who we are
Living Justice is co-founded by artist-researchers Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our life-long dedication is to live an ethics of care in the everyday by remembering and enlivening our interdependence with each other and the living earth.
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MICHE FABRE LEWIN
PHD, DIP ART THERAPY
A White woman, born on Zimbabwean soil, Miche has French and Jewish heritage and is based in UK. Her devotional vocation is rooted in a passion for art, ecology, food, and liberation. These passions interconnect through her therapeutic arts training, combined with a liberation counselling practice, her socially engaged body of work as an ecological artist, and nurtured within a Zen kitchen as a contemplative cook. Tuning into the cohesive power of ritual she hosts convivial spaces for skills sharing, knowledge generation and co-creation. These are curated within an ecology of embodied, emancipatory arts and earthcentred ritual practices which are in service to freedom kinships for collective liberation. Commissioners include Home Live Art, TEdx Soweto, Royal Geographic Society, Thames Festival, Stellenbosch University, Triangle Arts Trust. Within the realm of research Miche has innovated participatory, collaborative and decolonising methodologies. Her doctoral scholarship with Coventry University in partnership with the Sustainability Institute in South Africa, evolved the concept of sympoiethics. The concept honours a way of living ecologically and ethically as humans in respectful, response-able co-evolution within a participatory cosmos.
FLORA GATHORNE-HARDY
PHD, DIP LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Flora is a British born, white woman based in the UK. At the heart of Flora’s creative practice is honouring and tending to our entangled relationships with the life of place – a thread that weaves through her work within human geography, landscape architecture and intuitive plant and land care. Integral to her doctoral studies, policy research and landscape design practice is her dedication to attending to people’s diverse experiences and tuning into the ecology of place. Commissioners include the UK Department for Education, NHS Hospital Trust, National Trust, Creative Partnerships, Playlink, and Maggie’s Centre. In her partnership with Miche, Flora has developed collaborative approaches to practice-based research, multi-media documentation and the co-curation of spaces for collective inquiry. Her studio drawing practice helps makes visible the subtle energies of these unfolding journeys of knowledge co-creation with each other and the animate world. This commitment to engaging with wider fields of knowing is supported and enlivened by her training and practice in organisational constellations.
What we do
We collaborate with change-makers, organisations and alliances who are dedicated to reconnecting human liberation and ecosystem restoration. Within every engagement, we respect what is here, resource inner and outer explorations of what is possible, and revision ways of manifesting just futures.
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Our breath, our nourishment, our habitats, our thoughts, our emotions, our ways of knowing, our consciousness are all co-existent with the matter and cycles of the living Earth. Traditional knowledge and spiritual wisdoms recognise this relational worldview where we are in kinship with each other and our animate world.
When we recognise our relational sovereignty, we see how racial, social, ecological and food justice are all entwined. Living justice frames these intimate nature-cultural interconnections, opening to ethics as an everyday process of responding with each other and the matter, processes and intelligences of the living Earth.
We collaborate with research centres, education and training organisations, environmental design practices, arts organisations and community led networks. We help build alliances between groups and organisations to open up new narratives and co-operative initiatives. We also offer support and training to individuals and groups of change-makers.
How we work
Our work is dedicated to enlivening our capacities to feel, sense and think with our whole selves in relationship to the wholeness of life. These justice practices are informed by the transformative power of art and its roots in the Sanskrit word ‘rta’, which evokes a dynamic co-creation with the matter of processes of life.
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We share art as a process of thinking-making that engages the multiple intelligences of our bodies and minds. By valuing and integrating the senses, intuition, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory, we can experience our human knowing as part of much wider fields of life intelligences.
This art of sympoiethics embraces the creation of artefacts, communication exchanges, as well as the processes of everyday living such as cooking, growing food and ritual-making. Through embodied interaction, come to see how our human well-being and the flourishing of the whole are in a sacred and reciprocal exchange.
Within every engagement, we welcome what is arising, giving space for the possible and for what presents and what has been excluded and needs to be included. It is an ethos of responsiveness, working with the emergent and honouring of the not yet known through curated sequences and encounters that unfold through collaboration.
Gratitude
Heartfelt gratitude to our circle of advisors, research communities, justice thought leaders and wisdom traditions that support and guide our work.
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We are honoured to be supported by our circle of advisors who hold us in support, trust, accountability, and response-ability within our work towards ecological restoration, freedom kinships for collective liberation. This STAR Circle whose members include Kitty D’Costa, Anna Mudeka, and Theo Mayekiso.
Gratitude to our research communities and collaborations which offer the valuable resources of co-inquiry, reflection and constructive challenge. These include: our Research Associateship at the Centre for Agroeology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), Coventry University; and on-going research exchanges with Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) at Stellenbosch University and Sustainability Institute in South Africa.We are also members of the Democracy and Belonging Forum at the University of California at Berkeley.
Justice leaders from the Global Majority call us and show up to counter oppression and co-create new cultures of connection.Interwoven, we honour cosmologies of sacred interconnectedness, including animism, African philosophies of Ubuntu and Ukama, Zen Buddhism and quantum thinking, which ground our work and ways of being.
