Marc Delalonde: For an astro-ecology of the self
Photo: Myrto Katsimicha
This research takes place in a middle ground between rational thinking and spiritual language. There, ecology meets astrology and its rich vocabulary of analogies describing the human experience.
The starting point is a drive to enhance intuition in a Western society where the mind is dominated and sometimes overwhelmed by rationality. It is one thing to know rationally that we are deeply more-than-human selves involved in a complex network of relationships, but it is another to experience a gut feeling that everything is connected and you are one of the links. An excess of rationality can be toxic: reason and intuition are not opposed, but complementary components of a healthy mind, therefore balancing the two is a mind-regenerative act of mental –thus ecological– care.
Both ecology and astrology speak of the interconnectedness of everything in the world, of the infinitely small and infinitely big, of balance, cooperation, competition and symbiosis. The challenge is to find where they can meet halfway: a space where not everything you think and feel is filtered through reason, and where you don’t need to blindly believe either, but simply to play the game and see what happens.
The aim is to build a platform for bridging reason and intuition in an astro-ecology of the self, that is a practice of “self-relationing” or dialogue between you and yourself, where you choose the vocabulary to tell you own story of how you relate to the living world, using media as varied as artistic tools, astrological charts and oracles.
Astro-ecology workshop by Marc Delalonde, Paris, September 2022.
This research project started from a hunch: that intuition is key to repairing the broken bonds between humans and the rest of the living, and that as any other form of intelligence, it can be developed. That is what I set off to explore, through mixing different practices of mine in what I hoped would be a fruitful heuristic process.
For years, I have pushed forward narratives of symbiosis and explored ways to establish emotional links to the living through art. In using astrology as a research medium, I meant to go deeper and tap into intuition for relationing with both ourselves and the world. The goal was to find a middle ground between rational thinking and spiritual belief, a place where multiple truths coexist.
The practical framework I chose “For an astro-ecology of the self” consisted in developing a three-hour workshop where a small group of participants explore their relationship to the natural world through their astral chart, as a time-space of self-relationing fostering intuition within a more-than-human framework. The guidance I provided stemmed from my own practice and vision of (tropical/humanist) astrology as a philosophical tool and a language full of metaphors for existence. I do not think of astrology as a science nor as something deterministic or fatalistic, but rather as a toolbox to reflect on ourselves and grow.
I started with theoretical research into how astrology speaks of ecology. There are many analogies between the natural world and our human inner world, many scales of the living intertwining. The poetry, I find, isn’t so much in the idea of celestial masses influencing our organic existence, but in the way the human experience is represented and narrated through natural elements, bodies and cycles. This first phase of the research included building an astro-ecology database, interpreting each sign’s symbolic in nature, in terms of element, seasonal stage, natural landscape, but also each of the 12 archetypes’ relationship with the living world: how they would best connect to it and what is their potential ecological agency, both positive and negative. To conclude the theoretical part of the research, I met with French astrologer Mathilde Fachan whose approach seemed the most fitting to my own vision of astrology as a philosophical tool, that doesn’t explain but rather helps understand.
Having concluded the theoretical part of the research, I conducted three workshops -two in Paris at Buttes-Chaumont park and a final one on Filopappou hill in Αthens- in order to test and receive feedback on the format and the toolkit I put together as well as on the accessibility of the workshop and the overall experience of people without any prior knowledge of astrology. As a next step, I consider conducting the workshop again in naturalcultural frameworks in order to delve deeper into the subject, while developing its theoretical framework into the form of a publication.
