Reflections from Under the Big Top : From The Fitzwilliam to Fitzroy Street we’re starting to feel like home…
Ellie and I spent what I can only describe as an overwhelming week under the big top on the lawn of the Fitzwilliam Museum. As I sit beside our Cabinet of Curiosities with the grass massaging my feet, I find myself equally compelled to write about our experience and not quite sure how to use words to express it.
Collaboration and Collage Making Workshop at The Fitzwilliam Museum
All week long, Together Culture Founding Members stopped by to explore, to say hello, and ‘to find themselves’ in the Cabinet of Curiosities’ film and portraits. Two months ago, most of us were strangers. Yet, already, when we spend time together it feels like, well, home. The ease, the comfort, and this sense of building something extraordinary with this collection of curious and creative people has honestly taken my breath away this week.
Ellie and I have been leaning into the Living Book and running Collaboration and Collage Making sessions all week long. We spend the first half hour of the workshop exploring the power of disagreement and how to approach it to establish respect, attune our curiosity, gather information to widen perspective, and create the landscape in which something new can emerge. We explored how that differs from the debate that seems the norm in a world where many people approach disagreement trying to persuade another of right versus wrong. When the only options available are yes or no, there’s no space for new or different to emerge. We’re not creating. And, as we have said in our manifesto after this summer of exploring failure, the opposite of failure is not success – it’s not trying. Creating is what life is all about and creating, essentially, is trying something new.
After we explored disagreement, we made a collage together. A collage that is shaped in the way of community design. With a goal in its centre, surrounded by our skills, behaviours, and talents that honour that goal, and then finally the activities we partake in that help that community goal emerge. We sat down around our red tables with people from very diverse backgrounds, ranging in age from 8 to 78 and what was really being created, was community. And each community, without consultation or knowledge of the previous group, made their goal, peace.
People challenged one another and people complimented one another’s abilities and characteristics. ‘You’re so observant.’ ‘Thank you, you’re so resilient.’ ‘I really admire how straightforward you are, don’t be ashamed of it – it helps create clarity.’ It was clear in people’s body language that it had been a long time since they had been seen that way, some folks were relieved of a burden – of a personality trait they’d come to believe was ‘bad’ and here they were being introduced to the fact that it might just be one of their creative superpowers.
What was happening was together culture. Spoiler alert for those whose who haven’t done the workshop, the root ‘coll’ means together with – that links the acts of collaboration and collage making. People tried something new, stepped outside of their comfort zones, and learned new things about one another and themselves along the way. The first sparks of community began to form.
Ellie and I aren’t Together Culture. We’re Together Culture. You’re Together Culture. Yes, as founders, we have a plan and we’ll hold a framework. It’s ‘we’ that will help a more inclusive and ecological creative economy emerge.
I cannot wait for more of you to meet one another, to share your talents, to work together, to play together, and to create together at Fitzroy Street this autumn. Together, we really are going to build a Cambridge where more people are free to be their true selves. We’re – YOU’RE – already making it happen.
If you haven’t done so already, please do consider contributing to our crowdfunder so we can bring Together Culture to Fitzroy Street in September.