Casa de cultura permanenta
Adela & Dan
Cluj, June 2015
What’s your professional area activity?
Well, let us start by stating that we believe less in professions. We believe in livelihoods, we believe in education and learning that make us more prepared for the present and more able to unfold the present into beautiful futures.
We have both been part of almost every field of the social-economic environment: we have owned businesses, we have worked in corporations, we have volunteered in non-governmental organizations, we have worked as freelancers, we have worked in public institutions…
Currently, Adela is doing research in sociology in a public institution, with close attention to concrete utopias, social innovation, the global crisis as an apocalyptic experience and, more recently, futures studies.
Dan has studied economics and medicine and today he works as manager in a public institution. His main interest is in complex systems, viable systems models, sociocracy, holocracy and social innovation in organizations.
Is it link to your project in a way?
We both put our knowledge and learning capacity to good use in creating innovative visions for possible futures and in practicing a mindfull, voluntarily simple lifestyle that creates strong bonds to nature and to other people.
What’s your project, and born the idea?
Our project is not a project. It is our life, our lifestyle, our livelihood.
We have built, owned and managed a small bed & breakfast in Cluj-Napoca, for about four years. At some point, as we slowly started practicing voluntary simplicity and downshifting our consumption while growing awareness of our relationship to nature, owning and managing this business became inconsistent with our vision and ethics. So we have decided to close it down and move on. We have not been able to sell or rent the facilities, so there we were… two downshifters living in one room and eating seasonal local food, facing the prospect of living in a 360sqm home! That was when something moved inside us, there was this amazing opportunity to put our beliefs and views into practice. So we engaged in a beautiful journey of gift economy and social permaculture, as we re-opened the house. We now offer it to whomever needs it, as a gift, since it is a resource in surplus to us. Permaculture reminds us to take care of people, take care of the earth and to fairly share our surplus. We do not ask or expect anything in return for living in and using the house, we take care of people’s needs and we inspire the residents of the house to host each other, to care and nurture their social ties, to value resources, to expect nothing and to appreciate everything… It is a beautiful journey of questioning the social and cultural values that we have grown with and to shape them or even replace them with values that help us create a concrete utopia, where we remember how it feels to cooperate, to share, to be, to hug and to care.
When did you start?
We opened the house as it is today in August 2013. But our journey towards this concept started sometime in 2012. Maybe this is a way of experiencing the end of the Mayan calendar? Sometime it does feel as if we live in a completely new era 🙂
What changes do you want to create?
We want to help people see alternatives. We want to help them discover how powerful inner change can be. We want to get outside of the box everyday. We want to experiment with various models and modes of social innovation, from weekly sharing our experiences and emotions in community circles to belonging to rich trans-local communities. We want to feel everyday that we are part of nature, not above it, not beyond it. We want to create a culture that cherishes and values and learns from nature, so that we can see and create beautiful futures beyond the scare of the global crisis, with its financial meltdown, peak oil, global warming and social dissolution…
What’s next, what do expect? Any more details?
Just be and observe… And meet you all here 🙂
