This company’s last multi-year project — Quis Custodiet — was about the issue of security. In many ways our new project, an environmental project, is related.
I wrote in my book Somatic Ecology about how we sometimes imagine things to be accidents, when they are actually outputs of the system. In the book, I give the example of dead deer along the side of the road. Deer die in statistically predictable numbers, year after year. This makes dead animals not an accident, but an output of our transportation system.
When we mis-label a problem, it’s like mis-diagnosing an illness; It prevents a healing.
We’re starting our new multi-year environmental project with a photo project focused on “outputs”. What are outputs of the system, positive and negative, that we may not be aware of? Photographer Luis Gomez will be working with our partners as we explore these ideas.
If you’re in DC, I hope you’ll join Day Eight and friends of the DC Environmental Network this Friday for dinner. (Tickets required.) It’s a chance to support, and get involved in the new project, and it should be a lot of fun too. I hope you’ll come by if you can.
Doing art work is amorphous. The hours are long, and the rewards are uncertain (at best). Having friends and allies isn’t only what makes this work successful, it’s what makes it tolerable. I want to give another thanks and shout out to our friends at Kali Yoga Studio in Columbia Heights for donating the revenue from their community classes this month to Day Eight. Check out Kali for yoga in Columbia Heights, DC, and please support them.
Hope to see you Friday.
Sincerely,
Robert Bettmann
Day Eight