We are taught to see the world in parts: subject split from object, self from other, human from the nature it stands on, the mind from the body that carries it around. It is a tidy story, and I think it is failing in plain sight, in the warming air, in the loneliness people report from the middle of crowded lives, in the widespread sense that something essential has gone missing and cannot quite be named. The map was never the world, and now it is coming apart in the hand.
I start from a different picture. The world is woven, and goes on being woven, out of perception and relation and act. Walk into a forest and you are part of it before you have decided anything: the trees are already changing the air in your lungs, your weight is pressing the soil, your presence is moving through the birdsong.
A space of spaces.
Raw.Space is a place for the in-between, on screen and on paper: the cracks and the thresholds, the doorways where you are neither quite inside nor outside and something is still free to change. It has purposes of its own, and it stays raw by design, a clearing kept open for whatever you make of it.
There is no single centre.
Maps are drawn by whoever holds the pen, and what they push to the margins is usually somebody's centre seen from far off, the middle of a world the mapmaker never thought to look at. Every place is the centre of itself, and none is only an edge.
The same goes for the figure standing alone. Whatever survives does so through its relationships: with other people, with the living world, with the ground that holds the whole thing up.
That brings me to the word we. For a while this space said we, as if it were a movement or an organisation; it was a single voice dressed as a crowd, and I have stopped doing that. Two kinds of we were in play, though, and only one of them goes. The borrowed institutional plural, standing in for a body that never existed, is gone. The other we stays, because it was always true: you and I, reader and writer, caught in the same condition, both already inside the meshwork. And the I that remains is less solitary than it looks, made of everything I have read, everyone who has changed how I think, languages I did not invent, and you, finishing each sentence in a mind I will never see. A self is a knot of relations that happens to speak in the singular.
Art and design.
Public conversation tends to swing between messages that tell people what to think and ideas locked away in jargon. Art can open another way in: a poem can make you feel the weight of a word you have used all your life without noticing. Design is the discipline of giving that opening a form that holds, working within real constraints and answerable to the person on the other side, whether they are reading on a phone on the bus or holding the book at a kitchen table.
Across difference.
I have watched efforts to challenge the way things are deepen the very divisions they set out to heal, and I would rather not feed that loop. So I try to keep talking across difference and to keep crossing, between languages and between ways of knowing, without pretending the distances are smaller than they are. Mostly I try to practise that crossing with myself.
The aim is to let critical thought, activism and communities of practice, and art and design speak to one another, and to hand whatever emerges to whoever can use it. Entry is through the senses first, the intuitive, the made thing, and from there towards questions, and then towards what you might do with them. What I hope it leaves you with is more trust in your own judgement and your own power to act, and a sense that other worlds are already being born in the places we learn to look.