The Future is Rhizomatic

by Cinthe Lemmens

With Metaloog, a systemic knowledge network from Belgium and the Netherlands, we took part in Reclaiming Our Futures, an artistic–scientific festival organised by Radboud University, where scientists, artists and activists imagined the worlds we want to live in. Its motto, “The future is rhizomatic,” refers to roots like ginger that grow horizontally, through connection rather than hierarchy. For systemic practitioners, a familiar image.

We improvised through soundpainting and jazz, gave form to anger in a rage workshop, and facilitated a Warm Data Lab on “What is home in a changing world?”, sharing how Deleuze drew on Bateson for the concept of the rhizome.

A recurring thread was a critical look at AI: its consumption and pollution of drinking water, its capacity to manipulate knowledge, and the way it reinforces institutional racism through feedback loops. Because AI predicts what is most likely based on existing data, it tends to confirm what already is. The AI revolution is not inevitable; it calls for making room for what challenges power and what risks being marginalised.

Questions for our work

• Improvisation. What would it mean to see a therapy session as a jam session: co-creating in the moment, searching for attunement and playing together, while balancing method with the courage to not know?
• Feedback loops and power. We know from cybernetics that systems tend to reproduce themselves. When AI learns from existing data, whose stories become the norm, and whose disappear? What does this mean when AI enters our practices through note-taking tools, diagnostic support or therapy chatbots?
• Who decides? Technology is never neutral: it is embedded in political and economic structures. How can we, as a professional community, take a position on who owns client data, who profits, and who bears the ecological cost?
• Anger and resistance. Where is there room for anger in our training groups and therapy rooms? When do we calm it down too quickly, and when could it be a meaningful response to injustice?
• Rhizomatic organisations. How hierarchical are our own institutes, trainings and associations? Where could we grow more horizontally, and let knowledge from clients, students and other disciplines count equally?

The future is not a given; we co-create it, in therapy rooms as well as in society. Perhaps our most important contribution is to keep creating spaces where many voices meet without any single one taking over.

More: reclaimingourfutures.org