Our project "A:Practice - collaborative practices for climate resilience" was selected as part of Pro Helvetia's Synergies-programme. The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC) (South Africa) and KlimaKontor (Switzerland) will continue their collaboration. Many thanks to the great jury!
Our motivation arises out of a generalised global need for new thinking in the face of escalating climate collapse, new ways of tackling food production at a local level to break the reliance on industrialised agriculture.
The programme emerges at a localised level, from a 2022 Pro Helvetia funded residency where creative climate leader and companion Barbara Ellenberger spent time in a co-creative process with The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (FATC) in Mpumalanga, South Africa. During the residency, the collaborating parties worked to define the emergent practices and theories that FATC has been developing and prototyping over the past five years, in response to environmental degradation, climate change and pandemic.
These experiential practices and philosophies, which combine art, agroecology and management training, have been successfully formulated in a practical framework to support cultural organisations on the path to climate-positive transformation.

During the Creative Climate Leadership Week (CCL) Switzerland 2024, I thought about how A:Practice can be put to good use. And in this context also about myself as a "leader". I realise that in my previous role as an artistic managing director of theatres, I also saw myself more as a "companion". I initiated projects and drove them forward, but always with the focus on empowering everyone involved. In the context of A:Practice, I also see myself more as a companion than a leader. Especially here.
A:Practice serves as a tool for institutional self-reflection. The action matrix offers a holistic perspective on the global ecological situation and supports institutions in the transition from recognising their own limits and significance to explicit commitment as ecological actors in solidarity and cooperation with other actors.
Working with the action matrix leads to action. It illustrates how operational and substantive measures can be interlinked and implemented simultaneously, and supports their strategic bundling. Everyone can contribute directly and play their part. This contributes to the empowerment of everyone, promotes enthusiasm and vigour and thus increases the speed of implementation and reduces bureaucratic effort.
I can get involved in these processes as a facilitator - someone who listens, who resonates, who knows when an impulse is needed and when not - as a companion in a diverse, adventurous process towards a more ecological world.

Today, when launching the website, I am thinking of these three images. I was still in South Africa, on the farm where FATC operates. Under pressure due to my changed return date (ship schedules are not as exact as those of trains), which was moved up by three weeks, we sketched out a first Matrix of Action after three months of collective reflection and discussion. While drawing, I thought of the weaver birds. They start their nest with a single blade of grass, giving no hint of the beauty and functionality the nest will eventually have. Putting one stroke after another, sketching out everything we know, and seeing what emerges was our motto.
Meanwhile, Matthias helped to conceptually solidify the matrix, and Hubertus Design has visually refined it.