April 2025 Newsletter
Welcome to our April 2025 Newsletter. Here you will find our community, research, and the Bergerac Praxis Hub updates from the month of April.
🚀 Upcoming Explorations 🚀
In July, we have two art residencies: our month-long Inner River residency at the Bergerac Praxis Hub and our Art of Ritual weekend offering at the Farmhouse.
Inner River: A Month-Long Art Residency for Creative Wayfinding 🌊🎨
In a world of socio-ecological crises, does art even matter? Should I be doing something “more useful” with my time?
Inner River is a month-long container of contemplation, community, and creativity for 10-12 artists to dive into an individual and shared journey of discovering and creating “our voice(s)”. An exploration of ancestry – where we come from through to what kinds of ancestors we want to become – will form the ground of this inquiry.
Art of Ritual
Join us for a long weekend immersion into the world of performance art and ritual at the Life Itself Farmhouse Hub, grounded in the spirit of the Second Renaissance. From July 24th to 27th, 2025, the workshop will be led by Sylvie Barbier of the Art of the Second Renaissance Collective, who brings over a decade of experience in ritual art.
https://secondrenaissance.net/art/residency
Announcing the Life Itself Sensemaking Studio
We are delighted to announce the launch of the Life Itself Sensemaking Studio: a new multidisciplinary consultancy in service of inner + outer systems transformation. The Studio helps foundations, institutions, and conscious enterprises to make sense of – and act in – emerging systems and novel cultural landscapes.
You can register for the Sensemaking Studio: Find Out More – A Welcome Event here - an interactive session on Wednesday, 21st May. It’s a chance to meet the team and explore how sensemaking can support your work.
🌅 Second Renaissance 🌅
On May 2nd and 3rd the Human Transformation in a Time of Metacrisis event took place, bringing together a global community of educators, practitioners, thinkers, and changemakers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The event focused on how education and inner development can address the metacrisis, the interconnected challenges of our era - social polarization, ecological breakdown, and a crisis of meaning - signaling a world in transition.
Keynote speakers included Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction; Rebecca Henderson, Harvard Business School Professor and author of Reimagining Capitalism; Tyler VanderWeele, Director of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program; and Futurist and Developmental Theorist Zak Stein. The conference also featured panels, workshops and unconference sessions led by Bonnitta Roy, Daniel Thorson, Isabela Granic, Peter Limberg, Kam Bellamy, and Brendan Graham Dempsey, exploring themes such as metamodern spirituality, youth flourishing, and collective healing. A youth-led collective session, EmpowerEd Through Arts, from students at the Boston Arts Academy also took place.
A more detailed write-up of the conference will be available in the next newsletter.
In the meantime, if you attended, we invite you to share thoughts and reflections here, or to join our open to all facebook group to stay connected and continue the conversations.
Have you joined the Oasis?
The Oasis is a newly launched weekly online gathering space for those called to act in alignment with the Second Renaissance. Each 90-minute session - held every Tuesday at 6pm CEST - offers space to both be and build. These calls combine deep relational practices with tents, places where community meets project to catalyze energy and align action.
Read more here and sign up to our luma calendar here to join future calls.
Read our latest Seeds newsletter:
Second Renaissance Forum
Some of our top forum posts over the past month have included:
Join us today to contribute and share your own reflections and discussion topics.
🌻Conscious Collectives🌻
On behalf of our friends at The Village, you are invited to their very first Village Volunteer Rally & Fair on May 12th at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern / 11pm GMT - a gathering to celebrate the hearts, hands, and minds who have helped shape VillageCo into what it is today, and those who will carry it forward.
If you want to join to celebrate with others or learn more about how to get involved, you can RSVP here.
💡Life Itself Research💡
From Polycrisis to Metacrisis: a short introduction
We’re happy to announce the release of a new white paper: “From Polycrisis to Metacrisis: a short introduction”.
The Research Community has recently published several of our Research Community Calls. Two of our most recent calls are available for viewing here: Simon Grant on Ontological Commoning, and Momcilo Mijovic on Sensemaking, Blindspots and Systems Contradictions.
🌳The Bergerac Praxis Hub🌳
Reflections on the Life Itself Spring Gathering 2025
This year’s Life Itself Spring Gathering took place at the Bergerac Hub from Thursday 27th March to Sunday 30th March. We had 18 participants from the UK, Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, and Spain over the weekend and around 8 people staying for a community co-living/co-working week afterwards.
In next month’s newsletter, we will be sharing the plans for the Autumn 2025 Residency - watch this space.
