Prototype for New Thinking
We live in a world of splendid contradictions. longdistance-cargocycling.org donates (again) to artenglück.de, a purveyor of wild flower beds to save remaining bio-diversity. Generous donation for a common cause with funds generated from plenty of cargo cycling trips.
The results of our actions: expensively compensated. There appears to be a requirement to reflect their unintended consequences in the first place.
Oh, by the way, thanks to all MY donors!
Take a bike. On it, move an object to wherever it wants to be moved. Observe and document the ride!
This time, I had three objects that wanted to be moved.
The action goes on elsewhere. We witness idle artefacts of a busy world, carelessly abandoned, in all cases. Their silence is a prompt to think.
Ruptures appear, we hit the wall. No phantasys to shape the future of our World. Too many competing narratives.
Today, we tell ourselves stories that we wouldn’t believe in the future.
Entrenched in bipartisanship, unable to sense the emerging space of possibilities. My bike as a silent observer, an epitomised option for an utopian alternative modernity. Contours of those realities already appear to exist, in pictures.
Towers provide orientation. The world over, the sight of a tower symbolises refuge, identification, safety. Seafarers, worshippers, and even the odd cyclist, rely on their dominating impressions.
A beacon provides physical beams of light, a church tower offers hope for religious enlightment; and following the invitation of the latter, a cyclist might not only find sacred comfort, but also more secular distractions right in the middle of urbanism.
However, I observe an intriguingly new breed of towers, popping up at the fringes of urbanity. Slim, with spiritual symbols of its own, it appears they offer rewards of different sorts. The cyclist, coming nearer, feels like having to navigate a sea of four-wheeled gadgets full of adorers flocking to this symbol of a new religion seeking convenience and speed.
It seems, if you follow the welcome pull of one tower, you have to manage another´s repulsion.
We live in a world of contradictions.
We put everything into boxes. Our stuff, our thinking. By using boxes, we establish routines to simplify our life. Boxes are replaceable, and so becomes our thinking.
But what if those routines fail us? There is potential to act. New thinking offers ways of stepping out of our boxes.
Perhaps the voices of those who kept asking whether my initiative was economically viable and who would pay for my experiments were very loud. Or the new just didn’t want to come into the world.
It seemed to me that in 2021 I was moving in a space of efficiency, where a constant “more of the same” commercialized cargo bike usage; a drive for efficiency that requires you to optimize existing systems. We are happy about cargo bikes in the cities, but actually those very inner cities cry for help; cry for a new thinking.
But there was another space, that of functionality. In there, cargo bikes are a multiplier of sufficiency and regionality. But apparently there were no doors from one room to the other.
In a system of me (A), the public hearing (B) and the narrative (C), which moved in the field of tension between a sportive recognition of cargo cycling, the search for commercial realization and an integral claim, surprising results emerged:
B is stubborn; B thinks A and C are messing around. B is unsure who is leading: A who focuses on sportive recognition, or C who stresses an integral claim? C is completely on the side of A.
B complains: “A doesn’t manage to put the matter into words so that B understands it”. A’s behavior makes B angry. A invited B to come along, gets a swatter.
What is needed?
For C: put your fist in your pocket, explain, offer. For B: A and C can do what they want. For A: A would have to dissemble if it got involved in B’s language
An option?
… on the other side of the fence“, goes a popular saying. I decided to check it out in The Netherlands.
Both sides of the border: Green, lush meadows; flat land, at least in the north, in Friesland. Where’s the difference? My interest in the sweet specialties of our neighbours is pretended; actually, the food is only a side issue of my request to cycle sensibly again: When it comes to cycling, the Dutch are actually greener – in the truest sense of the word!
A biker’s paradise – the paths are wider and the surface smoother. A permanent embodiment of a real appreciation as a road user.
A cargo bike without a load? A film without a picture? The current program of Kunsthalle Osnabrück is irritatingly barrier-free: I cycle 357 km to find out how it achieves to bring down mental barriers.
The artists rearrange our established mental responses. A film without an image to concentrate on sounds and description of scenes and images? Sounds removed from the movements that generate them?
I enter the church. The ship is empty save for the row of screens facing away from the entering visitor. Half of the floor is covered with a patterned carpet. Box-like blocks on top..
The air is filled with a roar, it echoes persistently. The screens show film sequences. The deaf actress practices drums. The sounds of practice become irrelevant as the objects in the rehearsal room are rearranged.
Sudden silence; a call on the protagonist’s smartphone. The gestures of sign language are reflected in the mirror of the hairdressing salon. The roar resumes.
Do we expand our field of perception? We absorb information in different ways than usual, but how? An enriching visit
Kunsthalle Osnabrück: Raumkonzepte im Dialog mit dem Behinderten-Forum Osnabrück – Anna Erdmann/Franziska Goralski (Die Blaue Distanz); Alison O´Daniel (I felt people dancing/The Tuba Thieves).
How do you take it with financial indetedness? As quickly as possible paid back to the bank? Why not also in terms of climate protection, because our today´s consumerism takes out loans from nature.
“Our knowledge should already be sufficient to save the World.”
R. Klingholz, member of the Enquête-Kommission Demographischer Wandel des Landes Niedersachsen, 2005 – 2007
“Our knowledge should already be sufficient to save the World”, says Reiner Klingholz, member of the Enquête-Kommission Demographischer Wandel des Landes Niedersachsen from 2005 to 2007 (Kurier am Sonntag, 28. March 2021, p. 3), but “crisis appear only if we live too generously.”
Obivously, we are not able to adapt our behaviour to protect the climate. We struggle to address pandemics; if challenges get bigger?
My cargo bike alone does not move the World, but I can induce ourselves to move it!
