Story Worlding, narratives and changing the world…
Interview with Lina Person & Josephine Rydberg (Sweden), creators of
Lina Persson is a researcher and visual artist with main focus on landscapes, environments, world building, and natural elements as active agents. She often works with animation and with interventions in different organizations.
Josephine Rydberg is a cross media developer for Region Gävleborg (Gävleborg County Council), and a PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts, working on projects that explore “Dramaturgy for Participatory Practices”.
We sat down with Lina Person & Josephine Rydberg who work together in different projects and are participating in the Nordic climate story lab with “Elsa -A New Reactive Earth”, which is a speculative fiction story-world that drives transformation of stories and future realities.
The material context, and the space.
For storytelling to be authentic, relevant, mythical and transformative to us, it needs to come from lived experience somehow. We have found that doing things in a new way sometimes results in spotting new things, finding new forms and making us able to tell new things. We have tried to exercise degrowth by limiting our climate footprint while storytelling. So it is about form as well as content. So one could say we work with two different things, world building as a narrative practice and the participatory form.
“-The attempt to make other things starts with telling the stories about them differently. “
Working with a place, world or the environment as a starting point as a driver of narratives, brings the possibility of decentering the human perspective. Working with generating imaginary worlds, we see what kind of meanings become relevant if we instead look at the connections between things.
Situating particular spaces are important. It is important to acknowledge that this story is relying on this space, and to acknowledge that this space sustains me, and carries me. So space is important. In one film one time, I (Lina) credited all the natural resources exploited enabling the film down to the minerals in the computer. So the very long credit list of that film was a way to make this point regarding responsibility visible.
When it comes to world building, we came up with the term trans-topia, to emphasize how this story is a process and a way to transform through, instead of a place to arrive at, like utopia would be. We like to think that stories transform, affect and shape us. Especially, if participatory aspects are incorporated. It has a deeper impact if your body is activated, participatory storytelling can make people part of the story.
Related to this, we have also tried to get away from the ‘hero’s journey narrative’ and the conflict oriented narrative because this just reproduces what already is. We much rather enjoy the ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ where we can have multiple perspectives and stories. Here it is not about winning and overcoming, but living and dying together.
We simply try to work with a different logic.
We try to work with the lust of being dissolved. Holistic storytelling, both feeling yourself as a body of cells, but also documentary storytelling about how carbon works in the world.
Regarding the participatory aspect, Josephine works a lot with live action role play to take the worlding one step further. So for example, imagine experimenting with the transformation by picking up an item and carrying it around a little bit and having it in your hand everyday. To let yourself be affected by it, allow yourself to be transformed a little, and just you know, use it as a tool for divination. This is one way to create links between one thing and the next, practicing imagining. It shows the power of charging things, how you point your awareness, what you invest your hope and desires in, and how you can make something come to life. Creating experiences and memories that even if fictional, becomes part of a personal makeup. Especially making it together with others makes it powerful.
We could describe it as a deceptive mind trick, but we can look at it in another way. The way we see it, we are already in a deceptive state. Just being an adult in this society, you already have so many deceptions in the forms of discourses, hegemonies and paradigms that we live with.
“-We see this work that we do as a process of ‘off-boarding’ these narratives just as much as on-borading new ones. “
That is another part of storytelling: how we enable new habits, new paths, and get rid of unwanted others.
That thing, when you realize and are suddenly reminded that it’s a choice! Also the devastating and very problematic grip of algorithms in today's realities almost demands coaching programs or deprogramming more than films.
Regarding storytellings and hegemonies, it can be fruitful to use tools like the Bechdel test and check what kind of infrastructures do the production of this narrative rely on? Not only within the stories but underlying the production, like choosing not to rely on channeling our stories through patriarchal structures and so on.
So one component of our narrative is the climate calculator for film production that we made. The calculator is part of our story world but it is also a tool that enables others to reduce their footprints.
On a personal level the path to creating story worlds as an artist comes from a strategy for coping with the world that I call ‘neuro queer coping mechanism’ where I (Lina) fictionalize everyday situations to be able to open up for more radical ways of being true to myself. Creating a fictional trial setting. Applying a dramaturgical arc to my story world, I create my own radical version of society in which it is easier to find strategies to change or break patterns. Even though something might seem impossible, I treat it like transtopia and keep working towards it as if it might be possible, finding solutions or halfway solutions on the way.
Josephine has experimented with trying to reprogram the brain by learning a new language, diving into that language also in culture, tv-programs and literature. Learning new tropes, new languages and communication forms, not just a new vocabulary to attempt creating new pathways in the brain.
“A motivation also for creating new story worlds is also to create new reference points and new baselines.”
If we want to get as far away from where we are as possible, why do we depart from this world and use it as reference? We should use something very different as reference instead. Like the academic method of back-casting where one starts from a hypothetical scenario and moves backwards from there until the current position.
But at the same time consider the Tonga and the Moana Pacific knowledge which teaches us the perspective of walking backwards towards the future, facing history as the default ‘frontal’ position.
So for us, action doesnt need to begin with physical. An action can be to practice to look at things in a particular way, to prompt ourselves to look at things differently. This can be a beginning to materialize new realities. There are always small things everyone can do. One action at the time is how transformation starts.
We also try to narrate the opting out of things. To create things that are things that we just don't do anymore, collectively.
We have to make new connections and new logics together. We can't live in colonialist patriarchal logic anymore. We need to find new logics and collaborate to normalize those into viable alternatives.
