All projects, programs, installations, gatherings, and engagements facilitated by the DIA are invitations to better worlds (IBW).
Why Invitations to Better Worlds?
INVITATION
Invitation means that we cultivate an intention and extend an offering that you can choose to or not to engage in/with.
BETTER
Better is a subjective term. What is better for one/some might not be better for others. We commit to being transparent about what “better” means for us within a given context, and invite you to affirm, challenge, and/or build on this definition based on your own lived experiences.
WORLDS
While we may all be residing physically on the same planet, our experiences of it vary based on geography, class status, gender, race, ability, etc. Experientially, we are not all living in or building towards the same world. We choose to see that as a point of curiosity and conversation, rather than a threat. We strive to create spaces where we can critically engage with the gifts, boundaries, and dangers of multiple worlds.
Core Skills We Practice
Telling the Truth
To name what is actually happening, in our bodies, relationships, institutions, and systems, even when doing so is inconvenient, risky, or scary.
Holding & Metabolizing Contradictions
To remain present when multiple, seemingly opposing truths exist at the same time.
Weaving the Micro & the Macro
To attend to our embodied, personal experiences while connecting them to broader systems, histories, and power dynamics.
Practicing Curiosity
To stay open, to ourselves and to others, even when we feel triggered, defensive, or certain.
We see each Invitation to Better Worlds as a place to practice and/or teach one or more of these core skills.
Practice Space
This is not a conference or a retreat or workshop. It is a space where we interact with the four core skills (detailed below) by practicing them together. Our rationale practice is mirrored in this excerpt from the generative somatics practice space:
A central component of any change process – personal change or organizational change – is the concept of practice. New intentional practices are those that we choose to do in order to transform the way we show up in the world.
We transform through embodying new practices over time. Through new practices we increase choice and alignment with our values. As we change default practices and engage in new intentional practices the internal terrain of who we are is changed.
Research shows that 300 repetitions produces muscle memory (the ability to purposefully take a new action), and that 3000 repetitions creates embodiment (being able to take this new action automatically, even under pressure).
It is much easier to stay in practice within community.
Installations at Conferences
Often, conferences and symposiums are designed to stimulate our minds over (and sometimes at the expense of):
- our bodies. Rushing from session to session, hopped up on coffee and pastries, sitting for long periods of time, taking in information and interactions through a fire hose, and checking emails during whatever small breaks we are afforded.
- of what is heavy on our hearts. Arriving with a lot on our minds and then loading up on even more information while attempting to forget our regular scheduled programming, it can be hard to carry alone.
Our invitation is first and foremost, an invitation to pause.
Installations in Public Spaces
Often, public spaces like parks, streets, parking lots, malls, schools are designed to be accessible for “everyone” (and sometimes at the expense of):
- stories from community. Instead, these spaces are overloaded with information and distractions, meanwhile we are consumed by our own worlds and phones, we never pause to look up and see what is happening around us.
- stories not like ours. Instead, we are bombarded with stories that are meant to convince us of what “normal” is and what we are supposed to want to be, we rarely see stories that crack us open to wonder what we might be missing from our own perspectives.
Our invitation is first and foremost, an invitation to witness others stories.
Artifacts
Within Invitations to Better Worlds, we are practicing alongside everyone else we invite to participate with us. So we leave behind the artifacts of our learning.
This portal is an invitation to practice getting to better worlds. It affirms that imagination is not an escape – it is resistance, refusal and radical possibility.
There is no right way to use this practice book so engage with it as you see fit. We invite you to take what makes sense for you and leave the rest, if they are more than you have capacity for in this moment.
We trust that you know what you need in this moment and will choose accordingly.
