Vita-Socio-Anarco is the framework I use to guide my work, my relationships, and the architectures of space and time I try to shape. It’s a theory as well as a mode of being—continually refined in practice, recursively.
It’s composed of three interwoven commitments:
- Vita — to affirm and sustain life: biological, emotional, cognitive, ecological, cultural, and relational.
- Socio — to cultivate social relation, mutual regard, and the capacity for meaningful shared presence and dignity.
- Anarco — to resist domination and asymmetrical hierarchy—not with slogans, or only with more-or-less protest, but through structure, process, and attention.
This framework grounds everything from my safe-and-brave-space life drawing sessions to my digital systems work: design, facilitation, code, administration. It’s a call to integrity in form, ethics in attention, and openness in encounter. It doesn’t demand agreement—it asks for presence.
Yes, it may walk and quack a bit like a manifesto—but really, it’s closer to an orientation device. A kind of poetic signage, to myself as much as for anyone else. Like the hypercube diagram etched beneath the tesseract-octagram on my studio door: “Vita-Socio-Anarco: et videre ostium vitreum – experiri non laedere.”
Which, as I like to tell new visitors, means exactly what it says. And also: “There is a glass door here. Please don’t walk into it.”