*This collective editorial has been written by different hands, together. More specifically the hands of Amy, Chantelle, and Marea from the SoC Team.
We co-write the following text together in layers, as part of an ongoing dialogue, durationally, over the course of one week, almost two months after the 'end' of the SoC 2024 cycle. We have been popping into and out of this document to produce a continuous, if not disjointed, body of writing, that attempts to contextualise the SoC 2024/2025 experience, and the selected collective theme of 'Embracing Chaos'.
The 'we' of this text is therefore a complicated 'we' that is at times untangled and re-entangled again. This 'we' hold many perspectives, wishes, power dynamics, hierarchies, inside/outside relations, contexts, ignorances, and biases, at once. As a hindsight learning from this year, we attempt to hold the imperfectness and complexity of this 'we' throughout the text, feeling that it somehow feels reflective of the imperfectness and complexity that so often (if not always) arises through the notion of 'being together' that is so strongly at the core of SoC and was especially felt during SoC 2024.
Contextual Intro
I don't think anyone who participated in School of Commons 2024/2025 will be surprised that a theme as confrontational and as advisory as 'embracing chaos' was collectively chosen for our ISSUES 2024 publication.
But maybe before embracing chaos, one must first map it. Not as a way to control or manage it, but in order to place the real and human conversations, experiences, situations, differences, and dynamics in direct dialogue with the typical bodily response to chaos: fight, flight, or befriend. And so, this collective editorial, written together by Amy, Chantelle & Marea, is a contextual mapping of our different, yet inherently interconnected, experiences within SoC 2024/2025 and our fear, our friend, our shadow, our mentor, which accompanied us all along the way...chaos.
To really start at the beginning, for the SoC Cohort 2024/2025 cohort, seventeen projects were selected, spanning countries and contexts that included: Vietnam, Brazil, Germany, Wales, Israel, Italy, Turkey, USA, Tunisia, Pakistan, England, Russia, Ecuador, Canada, South Korea, Finland, and Switzerland. The process of 'curating' such a diverse cohort (if this can, in any way, be considered 'curation') falls into the hands, and decision making, of our excellent peer jury - a team made up of previous SoC participants; as we believe that no one 'knows' SoC more than SoC participants past, present and ongoing - and, at the very final stages, the SoC Team themselves.
From the final 50 projects the SoC Team read in order to make this final, final selection of seventeen projects, a keen focus was placed - both consciously and unconsciously - by mapping the crossover of themes and forms that we saw patterns between within this final 50 projects. This was mainly projects that looked at nature, the environment, and the climate in either new, urgent, or accessible ways. And also projects which were able to speak both to their local contexts and our interconnected global communities - including the political ruptures and shifts that were being experienced throughout the duration of the 2024/2025 program.
Of course projects on 'paper' are always condensed and flattened. There is only so much you can convey in a 250 words maximum Google Form response. So it is always simultaneously exciting, stimulating, nerve-wracking, and surprising, to meet 'projects' - but most importantly the people behind them - 'in-person' (or, digitally, to begin with) when we come together for the first time.
From the get-go of SoC 2024/2025 we collectively witnessed, experienced, and navigated (sometimes more successfully than others) political, contextual, communicative, economic, racial, structural (to really name just a few) conflicts and tensions. With differing responses and needs arising from SoC peers and the SoC Team, and with some being met, but others totally being misunderstood or ignored. Aptly, it was these points of difference and tension that acted as the starting point that would go on to shape our collective 10-months together.
And although this kind of a start to a program was very different to what had been experienced before, as well as the journey which followed along from it, so in same ways it became very new, unknown, and therefore scary, this experience led to many new pathways, learnings, adaptations, evolutions and understandings for the entire SoC ecosystem, including (or especially) the Team. This is not to overlook or underplay to challenges, failures, and hurt that was experienced, too, but to also remind ourselves and reaffirm, that there can be a sense of possibility borne within difficulty and chaos.
But now we sit in April 2025, two-months after the official 'end' (although there is never really an end) of SoC 2024/2025. Which generously offers us a significant moment to look back upon and collect our learnings from this very specific and apt lens of (learning to & practicing) 'embracing (sit with, feel uncomfortable within, maybe-not-making-friends-but-certainly-not-make-enemies-with) chaos'.
We realise now, more than ever, and perhaps extremely naively, that SoC is such an extremely diverse group and, due to the anonymity of our application procedure, and the unknowingness for each participant of who their peers will be for the upcoming 10-months until they officially begin the program, that we do not ever truly know the complex, subjective, multi-layered, backgrounds of the participants before the program starts.
It is therefore important for SoC to communicate an ongoing expectation that, as much as we try to, we absolutely cannot with confidence call ourselves ‘safe space’. Instead, we are attempting to practice a diverse space of learning, practicing, rehearsing, attempting, and sometimes failing, that tries its hardest to be a ‘brave space’. Attempting, once again, being the paramount word.
One result of this diversity of people and contexts is that conflicts can arise during the program, which is totally normal and ok (this we have to continue to remind ourselves). We also now realise that when embracing rather than shying away from chaos, new pathways, streams, branches, tentacles - however we wish to see it - are able to emerge, to form new and wholly unexpected collaborations, pairings, impulses, urgencies, and ways of working together. We therefore are so touched to bear witness to all the different (and, again, unexpected!) connections that came from an - at times - extremely difficult, challenging, and disappointing 10 months of 'being together'.
We also now have a very different notion of what 'being together' means now. Not necessarily always agreeing, always wanting to work together, and not necessarily monitoring everything from a perspective that it must run with 'business as usual' approach. But instead learning into a trust for providing a space for confidence, courage, and a willingness to listen, learn, sit with, think through, pause, rehearse and embrace, the chaos that inevitably surrounds us as individuals, as interconnected communities, as strangers, and complex people navigating hugely unknown and scary political shifts that are felt at absolutely every level of society, and especially in an experimental learning environment made up from global participants.
To come back to the unexpected pathways which have emerged over the 10-months together. These have included in-person meet ups, the assembling of practices, the setup of spaces, collaborations on workshops, residencies, publications, including, of course, this publication, which year after year continues to floor us with the generosity, openness, vulnerability and care each contributors takes in approaching their contribution. We're therefore humbled and happy to invite you, our reader, to embrace chaos, too, and see just where it may bring you, and to return to the digital pages of this publication should you need a (helping, healing, motivation, inspirations) hand along the way,
Collective questions on Chaos (As an Attempted Form of Embrace)
The experience of SoC 2024 inarguably left more questions than in ever did answers. To respond to this in the only form we thought was even mildly adequate, instead of our originally planned 'dialogue' around chaos, we wish to instead play into its sweet embrace but asking yet more questions, some of which we hope will accompany you for the duration of this publication.
The questions below were assembled by four different people, all with different roles and entrance/exit points within SoC, include the cohort and the team, so we hope the position and approaches of these questions reflect this.
꩜ How does our perception of chaos shape our experience of it?
꩜ How do we hold each other accountable in chaotic times?
꩜ How do we build care systems that can persist amidst chaos?
꩜ How can embracing chaos boost our resilience?
꩜ How does accepting chaos challenge control?
꩜ How can chaotic moments reveal hidden strengths or knowledge gaps?
꩜ How can we reshape our perception of chaos as something recurring?
꩜ Does one still have to have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star?
꩜ Does chaos mean rejecting all you have learned so far?
꩜ If chaos was a shape or form, what shape or form would it take?
꩜ How do we embrace the chaos of strangers, with strangers?
꩜ What blossoms in the wake of chaos?