About NACH

NENA Arts and Culture Hub

OUR PURPOSE NACH is part of NENA (New Economy Network Australia), a network of organisations and individuals working to create an ecologically healthy and socially just society by transforming Australia’s economic system. In this spirit, and in response to the multi-faceted crises engulfing our world, NACH is an emergent network of artists, creatives, storytellers and culture change advocates exploring how to transition from the global capitalist culture based on extractivist logic to one based on relationist logic.

The dominant narrative of our extractivist economy is about consumer-driven growth in goods and services, with high levels of waste, negative environmental impacts and human control over nature. The new emergent relationist narrative focuses on sustainable systems-wide relationships, acknowledging the importance of community resilience and the need to reduce waste and negative environmental impacts in industrial production, agriculture, urbanisation, infrastructure and services.

It aligns with the relationist ethos of Australia’s cultural foundations in First Nations knowledge systems, encoded in the all-inclusive eco-spiritual framework of Caring for Country, which includes both humans and all of nature. OUR OPERATING PRINCIPLES Based on NENA’s five foundational principles, NACH will grow a network of co-created collaborative projects with like-minded groups and individuals that:

• Engage with, and profile local arts and culture projects that demonstrate ways of embedding a relationist-systems approach to artistic practice in our culture, which supports transformative adaptation to a changing world.

• Develop a range of self-funding projects that give expression to our purpose, helping the wider community understand the meaning, purpose and benefits of a relationist-systems logic in our culture • Provide an information ecosystem of communicative engagement with the core ideas shaping a culture based on a relationist, sustainable, systems ethos

• Provide ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can work as allies with Indigenous Australians in healing the deep wounds of Australia’s colonial history, in the spirit of the meaning of ‘makarrata’, the Yolngu word meaning ‘coming together after a struggle’

• Provide an arts and culture perspective for NENA’S Strategic Directions Group.