Systems Dialogues with Ana Lucia Castaño Galvis

Ana Lucia Castaño Galvis is the co-founder of Arare Co., an organization that fosters regenerative development of primary production systems in Colombia and Mexico.

This conversation takes us from Ana Lucia’s Latin American system change lineage, to how kinetic sculptures might express systems change.

Rodrigo 

Hi, Ana Lucia. We would love to hear about your perspective. What is a system and when you think about what is a system, what metaphors do you normally refer to?

Ana Lucia

Okay. A system is a set of elements connected by relationships that create a functional whole. Maybe we could start there.

A metaphor I really love to use is the human body because we know our bodies. We know that we are made of parts and we know that we are more than just the parts. If you had some corpse that has no relationships or no elements connecting with each other, then there is something that is no longer like a human being. It becomes a corpse and it's something else. The living human body as a system is a great example of the importance of relationships between the elements within the system because you can't have a system unless there are relationships between the parts, and you cannot just put the pieces together and expect it to work. It's like this Frankenstein story with this mad scientist trying to connect different parts of different living things into one organism. That works for that wonderful story, the Frankenstein story, but in reality, it doesn't work like that.

One of them is, for example, our digestive system. It's made of parts. They are related through different flows of information and matter. There's blood flowing. There are nutrients flowing. There are different bacteria flowing, other microorganisms. And that in and of itself is a whole system. And how do we know this? Because sometimes, if a part of it fails, we can start to see how it affects the rest of the digestive system. So connections, relationships and nestedness are things that I consider to be a part of what defines a system. 

All my metaphors come from the living universe of our planet, because those are the most wonderful examples that I can think of. A car also works if you're more of a mechanistic person. If you had a car and you just put all the parts together, or you took them all apart, you no longer have a car. You have car parts. And you could have everything set together in place but if there are relationships that are missing, your car won't start. If there are flows that are being cut but you don't have energy or you don't have fuel or you have no connections between the parts, you just assemble them together like they were lego, they're not a car. They're just parts just put there. 

That's also a good way of understanding the system. It is a set of elements, but it's mostly to me, how those elements are related and connected. 

Rodrigo

Great. Thank you. Very illustrative. This could be the same answer, but I'm intrigued to see what you say. If you were to bring an object or a prompt to the conversation to help describe what a system is, what would it be?

Ana Lucia 

There are these kinetic art pieces or these tiny sculptures that move if you just push them a little bit. If you just take the connecting parts out then they don't work. I really like the ones that Theo Jansen makes. He creates these bug-like creatures that walk with the wind.

Rodrigo

Kinetic sculpture, poetry in motion. They look awesome actually, very organic, very meaningful type of inspiration and aesthetic. 

Ana Lucia 

Yes. This one is beautiful. It moves and it waves like that on the beach and it's very complex. But also, I've seen smaller prototypes that are very simple and they work in the same sense. You have just a collection of sticks and some thread, and if you create the correct relationship between them, you have a moving kinetic art piece, which is the system. 

And depending on how you connect them, you can create all different sorts of forms and possibilities that work in different ways that perform different functions. So you can have the same element, the same props, the sticks and the threads or maybe, I don't know, bolts or whatever. It's the same element, but the way you change the configuration of relationships between those elements changes the way the system is expressed in the end. 

I like that prop because it helps you to explore this idea further, which is central for me about the system being more than the sum of its parts, but also the importance of having a relational focus on the system and not just the particular elements that we can see or measure or think about. 

I also really like to play a lot with people. No props, just people. There are different systems games that I like to facilitate when trying to develop systems thinking - just people creating movement based on relationships, different types of relationships and configuring them in different ways to understand how they flow or they connect.

Rodrigo

Love it. So next one, how do you understand how systems change? 

Ana Lucia

It depends on what system we're talking about and it depends on what we are defining as change. Living systems change, just because. 

One aspect of our knowledge that explains how living systems change is evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory says that systems change because of changes in the environment that select for different variants, different forms of life that have more reproductive success. And that's just a totally emergent, random phenomena that we have no control over and has no particular purpose or direction. It just happens. 

But human systems, or socio-ecological systems, also change because there is agency in human beings to choose what we want for ourselves. It's not an absolute force. We can't choose everything. We are still being influenced by our environment, but we change also because we choose to change. 

Personal systems can change, creating different environments for ourselves, which brings back again the importance of the environment.

I believe that collective systems also change, thanks to the way we create culture, which is based fundamentally on our capacity to learn socially, the capacity to learn anywhere, anytime, from anyone. 

So if I think about how human systems change, I would say that they change through learning and it's not individual learning and it's not learning like you think it is. It's not a ‘schooled learning’ necessarily. It's a wider form of learning. It's like our intrinsic capacity and potential to learn, to put learning in service of something else and widen our perspective, broadening our capacity in any which way. 

Rodrigo

Got it. What are your lineages into this practice? What do you see as the divergent and different histories and lineages of systemic practices?

Ana Lucia

I have several. I think my most recent one would be regenerative thinking from the regenerative Carol Sanford School. They are very transparent as to where they come from, which involves indigenous knowledge but also permaculture, biomimicry and some pioneers of organic and regenerative agriculture.

Being an agroecologist, I do drink a lot from that base of people who think about living systems as an integrated form of looking at life, and of what we do as human beings in this planet.

Another one: Latin American thinkers and activists that have thought about us in relationship to the earth or territories or land. There's a Colombian thinker called Augusto Angel-Maya, who had a very interesting exploration of the relationships between humans and the environment. 

One person that I really, really, really admire, is a Colombian philosopher called Manuel Zapata Olivella, who really helped me understand relationships between identity, history, politics, especially in a Latin American context, understanding what was the role, for example, of African slaves shaping American freedom. 

There’s Humberto Maturana in Chile and the whole movement of decolonial thought in Latin America, who help Latin Americans to think about our relationship to the global north, the global south, to our economic systems, our meaning systems, our land management systems. All of this helps to really understand how we are the outcome of a series of relationships and how we can start thinking about ourselves through how we relate to different things, to knowledge, to land, to traditions and ancestral cultures.

And I think the furthest one in my story would be the Amazon people from Colombia and the indigenous peoples with whom I worked, who very early on influenced me to understand other types of relational views of life and who saw things that I didn't necessarily see back then and had the patience to explain it to me, the way they think about themselves, the way they think about their learning process, the way they think about their future. 

I came in contact with a very beautiful story that comes from the myth of creation of the Guambiano people in Cauca, for example, who associated the land, the territory, with time. 

It's everything you're not seeing as you walk. It's everything that's coming behind you. It's walking behind you and taking you and you can't see it. What you're seeing is actually your path, which contrasts a lot with our western narrative about how the future is something that is in front of us all the time in this linear view of time. 

So I think I'm an outcome of all of those schools of thought, lineages, knowledges. In Spanish, we say saberes, which is not conventional knowledge, but it's more like wisdom from different places.

Rodrigo 

Thank you for that. Beautiful. From my perspective, it's harder for western cultures and Anglo-Saxon heritage to pull apart that linear way of seeing the world. Now I want to ask, what are the best examples of stories or systemic transformation that you have?

Ana Lucia

I have found a lot of inspiration here in Mexico. There is this cooperative called Tosepan Titataniske, an indigenous cooperative in Puebla that I believe has transformed the systems of that region, both human and nonhuman. It has shaped their economy. It has shaped the way women are involved and participate in political and economic activity, thus creating new possibilities and new explorations of how women interact in their society, which were very traditional in terms of womanhood and their participation in society. 

Tosepan Titataniske have also created their own coin, so they have their own economy going on, supporting themselves and their families and their livelihood while also tending to their land, growing tourism, coffee. They have their own bank, which is also part of the cooperative, thus changing the way that they function internally but also the way they relate externally with different stakeholders in that territory, with the wider Mexican country and even international people who come and visit, like me, and who can be inspired by their story.

There are other examples in Colombia that I've seen in which very conflicted situations and territories were transformed after peace agreements with different paramilitaries and guerrilla groups. So in Colombia, in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, there is a beautiful project that involved paramilitaries who had given up their weapons, demobilized out of their paramilitary structure, and started working with the community in tourism and conservation practices.

This one doesn't happen at the scale of Tosepan Titataniske, but I believe it is systemic change because they changed their livelihoods, they changed cocaine production labs into just camps for people to visit, like heritage sites. People have migrated from violent criminal activity into re-signifying the places they inhabited. A cocaine lab is now a camp. You dismantle what you can, bring in something new, but the structure itself, it's the same. Which again, emphasizes my point about relationships being more than just the sum of their parts.

There's also an example in Colombia about our ex-FARC members who became bird watchers and have been invited to participate in tourism services for bird watching. These people have the most wonderful knowledge of the jungle and its birds - they know all the names, what they eat. They have changed their livelihoods, but are also contributing to protect and create more abundance in these territories that are in desperate need of care. 

Rodrigo

Thank you. Lovely. My last question is, how is your practice systemic? 

Ana Lucia

I'm currently working with my partners, seeking transformation in three nested systems. The bigger one, it's what we call territorial management systems, which are all the actors and forces that are involved in shaping how our landscapes are being transformed and being managed by humans. 

But we're mostly interested in the primary sector, the people who are involved directly in the living world. People who are producing wood, fibres, food, which all depend on ecosystem's wellbeing and ecosystem's nutrimental flows to be flowing. You need water and you need soil and you need biodiversity and you need certain species. You need pollinators. You need mammals to spread the seeds. Different things that we use as resources that depend on a healthy, thriving ecosystem. 

For companies, especially extractive companies to begin to understand that their business model ultimately depends on the wellbeing of their community and of the place, which brings me to the final maybe smaller nested system, which would be the businesses that are in charge of this work, in charge of producing our food, of producing the, for example, cotton fibres that end up in our clothes, producing the wood that ends up in all sorts of things and places. 

The businesses and the business people who are in the front line of the interface between community, place and larger economic systems and the way they think about what their work is and the way they think about where they should be investing and what are the sorts of things that they should be caring about. So we're seeking to create an opening for different industries to emerge, for different forms of taking care of both local economies but also local ecosystems and social ecosystems in particular. 

I have a friend who puts it beautifully - we are trying to initiate conversations that can bring us to a different understanding of what territorial management might mean for the primary sector, how to invest in the landscape, in what the people are bringing and the value that they're creating. 

One of the ways we make our practice more systemic is by actually thinking about our strategies in terms of these three nested systems. So it's never just about the business or about the particular place. It's also about, okay, what are the wider effects that the system has or that the business has? Who are their suppliers? Who do they supply to? What is the value system that is connected to this business and that is making it possible to be what it is? That involves consumers in other places, but also suppliers, but also the places where they extract value from. 

So one of the ways in which we try to make our practice more systemic is by engaging in this strategic view of nestedness and understanding different effects on different nested systems and trying to download information from the wider systems into the smaller ones so that we can try to map roots that can enable us to play with the things that are already in place. 

We also try to engage with people as a whole, to understand what sorts of learning and developmental processes have to be set in place and in motion in order for people to start asking themselves different questions, to start listening from a different point of view, to start paying attention to different things. And most importantly, to enable themselves to be somebody else and shift their culture entirely and change the way they talk to themselves and to other people. 

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