JungleHouse Roots

So how did it all start? How did you get the idea to make a space like the JungleHouse?

It’s a tale I’ve told around tables and mountains and firepits and under stars. Part of the essence of my appreciation for this type of transitory state of story, is the special kind of magic that comes from allowing Story to unveil itself. Dream Casting Spell Wording

And still, it's worth putting this all down again, because why not? It is also perhaps the Nature of Story itself, willing to be winged words bound to peoples' perceptive powers in order to persevere and preserve itself. To live among the legend stories that survive technologies and disasters. Into the culture code as a mutable entity. A moment frozen in time, a treasure passed down from generation to next

The Roots of the JungleHouse are entangled all across South Africa, with a few key locals and a stunning set of satellite characters who descended and collected, collectivizing and collaborating. The point in time was 2011 - the backwash of the 2008 Global Scam Market Crash, post hysteria hype and hopes dashed “(2010)-World-Cup South Africa”. Mid Arab Spring. Occupy was in its mushroom phase, with chapters appearing across regions, organic nodes of a decentralized network. The genesis block had been printed.

2011 of course, was also the year the Climate Summit Circus (the COP17 Edition) rolled onto Durban streets. It was seismic moment for many people, those visiting and especially a bunch of locals who stepped up and stepped forward. I guess every COP has its moments. Every convergence has its heroes, right? These heroes were the Fools.

Steve was the real visionary who saw it all coming together. I was the contact agent who has connections to large sections of creative culture. The deal was struck in the Tsitsikamma Nature Reserve in the coastal indigenous forest. The agreement was to meet back in Durban, our shared hometown and do something epic. Steve was back on the Indian Ocean way before me and had started to set up many of the side projects that was essentially an ecosystem support system. This was an intersectional, inter-generational and inter-dimensional support system that spoke to delegation members, Insiders, Outsiders, as well as a motley crew of media folk, artists, campaigners, direct actioneers and on-the-ground organizers.

Importantly, this temporal community had a strong local:visitor ratio. This ratio is something the JungleHouse aims to keep biased to contemporary local voices, movements and issues.

I was up in Baviaanskloof for most of 2011, volunteering at an experimental Ecosystem Restoration school/community testing out the U-Theory (Otto Scharmer). By the time I got to Durban, there was a lot already going on

Through the two weeks of COP17, we collectively produced:

A bunch of art. A bundle of Actions

The Media Lab. The daily musical performances at the Peoples’ Space

The Gallery. The Artspace

The Quiet Dome. The Occupy Camp

The General Assemblies. The 1%Clowns

The Human Mic. Homemade Soundtrack

The Occupy Crew. The DurbanKnights

The DurbanKnights was a temporary collective of artists, media folk, actors, drivers, activists and creative collectives. Together we helped scramble resources together, painted a few public murals, created digital content, made banners and media and generally be up and learning and sharing with the International Artists and Actors carving a People’s narrative through the thicket that is COPLand.

It was a momentous ask and task. We also ran two blogs, made a bunch of and still had time to dress as clowns as a feature appearance at actions and manifestations. And in the midst of all of this, there was the house that formed around the idea of turning a multi-room colonial style house into a pop-up hostel to provide cheap accommodation as well as meeting space and social space. To unwind or organize

To be clear though, we saw the house as a mere by-product to support the really epic stuff we’d been up to. We didn't even have a name for the place, so the name was named by the early bunch of people that came through. The Canadian Youth Delegation along with a few other delegations arrived early to attend the COY as well as COP, and as I recall they called it the JungleMansion — which it really was. Giant trees, resident monkey troupe. Grass to picnic or camp on. And multiple rooms — for sleeping. For meetings. Private Spaces mixed with communal

And at the end of it all, hardly anyone had used the super-fast internet at the IndyMedia Lab. The clowns had had their moment of fame in front of the cameras and were now a forgotten flame. And the JungleMansion was the one thing that every kept congratulating us and commenting on. It was kind of ironic, and also so clear

And that was how the Junglehouse began. Or at least, it was the first model of creating these community support spaces specifically for the Climate Justice movement (mostly) at the Climate Summits. An organic, emergent, natural central hub for people to organize from and use as a retreat space (it really was a lush large garden)

On the 2nd Sunday, the day that the COP circus was closing shop, as the JungleHouse was starting to wind down, there was, at some point, an eclipse. Lovia and myself did a little ceremony while the eclipse was happening to see if the idea of making a House Space in Rio the following year for the Rio+20 Earth Summit. We’d set our intentions under the averted gaze of the Moon, and we were both curious to see how it would all turn out. Turn out it did!

And yet, a deeper scan reveals the layers beneath and within. Where the roots end and the microbial forces interlink in unseen ways. The JungleMansion was, in fact, the second ‘Third Space’ I’d had crafted into existence. There was also KwaSuka and jUNe Project

2008 was another of those years that autographed it’s name onto place and time, skin and sin. My life was being diverted towards a destiny of sorts, and I found myself starting my set of collectives. They could have, in fact been better suited as disposable collectives, back then though longevity seemed to be the aim of the game. And using reductive centralized governance patterns. Yet, this was how I broke into this world of collectives and spacemaking

The collective was C.C.C. — the Circle Center Collective. Artists, thinkers, poets, makers and groovers, moved to action and building around my unformed uninformed ideas around collectivizing. We were local partners of a youth hip-hop alliance advocacy group, and as part of our dealings, we agreed to host the team on a tour of the city post-Summit, and in exchange we got our own venue for a week. This was the KwaSuka Theatre, and for that week, it became an organizing spot, a performance space and a cultural melting pot, driven by the need for us, as youth local and visiting, to have a space that was not controlled or contrived. A third space where new power relations could emerge and deep relationship could blossom

And that was my introduction to global governance, making collectives, hosting these unofficial breakaway spaces and ultimately was the first execution of what would emerge as multiple spaces at conferences, summits, resistance actions and art interventions.

Deep are the roots

Fruit of truths

And still

Waters run deep

In the depths of the mental vaults, subterranean tendrils search and seek

The germination point

The termination point

The first plan I made around a space was a proposal I submitted to Lunch Media — a sister company of our own Infectious Agents media agency — an action plan to convert a double story house into a culture hub and community center. The project was codenamed 325, the year was 2005/6 I guess

This was a social experiment testing out theories around Memetic theory and how it related to marketing ideas and brands. 325 was a purely theoretical brand, a brand with no product. We used to test our engagement techniques and memetic replication. The project was shelved just before the 325 house was meant to appear. As transient as this space was, existing merely in words and in agreement, I’m pretty sure this was the first time I considered curating spaces to achieve specific outcomes. The substrata that fed the soil that would yield a decade of Spaces