On bewilderment

Last Saturday, June, 20th, as a part of Weaving Place closing event, Hiatus organized a stakeholders sharing circle with locals, environmentalists, scientists and artists - to reflect and share the common visions on the wild biodiverse area of Donderberg.

It was a deep and rich discussion. Somehow, most of the questions and reflections were about wildness and wiilderness.

I captured some words and reflections by Alain, Tormod, Michael, Serge.

How the care and control intertwine?

What is freedom in a relationship to a certain place? - and how free can we go imagining how we shape the wildness?

Whom should we become - gardeners or guardians - in order to care for such zone?

And deeper questions of freedom: we are probably never free but free to choose our dependencies (our entanglements).

In this way, nature is never just an eco-system in the urban context - it is an eco-culture. Humans impact the entanglements of nature bringing invasive species, bacteria, collectively deciding what the landscape should be.

So how do we deal with this eco-culture - and do we need to deal, to decide and to manage?

Maybe, we need first to experience the place - with our own bodies, senses and emotions?

And here another layer of meaning of nature in the urban context emerges:

How do we really relate to nature? Do we consider it only as function/utilitarian commodity?

Side note: like recent AI CEOs try to convert the intelligence into a commodity along with gas and electricity….

Or is it alive?

We can consider Donderberg just a space, an area in Laeken, or - a living breathing place.

From eco-system - to living environment.

And the edge between two is so fragile.

How do we protect such places where we can connect to nature in a different way? In a more sensitive, intimate way, rewilded way?

Where is the authority and who who should hold the key to this place?

Maybe, there should be no strict notion of authority, maybe it shold be ambiguous, entangled, like nature here, maybe we can dance with authority in the same way as we dance with the place?

Exploring the possibility of multicentric dancing of our embodied presences - with the wildness and wilderness.

In the end most city nature and places like this are produce by certain failures of city development.

Here we can experience that particular Secret garden quality - that feeling of Alice in Wonderland, of magic and being lost deep in the wild forest…

How to preserve that quality in the city where things are public and accessible?

Nature of Donderberg is also anarchist, if you seek for anarchy - here you feel at home.

That aesthetic of absence of control, of absolute freedom of nature is very much alive here.

This is what makes this place unique. It is entangled and fractalized in zones and microzones with different types of landscapes and relations between species.

What story should we tell about this place? Is it a failure (of urban development)? Is it a success (of resistance)?

And should this wild area be managed? Is it needed to improve biodiversity?

In the end, in the urban context wildness is a way of caring.

Maybe, we could define the common rules of caring for keeping the wildness wild?

What does natural state of nature mean in the current conditions?

And should we manipulate nature to reach elsewhere?

Or maybe - we could just be bewildered by this place.

Be-wilderment.

This is the word that for me was a quintessence of the discussion and weekend. Through the weekend I caught myself myltiple time in that state of émerveillement enchanted by the moment in nature:

green leaf,

flower,

sunlight,

wet grass,

snails,

birds -

all those sensorial, non-verbal presences - brought me multiple times into the state of wonder, where I was pierced by the moment, by its quality, colour, smell and sound, and nothing else existed.

Falling out of habitual human ways of thinking and being and passing by.

Perhaps, cracking the code of that passing-by state - into bewilderment by nature - is the real change we need and look for.

Final note: Thank you, Michael, for bringing be-wilderment in the weekend -- a word that reflects the state of awe and presence so exactly...