Group 2
Noelia del Carmen Valderrama, Margot de Smaele, Cass Hebron, Bert Koether, Camille Leleux, Sheredhan Moutaber
Result ideation session Group 2
July 2022
Internal freedom
This is not an empty room
What do you see? What if my previous question was wrong? Can you know why? Or, in better words, can you feel why? ‘This is not an empty room’ doesn’t represent the internal freedom, but it is the real experience of it.
Through emptiness, everybody experiences his own internal space where our imagination comes from. It doesn’t matter what you see. What matters is what’s behind the appearance: the personal and subjective internal place that gives you access to a world of infinite possibilities.
Freedom in balance with nature and society (or community freedom)
Is freedom possible in harmony with the world? Is freedom possible in balance with nature, in an egalitarian society? The answer is yes, but it cannot exist without self-responsibility, solidarity, and empathy. Within a community, our freedom should not reduce the freedom of others, be it humans or non-humans. Nature’s right to freedom should not be forgotten in the equation because nature should not be perceived as an object for consumption. Community freedom is driven by our ethics and our values. Education and the share of knowledge and experience is therefore crucial in this kind of freedom, as we learn as a group how to feel free and how to be free. Furthermore, we need to rethink the world and our society constantly so as not to stray away from this kind of freedom.
Paradoxically, it is freedom but freedom that requires “restrictions,” which we impose voluntarily. However, it’s also a more egalitarian freedom, as everyone would have equal access to freedom. By ethically “reducing” our freedom, everyone will eventually be more free.
Freedom without boundaries
Maybe the first thing that comes to mind when you think about freedom is the absence of any limitations. But that also means that my personal freedom can clash with yours. We need empathy to protect the freedom of other people and of this planet. These pictures represent the ever-growing gap between rich and poor, the excesses of our capitalistic society and the imbalance between people and nature. The paradox seems to be that we need boundaries to be free.
What does freedom without boundaries lead to? Real freedom? Or more chaos, greed, selfishness, etc.? Some people see their freedom be enhanced by this concept of freedom, but when we think about it, does it not concern only a small number of the population? What about the rest? Is their freedom not being taken away from them? And with inequalities in our society, can we really experience freedom? All these questions have driven us to question this kind of freedom that is at the basis of our actual capitalist society. Even though in theory freedom without boundaries seems to be the “freest” of all kinds of freedom, in practice, very few people can experience it and many are impacted by it. If we do whatever we want without thinking about the others, we end up encroaching on the freedom of others.
Feedback Transdisciplinary Team
10 experts from various disciplines learned from the dreams and thoughts of the young people and supplemented them with personal and diverse insights, reflections and sources of knowledge. As part of the Chapter Freedom transdisciplinary team, artist Koen Vanmechelen selected OSOTWA (Kitovu) as the artwork to integrate the ideations of group 2 with the feedback and reflections of the transdisciplinary team.
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