‘MIENSKIP’ (COMMUNITY) / ‘COMMONS’ IN SIGHT
She learns a lot from her surroundings and the rule of bio-systems such as ant colonies. This swarm intelligence intrigues Tehran born, Dutch transformation designer and visual artist Soheila Najand (1957). She has evidence that individuals seem to find each other in ‘commons’ and organize themselves in areas such as housing, work, learning and life.
For her, art is a movement, an awareness and a revelation of mutual, human, ecological, systemic, cultural and economic relationships, on a personal level as well as at the level of society processes and -meanings. As director and artistic leader of the Interart Foundation she advocates learning getting to know the unknown through art projects that connect various disciplines and – with that – people with each other. In her eyes, that way you get to know and understand others. That fact plays an important role in today’s society.
Soheila Najand travels the entire country, to make the world a little more tolerant and nice with these ideas. It is her vision on a new, cultural citizenship. For centuries, governments and business companies used networks as their own power. Now the traditional government tries to create space with a temporary lee of rules and by reducing regulatory pressure. Najand regards this as not very successful.
According to Najand, swarm Intelligence consists of a population of individual members who interact with each other and with their environment. Although there is no central structure that controls the individuals, the joint interactions result in global intelligent behavior. Soheila’s dream is that we re-develop this power in our ‘mienskip’/commons. Thanks to the digital revolution and social networks, it seems possible for the first time to deploy common intelligence and to realize a society of free people. Are we ready for this paradigm shift?
Read more about Soheila here.