Good Praxis Helsinki—part 1

For Drifts Festival in Helsinki, we organised a week-long Good Praxis workshop with 50 students of Art School Maa for the opening of their new school year. Connecting to the theme of Drifts Festival—Precarious Lives—students organised a communal celebration based on mutual aid. In other words: we organised a party. By organising a party together the students of Art School Maa would get to know each other, collaborate and express themselves.

Here's a recap of the first day.

Drifts Festival
Drifts is a nomadic art platform that organises transcultural art festivals annually in various regions of Helsinki, Finland. This year's festival engaged with the social scars caused by fascism and capitalism that oppress and dispossess lives and addresses contemporary urgencies in Suomenlinna, a site where wounds from various historical moments/periods remain.

Founder and artistic director of Drifts Soko Hwang participated in Good Praxis Malmö last May, and together with Art School Maa rector H Ouramo invited us to do our workshop in Helsinki.

Art School Maa
Art School Maa, founded in 1986, offers versatile arts education in Suomenlinna, an island off the coast of Helsinki. In its teaching, Maa emphasises interdisciplinarity, thinking and new forms in contemporary arts. In addition to teaching, Maa maintains project space Maa-Tila located in Sörnäinen, and organises art activities in the Helsinki metropolitan region and internationally.

Desire the world differently
In a 5-day workshop, the students of Art School Maa explored how we can desire the world differently. Inspired by artist Toni Cade Bambara, who said “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible”, the workshop focused on the students’ desires, abilities and needs to form groups that would create works that were an expression of their revolutionary feelings. By doing so, the workshop is a collaborative pedagogical improvisation that leads to a spontaneous celebration of collective creativity. It also leads to accomplishment, experience and, hopefully, good praxis.

Monday
We started the week with a check-in on Monday morning. We said our name and in one word how we were feeling. We repeated this every morning for the rest of the week. Gradually we noticed people changing from saying “nervous”, “overwhelmed”, and “tired”, to “okay”, “hopeful”, and “excited”. It is important to keep checking in together, in order for everyone to be heard and seen, and every feeling and need to be taken into account.

After the first check-in on Monday morning, Juha gave an introduction to Good Praxis, mutual aid and his own practice as autodidact dj, filmmaker and teacher rooted in club culture. In this presentation he spoke about the importance of solidarity, collaboration and joy in the revolution.

Good Praxis is art education for climate justice, celebrating successful models of resistance and regeneration through workshops, assemblies and club nights. With our work we want to make revolution irresistible. 500 years of capitalism have brought the world to the brink of collapse, through plunder, exploitation and exhaustion. Only a new consciousness, a new culture and a new way of living together can save the planet. To realise this we must desire the world differently.

Because not everyone can participate in blockades, strikes or blowing up pipelines, mutual aid is an accessible alternative to direct action as a political tactic. Mutual aid gives people the opportunity to organise themselves to meet needs that are not met by the state, municipality or commercial parties.

Mutual Aid
To introduce the concept of mutual aid we used examples from Peter Kropotkin, David Graeber and Dean Spade. Kropotkin's 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is one of the origins of the subject in the context of anarchism and social action. In this book Kropotkin demonstrated that mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity—in both individuals and as a species—plays a far more important role in the animal kingdom and human societies than does individualised competitive struggle:

 It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.... It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependence of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.

In his 2020 book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and professor of law at Seattle University School of Law Dean Space writes that “(m)utual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another & changing political conditions. Not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on representatives, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.” Spade's book is a brilliant repository of revolutionary praxis we have shared and read with students and activists since it came out during the COVID '19 pandemic.

In addition to Kropotkin and Spade, we showed a short clip from an interview with David Graeber by Charlie Rose, in which Graeber describes anarchism as "a commitment to the idea that it would be possible to have a society based on the principles of self-organisation, voluntary association and mutual aid." Graeber, who co-wrote an introduction to Kropotkin's book, also referred to mutual aid as "everyday communism":

The idea that communism, as a certain way of coordinating labour or human activity, might exist in any human society is not entirely new. Peter Kropotkin, who is often referred to as the founder of ‘anarchist communism,’ in Mutual Aid (1902) implies that communism could best be seen simply as human cooperation, and cooperation was the ultimate basis of all human achievement and indeed of human life.

Examples of mutual aid
You can find tons of good examples of mutual aid projects online, and on this occasion we showed these three projects: Black Obsidian Sound System, Common Street, and Cooperation Jackson.

Black Obsidian Sound System was established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non-binary Black and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following in the legacies of sound system culture they wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for our collective struggles. The system, based in London, is available to use or rent by community groups and others with the purpose of amplifying and connecting them.

Every Monday night since 2016, a group of punks hands out food for the homeless in Yangon, Mynamar. The collective of punks is called Common Street and it forms the local branch of U.S.-based “Food not Bombs,” that hands out food to the needy.

Cooperation Jackson is an emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership. Its long-term vision is to develop a cooperative network based in Jackson, Mississippi that will consist of four interconnected and interdependent institutions: a federation of local worker cooperatives, a cooperative incubator, a cooperative education and training center (the Kuwasi Balagoon Center for Economic Democracy and Development), and a cooperative bank or financial institution.

Workshop
After the morning introduction we watched the short film RoXY together to get in the party mood and went for lunch. In the afternoon we began with the workshop. It has three parts:

1. desires
2. abilities
3. needs

We did the first part on Monday afternoon, the second and third part we did on Tuesday. The first part of the workshop is straightforward. Each student was asked to write down the answer to the question "What do you desire?" on a post-it note and place it on the large roll of paper on the floor. Some students wrote more than one desire, and placed more than one post-its on the roll.

Some of the answers they wrote down were:

"Build my own house."
"Bread."
"Have fun :)"

Other answers were:

"The far right collapsing."
"Less work."
"Free therapy."

And even more answers were:

"To have enough energy."
"Well-being."
"I want to know what I want."

This resulted in a cloud of individual desires of all the students. Then one student read out all answers—one by one, so everyone was heard—and two other students started organising them, grouping desires based on similarity and proximity. This resulted in four groups of desires, which the students had to name. In this case, the group names were

Fun, Care, Equality and Revolution. Students proceeded to joining the group of their liking, and this was their group for the week. They continued talking amongst themselves, getting to know each other and elaborating on their individual desires. From here, we would continue with the second step of the workshop the next day.

We ended the day with a check out, again sharing how we were all feeling. Some folks were still or even more overwhelmed and confused, others were inspired and energised.

This is the first part in a series of posts about Good Praxis Helsinki.