i gigi saggi

A Mantra for Long Forgotten Usi Civici

Dear fellow more-than-humans!

You know them well, the fences and borders erected around properties. Even if they are not visible, they are enacted through legal frameworks, power structures or stories and oral histories silently told without being questioned. They are practiced through acts of violence or acts of care. But they all to often safeguard the dead, the immaterial, the abstract: an indiviual property right to arbitrarily exercise power over the living, the material, the concrete that is enclosed.

Luckily, this is not without alternative, and never has been. In Italy there are usi civici, in Germany Allmendeflächen, which in english-speaking terms are called commons. They had been cared for in great numbers and some of them are still cared for collectively. In the best cases, their usage is organized in community without dominating hierachies - in those cases these lands are not arbitrarily acted upon. However, the usage of most usi civici around Rovereto, Italy, as Flora found, are cared for by patriarchal association structures leading to their enclosement and exploitation for capitalist accumulation.

At invitation from Flora Mammana - you might know her from our song Forno Vagabondo - we spent a beautiful April weekend in Rovereto, Italy, developing a feminist mantra for long forgotten usi civici advocating for their revival with a collective commoning approach. We played a concert at La Foresta Rovereto celebrating the forgotten usi civici of the region unearthed by Flora and joint a collective march to render such usi civici visible and audible in the public.

With our music instruments, a handful of banners designed by Flora, and masks developed in a workshop held by Caterina Laruccia before our concert, we impersonated the usi civici in order to start a more-than-human dialogue on a more-than-human matter: how to care for land collectively and how to celebrate the living and complex in the patriarchal age of the dead and simplified.

This weekend and the incredible work of Flora gave us hope. We love to share this hope with you - once again.

Love,

Why It Matters to Rethink Catharsis and Take Activism to the Dance Floor

Although we were very fortunate to play a few concerts with the Gigi Saggi Dance Band in the summer season, due to the pandemic we were not able to play as much as we had initially planned to. But we took some time during the rather calm summer season to reflect on what this actually is what we are doing by combining music, visual arts, science and activism. In end of August we then had the chance to hold a workshop at the (online) conference "Zukunft für Alle" that we called "The Dance Floor as a Carrier Bag for Transformative Futures". There we discussed our approach to the dance floor as the Gigi Saggi Dance Band, using its possibilities for shaping transformative futures. In the following we want to briefly share with you our thoughts we came up with during the process of preparing this workshop and beyond.

On Music and Caves

In the introductory performance for the workshop (see video above) we were inspired by an essay the musician Jarvis Cocker wrote. In “The Sound of the Underground, an essay about music and caves”, Cocker travels back to the very beginnings of humans’ artistic ways of expression, speculating about the remarkable resemblance of caves and contemporary underground music clubs as well as our love for reverb and echo sounds. He himself had been inspired by the findings of the renowned archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, who observed, during his decades of research in Neolithic caves all over the world, that the highest concentration of cave paintings could often be found “at a certain point in the cave system where there is a particularly strong audio echo.” This finding not only suggests that musical expressions might even predate the act of painting, but ultimately shows that music and visual arts already were of significant importance for the earliest cultural rituals. As Lewis-Williams points out, the paintings may actually have been used to enhance the mood during musical rituals in the cave. It’s not too far-fetched to think that a collective catharsis facilitated by music, flickering light and paintings was one of the key preconditions for the emergence of our modern societies.

On Muddy Catharsis

But why does this story matter today? Let's travel in time right into the year 2019 and continue with another story. While the modern societies we now live in experience multiple social-ecological crises that reinforce the personal and collective need for cathartic experiences, the 2019-edition of the famous British music festival Glastonbury – the modern day Neolithic cave – turned out to be a site of catharsis: Bathed in the golden light of the evening sun, thousands of people danced densely packed in front of the festival stage to the music of local post-punk band IDLES. While watching their performance in the video beneath and remembering their show at Haldern Pop festival we experienced the same year, we had the feeling that there was something slightly different about the cathartic experience the band invoked. It wasn’t the usual catharsis festival-goers know all too well.

Carried by the band's highly energetic music IDLES' singer Joe Talbot poses important questions about social justice, mental health, toxic masculinity, sexual violence and racism in his lyrics, topics that have the potential to resonate among the festival-goers even beyond a weekend of music and fun, topics that keep them involved. So, instead of a catharsis based on relieve they bring a catharsis to Glastonbury that “makes a change”. More specifically, they bring not a catharsis of purification or purging of emotions and conflicts but one of keeping us involved, one that leaves us sticking in the mud, the 'societal' mud. A muddy catharsis.

Towards Cathartivism

With the Gigi Saggi Dance Band, we are making it our aim to bring such a muddy catharsis to the dancefloor. As the art collective for earthly survival, "i gigi saggi" (colloquial Italian for “the wise people”), that strives to combine music, visual arts, science and activism, we are currently developing our own audio-visual approach to "artivism" that is deeply committed to the utopian power of the dance floor and that utilises the tactics of story and play in music to eventually bring about a muddy catharsis — something we term Cathartivism. Feminist scholars like Donna Haraway already acknowledged story and play as the main strategies of an emotional activist science, a science that stays involved in the societal mud, or that “stays with the trouble” as Haraway puts it. Cathartivism, just like artivism, builds on story and play. However, the combination of music and visual arts promises to add a muddy catharsis and, in this way, might elevate the impact of these tactics even further. Before we dive deeper into story and play, the tactics of Cathartivism, we want to first give you a short overview on what artivism means to us.

Brainstorming about artivism on flip chart by Orin Zebest (CC BY 2.0)

On Artivism

Music is regarded the language of emotions, its poetics the opposite of violent language. There is a reason peaceful demonstrations like Fridays For Future as well as those that were overshadowed by violence like the protest marches during the G20 summit in Hamburg 2017 have dance floors. Hope lies in an activism that turns to emotional communication (like music) and carefully explores new ways of communicating, not merely personally emotional communication at demonstrations or in social networks but more collectively emotional communication on dance floors, where people open up affectively and let themselves be touched by the world (e.g. dance floor neighbours and yet unheard ideas). Ideas and initiatives being worth taking action for in order to bring about societal change need to be woven into experiences of muddy catharsis.

These theories and practices need to come from a diverse array of knowledges. Knowledges that are feminist, antiracist and decolonial, and that conceive of human nature as an interspecies relationship. It matters to take an activism informed by such knowledges to the dance floor just like it matters to reconsider catharsis as muddy. “It matters which worlds world worlds,” the feminist scholar Donna Haraway once stated. Indeed, the worlds represented by a diverse array of art forms generally offer the possibility of involving people emotionally and thus growing with them more sustainably. And that is what we define "artivism" — activists working together with artists or using artistic language themselves to promote their causes — and the rise of an emotional science both activist and artistic (e.g. environmental humanities) — feminist, posthumanist and multispecies scholars combining, enriching, and representing their scientific work with artistic approaches. In a nutshell, artivism is the important work on dissolving the long-upheld borders between arts, science and activism.

Gigi Saggi Dance Band live @ Alte VHS Bonn, 21st August 2020

The Tactics of Play

Now, as humanity approaches a turning point hardly of less significance for future (more than-)human life than the invention of agriculture and the emergence of complex societies, a collective muddy catharsis on our contemporary dance floors might be a chance that is worth taking. It has never been more important than today to revise our understanding of what is human, what is humane, or in other words: to find our roots again. Therefore, the dance floor offers space for playfulness, most commonly related to newborns or animals, which qualifies as a powerful tool for revision. IDLES’s Joe Talbot points to “a vulnerability with playfulness,” which allows “your imagination, innocence and naivety to come through as your strength,” ultimately leading to novel movements, connections and ideas. The renowned Philosopher Timothy Morton wrote in his recent book, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People: “Philosophers should never be allowed on the dancefloor. Or maybe they should only be allowed on dance floors, because that’s where their intellect might become confused enough to say something of significance”.

Gigi Saggi Dance Band live @ Alte VHS Bonn, 21st August 2020

We need confusion because it leads to "storying otherwise", and ultimately to muddy catharsis. We need play. Donna Haraway — while talking about dogs playing with each other — gave a short but quite precise definition of play: “Every play session recombines the elements in ways that never existed on Earth before. They’re constantly experimenting with possibility. That’s what play is.” She then refers to the findings of behavioural ecologist Marc Bekoff, who observed that, in order to successfully play, you need to be skilful in ethical behaviour: “The ongoingness of the game depends on its players knowing how to keep it safe enough to stay in, and the payoff of play is joy, basically.” Quite strikingly, the exact same thing happens on the dance floor at an IDLES concert. The chaotic and highly energetic punk dance style, pogo, which might appear violent to some people, actually relies on ethical behaviour as a fundamental play skill. It’s a common, unspoken law to never willfully hurt other people, to just let yourself bounce against the other without using your arms and legs, and to care for each other, take care of one another, to help people up who fall to the ground and help people out who seem in distress. This is what IDLES singer Joe Talbot empathetically observes from on stage and what he reminds the crowd of every now and then during their performances. There’s a reason the famous German hardrock, metal and punk oriented festival “Wacken” is regarded one of the friendliest, despite the seemingly violent appearance of its dance floors.

In the words of Donna Haraway: empathetic players — here dancers — are rewarded with joy for their ethical behaviour. Shouldn’t we encourage spaces where ethical behaviour is rewarded? And doesn’t such a space offer the right environment to pose important questions, show alternatives, envision utopias and stir up change?

Gigi Saggi Dance Band live @ Alte VHS Bonn, 21st August 2020

The Tactics of Story

What if we were to tell stories on our dance floors? Stories that are telling worlds otherwise? “I think of storytelling as an opening up of the possibility of that kind of feeling of being with some worlds and not others,” Donna Haraway once said in an interview. It is true. When IDLES play their song “Danny Nedelko”, the crowd experiences this “feeling of being with some worlds and not others,” the feeling of being with Danny Nedelko, a migrant worker in the UK. “Stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?” the famous writer Kazuo Ishiguro observed. But what is particularly powerful about storytelling? For a possible answer it is fruitful to turn to the critical theorist Hannah Arendt. For her, “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” She sees Story as a practice that stirs our imagination in a way that keeps a multitude of perspectives open rather than claiming a universal worldview: “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” Stories help us open ourselves up for play, for something we haven’t yet imagined, but that becomes possible once we “go visiting.”

Why not weave theories and empirical findings that make worlds otherwise or the utopias already lived in local contexts in our stories, and tell them through our music, lyrics, visuals and dance moves in a playful manner? Let’s listen once again to Donna Haraway: “It matters, to take these capacities and skills and all the rest of it and connect with the people who are trying to make worlds otherwise.” That’s what we do. We put all our efforts into connecting with those people and push a step further: We will tell their stories on the dance floors and we will carry Pina Bausch’s words with us: “Dance, dance or we are lost.”

Gigi Saggi Dance Band live @ Alte VHS Bonn, 21st August 2020

We do this because it matters to rethink catharsis, and to take activism to the dance floor. There is a chance that these stories that tell worlds otherwise will stick with an audience, as they might experience them in a form of muddy catharsis. This possibility arising from the dissolving borders between arts, science and activism is worthy of further exploration. This is Cathartivism.

Live @ Hofgeflüster Pt. 3

In the third and last part of our small video series we want to introduce you to our special band member that you could already got a glimpse of especially in Pt. 2: Eva and her dancy visuals! We are really lucky to have her in our team not only when it comes to our visual performance, but also when it comes to the important discussions about the intersection of science, art and activism we want to pursue with this project. Thank you for being awesome! Please have a look at all the other great things she does: @evalxmfilm

Footage by @john.mountainhouse

Live @ Hofgeflüster Pt. 2

Dear fellow more-than-humans,

Here’s the second part of our small series of videos, this time introducing a tiny but powerful creature we can all learn something from: physarum polycephalum, aka the blob. With its over 700 sexes, this creature can teach us a lot about not thinking in binaries. Congratulations on being the unicellular organism of the year 2021 in Germany! The German Society of Protozoology is clearly ahead of its time.

Footage by the amazing @john.mountainhouse !

Stay safe!

i gigi saggi

Live @ Hofgeflüster Pt. 1

Dear fellow beings,

It is a pleasure to share with you this cathartic dance we had with our music project Gigi Saggi Dance Band. We're really grateful that we’ve had the chance to play some (outdoor) gigs this summer despite the extraordinary situation we are in as a global society and hope we were able to share positive vibes. Among others, thank you Alte VHS Bonn for letting us play for you! This is part one of a series of videos of some of those vibey moments we had outside Alte VHS in Bonn, captured by the extraordinary human being @john.mountainhouse.

Stay safe!

i gigi saggi

Taking Action for Earthly Survival Pt. 1:

Forno Vagabondo

Dear fellow (more-than-)humans,

do you remember this Beyond Crisis Conference we talked about in our last episode? We met this incredible (more-than-)human called Flora. They - Flora and her microbes - took action and gave birth to a community oven that is set to travel through Italian villages and bring together people of all kinds. For us, this is one of these fundamental projects to bring about the transformation our society so desperately needs. In order to emancipate ourselves from the industrial food system that is destroying our health and that of our fellow living beings we need to bake bread together. It is through this seemingly mundane process that we learn how to live together in a mutual aid relationship with fellow living beings (e.g. microbes). We also need to bake bread together in order to re-connect with local (more-than-)human knowledge, as it is through this process that we re-democratize our communal living together.

And yes: Baking bread takes quite a time. It shatters our rigid timetables of productiveness that are solely feeding dead capital rather than living communities. It hands back time to exchange ideas and to discuss and shape our common futures. Transformational ideas like degrowth or commons not only need time but also an oven to take shape and gain energy. Ultimately, this oven needs to be a vagabond. It needs to travel without restrictions. This is what the Forno Vagabondo is about. It is not only baking breads but also futures of (more-than-)human commoning. 

Most of the heroic ancient and contemporary stories told in Western culture are “about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained”, as famous science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us. 

Instead of telling another of these phallic stories, we want to open up the dancefloor as a carrier bag. A carrier bag for stories of transformational futures. This music video is the beginning of a journey. From the Forno Vagabondo in Italy we set out to other transformational projects. We want to weave their stories of transformation all over Europe into a giant basket. A basket which we can live off in the future.

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

Let’s follow Ursula K. Le Guin once again and be (more-than-)human. Let’s put the bread in the oven together. Let it rise. Take it out. Put it in the basket that is our carrier bag. Repeat from dancefloor to dancefloor.

Feeding the Commons Beyond Crisis

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, our vivid everyday experiences and situated knowledges made us aware of the horrible failings of our current system of capital accumulation and neoliberal individualization. Now, as the pandemic ripped the glossy facial mask down from the face of our neoliberally organized societies with a virulent grin, these failings lay bare before our very eyes (the eye understood here as an interface between body and mind). Needless to say that our feeling of an urgent need to transform this failing neoliberal being-individually-outside-of-a-multispecies-world to a just and convivial being-together-in-a-multispecies-world currently seeks ways to burst out. Ironically, a virus, that our neoliberal societies interconnected through globalized capitalism helped to create, complicates a being-together-in-a-multispecies-world as of now. 

This crisis nevertheless points towards a beyond, a speculative future, that will arise from our decisions we take now and from which new possibilites of being-in-the-world are going to emerge. We are right there, on the dancefloor, the space in-between past and future worlds. The way we dance will decide about the world we enter when departing from the dancefloor.

When the invitation came to play our first live concert at the Beyond Crisis Conference organized by the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano we did not hesitate to take this wonderful opportunity. Beyond Crisis. The beyond is our dancefloor. What a match! Still, we also wanted to participate in the sessions and workshops of the conference, so we recorded our concert beforehand and took part.

Luckily, we had the opportunity to participate in a workshop dedicated to the topic "Commoning, Subsistence & Sufficiency". Despite the fact that none of us were real 'experts' in these fields (Who even is an expert?), we had the feeling that commoning might be key for our future being-in-the-world. We had a great discussion with a handful of people via Zoom about what "commoning" can contribute to reaching social-ecological transformation and what the context of the current pandemic may implicate for this agenda.

We first identified three readings of the concept of "commoning": sufficiency, common land and data/common knowledge. Focusing primarily on the sufficiency-reading and the sense of community that this implicates, we characterised commoning as a need-oriented, communal living together of humans and non-humans based upon sharing and trusting relationships, no matter if it's about land, food, knowledge, health or other needs and resources. By not only sticking to human-human relations we quickly came to the point that "commoning" is actually a concept extracted from nature. It is important to keep this in mind and learn from the commoning practices of plants, animals and microbes as they themselves have commoning systems in place ensuring their survival. The biological understanding of diversity is key to this, as most ecosystems and their constituents rely on diversity in order to be resilient to phases of shortcomings, crises and catastrophes. We can observe that monocultural systems, let it be agricultural production or capital accumulation interweaving each other, are extremely vulnerable to crises as we can see in the increasing dependence on pesticides, insecticides, genetic modifications etc. in agriculture, as well as currently in the austerity-plagued health systems and non-existing economic safety nets of capitalist societies.

Diversity helps to reduce vulnerability and build up resilience. If one of many components is experiencing a crisis, others will step in and help out. An unconditional basic income would have helped to buffer the current economical crisis, as well as an alternative money system set up regionally to support local businesses. These are examples that already show on which scales resilient commoning systems can be established, mainly locally or regionally. While diversity helps building up resilience, it also needs to be a principle in re-organizing our power structures. A sole focus on building resilience obscures the power relations in which we are enmeshed. Therefore, we need to scale up the commoning concept in order to reduce the power of the financial sector, the agribusiness and the food industry.

If we want to scale up the commoning concept, we have to acknowledge its decentralised nature, promoting the diversity of many local projects and initiatives, e.g. urban gardening or farming projects working with permaculture, towns using alternative money systems (see “Bristol Pounds”), library of things, repair cafés/bike kitchen, alternative housing projects, RIVE/WWOOFing, alternative education models (scandinavian/multispecies etc.) or peer-to-peer insurances (e.g. Elinor-Network). A scaling up can only be achieved by entanglement. We need to interconnect the existing small scale commoning projects and make them visible as a big cloud of commoning. Being in a natureculture world characterized by entanglement and interconnectedness across all scales, we witness the implosion of scales. Our dominant framework of thinking with scales is not available anymore. Instead, we are urged to think in entanglements. We could start by paying attention to the human body and its symbiosis with trillions of microbes on the skin or in the gut. How about this commoning project?

Our relationship with food and beyond can be part of the solution, as we are feeding not only us as human beings, but trillions of microbes, that have specific needs we should take into account while choosing which food to eat. At the moment, due to the corona crisis, people maybe have more time to celebrate their daily meals and food is one of the last things available for us, at least in a rich country like Germany. This has the potential for our society to rethink our relationship with food and its importance for a good living, picturing a point of departure for a social-ecological transformation. For post-corona times food can be a lever to fulfill the desire for conviviality. Food is the ultimate community-builder as its production, distribution and processing involves people working together often resulting in the social event of eating together. However, the current way we produce, distribute and process food is highly unequal and unhealthy, so that we have to seek for alternatives. 

Friends, join us for an aperitivo! Tonight 19:30h. Watch out for the link in our Bio. It’s an honor to present our very first live material at the Beyond Crisis Conference. Shout out to the team from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano for the organisation!

Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gigisaggidancebd/

We will post the link to the live session in our Instagram Bio. 

Open Call for Video Material

Dance Music for Earthly Survival Pt. 2: Fermentation

Dear friends,

fermentation is a process that allows living creatures to exist, grow and be part of the world. It is a bacterial form of resistance in situations of scarcity allowing microbes to change their metabolism in order to live out of scrap. It means being able to create something new - even in difficult situations. It means to value the few things left and not being afraid of what comes next. 

For us, fermentation became a way to communicate, to make art by creating a living cluster of ideas, feelings, sounds, images, odors, flavors and just everything bubbling from the bottom of our selves. Imagine a big melting pot with all of these things being given the possibility to rest for some days, to feel the influence of the moon and the stars, of temperature and humidity, of languages and cultures.

Now, try to look again at all of these ideas, feelings and images, try again to hear these sounds, to smell the odors or taste the flavors, don’t you think they could have turned into something else? And isn’t it just what happens inside of us?

We are willing to open a new fermentation jar and put in our very best, and we are willing to do it with you! 

Let’s create something expressive, something completely new out of our being alive! 

We want your ideas, dreams and dance performances bubbling in our new music video. Send us video clips expressing your visual interpretations of fermentation until Wednesday 15th of April. 

We will ferment all incoming video material into our new music video.

Send us your video material via, for example, WeTransfer to [email protected] or private message.

Love,

Gigi Saggi Dance Band

Storytelling for Earthly Survival Pt. 1

Human Microbiota and the Utopian Politics of Fermentation

Fermentation is the process of microbial metabolism that transforms organic material into something new. Since the early Stone Age, humans make use of this process to produce and preserve food.

Fermenting food is a lot more like gardening than governing. There is no need to fully control the microbial metabolism in order to nourish and nurture it. Instead, careful attention to the microenvironment of the ferment is needed to create the conditions for the microbes to flourish. For the process of fermentation we depend on the microbes, so we do our best to align their interests with ours, by feeding them what they like.

Fermented foods garden the already present microbial community in our gut, the microbiota, as they contain large numbers of prebiotic substances and probiotic bacteria enhancing and diversifying microbial metabolism. Byproducts of fermentation such as short-chain fatty acids nourish the gut barrier and help prevent inflammation. Fermented foods improve our health. Researchers found that human health needs to be thought of as “a collective property of the human-associated microbiota” — that is, as a function of the community, not the individual. Indeed, we are only half human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there is at least one resident microbe – conservatively estimated. The human microbiota consists of an estimated 39 trillion microbes.

Some researchers believe that the alarming increase in autoimmune diseases, allergies and asthma in the West may owe to a disruption in the ancient relationship between our bodies and their “old friends” — the microbial symbionts with whom we coevolved. Western civilization – informed by rational enlightenment thought and its modern assumptions such as the separation of nature and culture – has disregarded microbial communities like the microbiota by fighting off microbes such as bacteria on multiple fronts. 

This is evident in industrialized food production. Due to the high share of processed food in our diets, the microbial diversity in the Western gut is significantly lower than in other, less-industrialized populations. As industrially processed food is absorbed by our upper intestine, it leaves nothing behind for our microbiota in the lower intestine. With such a diet we are eating for one, the modern model of the human as a detached single entity, and not for a trillion, the microbial more-than-human that we evidentially are.

Gardening our microbiota with fermented foods means being disobedient against the modern model of our human selves. By fermenting food, we not only improve our health, we also resist against the system of industrial food production relying on monocultures and pesticides, which kill diversity and cause environmental destruction.

The structure of food and how it is prepared matters as much as its nutrient composition, such as the (power) structure of society and how it is organized matters as much as its people.

Fermenting means being disobedient against the current power structure of society and sparking social change. For us, social change is a form of fermentation, as ideas and dreams are bubbling and transforming until they become reality.

Finally, the process of fermentation reminds us that our world is not dictated by us, but by natural forces, and that change is always inevitable. It helps us to reflect on diversity by reminding us that while we might want to control our world, we are meant for diversity and difference.

For us, such insights into the process of fermentation and the workings of the human microbiota translate into principles for social change.

I

Living communally

/with microbes 

instead of 

individually 

/against microbes

II

Nurturing for all

/fermented food

instead of 

Processing for one 

/industrial food

III

Care

/gardening life

instead of 

Control 

/governing life

IV

Diversity 

/microbial culture 

instead of 

Homogeneity

/monoculture

V

Fermentation

/social change

instead of 

Stagnation

/status quo

Along these principles, fermentation became a way for us to communicate, to make art by creating a living cluster of ideas, feelings, sounds, images, odors, flavors and just everything bubbling from the bottom of ourselves.

Stay true to your microbial self. Be a trillion!

Gigi Saggi Dance Band pres. "Dance Music for Earthly Survival" Pt. 1: 

A visual performance of "Permacultura" 

Written and directed: i g i g i saggi - Art Collective for Earthly Survival 

Live Performance: Gigi Saggi Dance Band 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gigisaggida... 

Website: https://gigisaggidanceband.github.io/

On a strenuous day, as the story goes, Gigi Saggi needed to visit a sick friend. To reach his destination he had to cross a dancefloor that spanned a deep gorge like a rickety bridge. As he walked onto the dancefloor, the sound of a trumpet whipped him from side to side. Full of fear, he stood still and catched a glimpse of the void. His head spun. Behind him was his past, a known space from where he had come. Before him was his future, an unknown place to where he was going. In an unsettled state, he began to listen carefully. As he felt the music moving his body, his mind suddenly cleared. Sparked with an unanticipated jolt of energy and creativity, he started dancing and soon envisioned a new world filled with possibilities. He suddenly had a clear vision of the utopian power of dance music, permaculture and fermentation.

On the trumpet-whipped dancefloor Gigi Saggi had experienced the “in-between”, a place of existential risk, creativity and renewal: that which connects two things which had once been separated – mind and body, nature and culture, dance music and utopian politics. From this day on, he began to recognize that the dancefloor had revealed itself as a space which can ultimately provoke fundamental change in our current state of crisis. Together with his friends, i gigi saggi (ital. for “the wise people”), he founded the Gigi Saggi Dance Band to spread the wisdom of the “in-between” and its possibilities for earthly survival.

Follow Gigi Saggi on Instagram and see the world through his eyes: https://www.instagram.com/saggigi/