Strategies

Originally planned for Lebanon but pivoted due to war and participant displacement, this Collective Effervescence project moved to Barcelona and Empordà to explore how habitat and home can resist dominant narratives about migration and belonging. Rejecting resilience rhetoric in favor of collaborative creativity that transforms political imagination, the field laboratory investigated connections between Lebanon and Spain, unsettling East-West and North-South myths while examining how stories—not just policy—will determine the future of living together. Participants explored how territory archives experiences, how creative narratives can reconstruct politics and cohabitation, and how farming knowledge and land-based practices provoke different relations beyond the damage-resilience-heroism tropes characterizing migration discourse.

Drawing on Gandhi’s use of the spinning wheel and Salt March as strategic instruments that made independence tangible through hands-on rebellion, Otto von Busch and Karl Hallberg reflect on replacing disposable Post-it notes with, for example, handmade wooden clothes pegs in civic workshops. Whittling pegs from branches fundamentally alters ideation (participants negotiate with resistant materials, invest sustained labor, and anchor ideas in objects bearing marks of their maker). Unlike adhesive notes designed for rapid disposal, handmade pegs carry gravity: they embody time, skill, and attention, making ideas clipped to them less ephemeral and containing “the start of their own follow-through, offering a promise of a future that can itself be crafted or whittled into existence.