... I would give you a sense of your own worth, an unshakeable sense of your own dignity as one grounded in the source of the cosmic dance, as one who plays a unique part in the unfolding of the story of the world. – Greta Crosby
Sylvia Bhagavati
Escuela de Creatividad Intencional
(School of Intentional Creativity)
My target group are women and especially autistic women and girls. But also non-autistic mothers of autistic children are addressed here, and with mother I mean every woman who raises a child or "only" helps with it.
Intentional Creativity is not about talent and "artistic merit" in the typical Western masculine-centric sense.
Intentional Creativity is about women and girls getting back in touch with their inner creativity, something that has been almost entirely taken away from us in our patriarchal cultures.
In the course of the centuries of Christianization of Europe and Latin America, women were deprived of music, dance, poetry and painting. A very few female figures such as Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila, to name but two, are exceptions, and only recently has it come to light that the sisters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Robert Schumann were actually much more talented than their famous brothers. In music and dance, the female roles were also played by men for quite some time, before a niche opened up, at least in opera and drama, albeit at the expense of reputation and living conditions. Between the Renaissance and World War I, artists were vagabonds in the eyes of "good society," and female artists were "easy girls," i.e., prostitutes. For centuries, artists in Europe, together with the Romani, formed the so-called "traveling people", or Gypsies: people without a permanent residence, registered nowhere and by no one registered in any form. These free spirits were met with the utmost suspicion; they were considered unreliable, dissolute, poor, thieving, and generally of bad character.
Few artists enjoyed the favor of those who gave them commissions and thus an income, mainly painters, sculptors, architects and musicians - and always and exclusively men. The story of Michelangelo is a very vivid example of the situation of artists in Europe over the centuries, and so is the story of Mozart. He came from a poor family, and his father had only one thing in mind: to bring his gifted son into the highest ranks of society so that he could finally support himself and his family. It was the same with Ludwig van Beethoven and many a famous painter.
Art that was not prescribed, that is, controlled, by clergy and nobility was outlawed, and so were the people who created such art. Especially women.
Until the Renaissance, women still had many rights and professions that were reserved for them, such as spinner, seamstress, and many other fields of work that have long since disappeared. Certain other professions were also open to women, such as goldsmithing and silversmithing. Until the Renaissance, these professions and their craftsmen enjoyed high social prestige as guilds, and in some aspects even more rights than the nobility. It was even possible to do something that is hard to believe today: if a guild master, no matter what profession, did not have a son, he could appoint a daughter as his heiress - and take her husband into the family in place of a son, as it were. These were the last remnants of a once matrilineal form of society in Europe, which now came to its total social and legal end with the Catholic Church and its campaign to disenfranchise women throughout Europe and Britain. And what happened to the women of medicine is well known - the art of healing, as practiced by the herbalist women, became allopathic medicine, which originated entirely from the military. A decisive factor for this development was also the fact that between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Second World War, Europe was practically continuously at war.
And just as the art of healing became militarized, so did music and painting, just think of all the paintings of warlords and battles, or the marches and kettledrums and trumpets. Poetry and drama were able to retain a certain independence from this influence, but here too we see heroic stories predominating since ancient times. With the two world wars this reached a kind of zenith, and since then "art" has been spreading anew in Europe and the Western powers as a civil element of "culture". Medicine has not made it back into the realm of art, it is now considered a science - thus defined diametrically opposed to art. But whoever has been lucky enough to have met a really good doctor, perhaps a surgeon, or a dentist, a pediatrician, and so on, knows that it takes more than technology and comprehensive knowledge of the natural sciences to be able to have a truly healing effect.
In our modern world, art is a business - a billion-dollar business. Just like music, dance, drama and literature - and like medicine and pharmacology. Next to arms and human trafficking, these are the most lucrative industries of all. Nothing has changed in decades, and nothing will change in the future.
Intentional Creativity is about completely different aspects of art and creativity. It's about a kind of recollection - who we really are... what place we really occupy in the "big picture"... what life really is and means, life altogether... How would we experience the world, and our own lives, if everything didn't revolve around money and success and status and fame?
Many, if not most or even all autistic people are utterly unimpressed by all these things. What does that mean? For me autistic person myself, and for the world, the society we live in?
Can we survive in this world, in this society, without "playing with the other children"? And can we only survive - or can we really live and flourish?
These are the questions we ask ourselves when we work with Intentional Creativity.
And I can't wait to start working with you.
Comments