Small Things making Big Differences

This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Radical Visions, in Pari on May 23-30, 2025.

Can the gentle shifting of everyday gestures disturb the foundations of our economic system? In this interactive lecture, we explore how small acts, repeated with care and intention, can ripple outward—gently but persistently—altering the larger patterns of life. Inspired by David Peat’s notion of gentle action and the activity fractals of the Pari series Ancient Wisdom Transforming Tomorrow, we ask: what kinds of actions nourish life, and how do they begin to transform the systems we move within?

Central to our exploration is EXCHANGE, an ongoing artistic research and participatory performance that invites us to reimagine how we give and receive. Within EXCHANGE, participants engage in alternative forms of reciprocity—beyond the monetary—through gestures, stories, skills, and time. These seemingly simple exchanges become fractal seeds of change, unsettling dominant logics of value and ownership.

Together, through shared experience and personal reflection, we will enter into dialogue:
Can we shift the economy by changing how we relate, how we give, and how we receive?
And if so—what does it ask of us?

Godelieve Spaas is a visionary maker, performer, and Professor of Economy in Common. She initiated the research chair Art|Culture|Transition, where she investigates how artistic practice, and imagination can contribute to just and sustainable system change.

At the intersection of art, entrepreneurship, research, and education, she creates new stories and practices that help people and organizations engage meaningfully with transitions. Her core question: What kind of economy enables life to flourish—for all beings?

With over 30 years’ experience in social and sustainable entrepreneurship, and 15 years in academia, she understands economic transition as a cultural transformation.

Godelieve sees change as a form of weaving—requiring thinking and doing, knowing and unknowing, decisiveness and doubt, letting go and strengthening, leading and co-creating.