In 2007 I was on my way to building a successful gallery artist career in pop-surrealism after having graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California and exhibiting in places like Thinkspace, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and Roq La Rue under the name Myna Sonou - a rearrangement of the word anonymous as I was heavily influenced by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle at the time, an anti-capitalist philosophy and the french Situationist movement of the 1960’s.

Very quickly, I became both underwhelmed and overwhelmed by the absence of community and the reality of polycrisis, a word I couldn’t name at the time which describes the compounding emergency points of social, economic, ecological, and political events in the world.

My daily grief for the collective (as extraction, incarceration, exploitation, pollution, oppression, etc.) led me into a series of existential moments that forever altered what motivates me.

Over the next several years I would take on odd jobs, mostly rejecting the traditional life script of success and went deeply into research and world-building around how I could use my creative skills in a way which a politician or scientist might not have access to. My creative capacities expanded into knowledge and skill sets I had no real desire to market.

By 2016 I published the Regenerative Footprint site as a distillation of what I had researched over the years and knew was possible based on ecological theory and indigenous praxis. The term “regenerative” itself was extracted out of indigenous land management science without attribution to origin.

My ideas in that framework were about the excavation of the possibility that indigenous land management was never intended to be separated from their living culture.

Today, I am using the findings of that framework and research and composting it into collaborative action here.