. Do you think about or talk about the impact that you want to have on the larger cultural surround before you're creating the work?

SR: To design actions is quite tricky because there are obstructive actions and there are constructive actions; sometimes they’re both. That's where the alchemy lies when an action speaks to the yes and the no, the no to more harm. We're withdrawing our consent and saying stop! And yes, we have a vision of a future that is possible, that can harmonize the needs of earth and humans and all that lives, so that humans can become a regenerative presence in the community of life.

But we don't always hit that magic spot. We've got a lot of learning to do about how to hit that spot, because a lot of our actions have been obstructive without the constructive. But when you talk just about the constructive action, you lose some people, you lose the energy of the ‘no’ or the anger. That radical rage that just wants to say no. This divine rage is really important.

e: What happens when you hit that magic spot?

SK: It's magnetic. It draws people towards that happening. It creates a moment of wholeness. You might have seen pictures of the pink boat in the Piccadilly Circus. There was this boat about the future that is coming towards us with a message about what we might need. And it was visionary in terms of setting up food stalls and meeting people's basic needs for care. It was like a festival, it was so colorful. That was magical and people came from far and wide. Even if they didn't stay to be in disobedience with us, they stood by our side. Many people stood by our side going: “I think something important is happening here. And I'm drawn to it. I'm drawn to what feels really important here.”

Another Form of Knowledge

e: You said before that when you hit that magic spot, something is happening to the individual that all of a sudden brings them into wholeness with truths that they have known but had not been given the agency through the context of living to be able to live from those truths. You're giving people an opportunity to be agents of what they most deeply know and to enact and be part of a different culture. It's a culture that has an aesthetic rather than an anesthetic foundation. The anesthetic is the numbing that is neo-liberal culture. And the aesthetic is a move to a deeper embodiment feeling and knowing from a different place.

SR: When I think of aesthetic, I'm thinking about sensory aliveness. I’m writing the calibration program at the moment and one of my days is about sensory aliveness and how depleted our sensory intelligence has become. Visual intelligence has become our primary way of learning, interpreting and making meaning. Extinction Rebellion engages with sensory aliveness and sensory intelligence in a much fuller way than going on a protest march. There's taste in there, because we make food part of it. There's a touch culture. We in the UK, actually in the Western world are touch-phobic in our culture. In XR there's a culture of loving kindness and touch with permission. Also, music has been a really important part of bringing together a rebellion. We have an action design team who explore how we can bring ourselves to life through rebellion using colors, visuals, artistic expression.

e: So, there was a conscious decision: How do we use all of our different sensory modalities? Is that part of the constructive aspect of the culture-making that you're doing?

SR: All of our work has been an experiment, guided by our principles and values like creating a regenerative culture. A lot of what we did was often unconscious, but it was grounded in our principles and values. They asked something from us that we’ve stepped into. Now we're beginning to be able to name it to say: Yes, we acted in sensory awareness.

We had guiding principles and the vision of a very different, humanized world that acts to protect all. That asks us to act in respect, reverence and balance for what we are part of. It's such an organic process that starts to happen that shows, what you would choose to do and what you choose not to do. That's really exciting to me, because often we think we have to make conscious, write down and make explicit how we achieve something. But when you come from a heartfelt vision that speaks to principles of love, respect and care, often you don't need to write down and make explicit, you're going to do it, and moment to moment you're making very different choices.

Freedom for Life

e: Interesting, that seems to be part of the power of culture. And you have an explicit set of values and principles that provide you with a cultural scaffolding for people who mostly did not even grow up in a religious tradition. With these principles and values, you create a container and people come into it and start responding from that and are brought to a different place in themselves. This suggests that culture change may not be as far away as one might think.

SR: I agree with you. Turning up in disobedience is a reset button for people. It's all you need to do to change everything in your life. It's an initiatory experience. It's almost like a rite of passage. All these points in our life that we complied with because we were too scared, all the baggage of shame and powerlessness gets released and that's part of the reset.

Part of the initiation journeys of indigenous cultures is to go to really wild places where there's huge resistance and emotional and physical challenge. We are confronted with questions about living and dying, of meeting death and choosing life. We as rebels are using our freedom and the liberty that we do have to free the future, to free ourselves into a possible future.

I think there's a moment there where you choose who you are, who you want to be and how you want to use your freedom. What do I want to use my freedom for? I want to use it to protect life, to care for life, especially as a mother. This is where the mothering principle is really important in terms of our disobedience. This pure raw energy that we're using is the mothering instinct.

In the human body oxytocin is the love hormone that is part of mothering. And in mothering, I'm including everyone, men and children. We all have this instinct to mother. I watch how my youngest uses that instinct in relation to animals. And it's vibrant in fathers, it's a mothering instinct that I see in them when they father in the way it's described culturally here.

In rebellion, there's an energy of protecting and caring and being so truthful in your protection and your care for what is in front of you, that it feels to me like the liberation of full human divine energy. We show up because of our mother. Earth is the mothership, it births over and overabundantly with unconditional generosity. It seeks to balance needs and give abundantly with gifts. And that's the energy that I think is part of the restoration. That's the energy that we can draw on for all parts of this puzzle.

e: In response to your point about freedom, I see that we have a very distorted notion of freedom in our culture. A kind of consumer freedom. Then my freedom means I get to do whatever I want to do, which is, starkly put, a cancerous form of freedom. It's like when the cells are released from a relationship with the body and proliferates because they can, instead of a freedom that is life-giving. I'm making it more black and white than it is, but in Western culture, it seems to me that freedom has become commercialized and made very small. But what you're talking about is releasing human freedom through a deep anesthetic process to come into fullness. A wholeness that allows one to break out of the consensus reality that we've been trained to be in.

SR: What you just described is the difference between freedom from and freedom with. Freedom’s been made small because we talk about freedom from rather than freedom with. Every aspect of life has been for the separate me, all through the homo sapiens’ journey that started from patriarchy 6000 years ago, when patriarchy became the operating principle. It was about competition for scarce resources and therefore about control and domination, which included the control and domination of women and children. It was about the survival of the fittest, a caste system, a hierarchy of value. It also meant control and domination, especially of what we deem as nature that is outside of ourselves. We're separate from nature. We treat it as outside, nature as that is over there. This organizing principle of patriarchy is not about men and women. It's a way of organizing.

That's why I talk a lot about creating a multifocal organizing principle, because it's about freedom and care for the whole I'm with. And especially care for non-human life. We need to change our relationship to the land, to nature, to the multiverse, to the cosmic quality that is the universe.

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