The Inset Day
Dancehouse Carbon Insetting with VINC, Friends of Bats, and Kai Lane
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From The Green Bee, February 2022 with Grey Dear and Rebecca Jensen. Photo by Matt Krumins.
> PLEASE NOTE: this event has been rescheduled to Sunday 16 August due to torrential rain forecasts
The Inset Day
— Dancehouse Carbon Insetting with VINC, Friends of Bats, and Kai Lane
A Climate For Art (ACFA) and Dancehouse invite you to participate in a special pilot event to discuss and begin “carbon insetting” Dancehouse annual carbon emissions.
A small group from Dancehouse comprising artists, board, staff, collaborators, and fans, will meet to begin a creative, community, and cultural response to carbon management.
Starting with discussion and provocation by Grey Dear, we will then move on to a morning of planting in the VINC seed orchard and nearby areas along the Birrarung for bat habitat. Then, proud Yorta Yorta and Barapa Barapa man Kai Lane will then take us for a walk through the VINC wetlands sharing cultural knowledge, history and uses of indigenous plants through story.
What you need to know
Dress warmly and comfortably, expect planting and walking
Waterproof shoes essential
The event itinerary will adapt to inclement weather but still proceed
Catering provided
Travel and accessibility disbursements are available to participants
@vinc_nursery @friends_of_bats_and_bushcare @AClimateForArt @dancehouse.melb
What is Carbon Insetting?
Carbon Insetting is a growing practice of organisations investing in nature-based solutions and strong, direct environmental investment or action within their value chain in recognition of their carbon emissions.
This is an exciting alternative to Carbon Offsetting where companies utilise and invest in carbon credits, carbon markets, and sometimes dubious schemes outside of our local communities.
ACFA members, including Dancehouse, have been discussing and exploring how insetting might be undertaken by arts and cultural organisations in Australia, growing relationships and contributing to the First Nations land they work upon and are in connection with.
Dancehouse are contributing financial resources to support this event. If successful, Dancehouse will invest resources to Carbon Inset our annual emissions.
For information on Dancehouse’s Carbon Emissions, see page 107 of our 2025 Annual Report
More Information and Reading on Carbon Insetting
https://instituteofsustainabilitystudies.com/insights/lexicon/what-is-carbon-insetting/
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/03/carbon-insetting-vs-offsetting-an-explainer/
Fed Square and Creative Climate gratefully thanks its partners for making Planting possible: Creative Victoria, Creative Australia, Bupa, Melbourne Water and Burndap Birrarung burndap umarkoo collaboration, Now or Never, Dancehouse and Landcare.
By joining this event, you’re helping to care for Birrarung and its catchment, contributing to the vision of the Yarra Strategic Plan, connecting with Birrarung as a living entity and exploring what a reciprocal relationship with the river can look like.
Read More
Grey Dear has shared some inspiration ahead of The Inset Day. Enjoy reading, watching, and thinking ahead of our gettogether.
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WATCH: Excerpt of a Talk: Wayfinding out of modernity’s haze (5 mins)
by Yin Paradies, 2025
A short video, where Yin offers a generous and approachable introduction to deep listening and way finding practices from an Aboriginal perspective. These modes of embodied encounter and inter-connection are provided as a means to escape the inconspicously salient lens of Modernity.
Yin is an anarchist radical scholar and climate / ecological activist who is committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies. He seeks meaningful mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being and doing that are grounded in wisdom, humility, respect, generosity, down-shifted collective sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, frugality, direct democracy and radical localisation. Professor Yin Paradies is an Aboriginal-Asian-Anglo Australian of the Wakaya people from the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Further reading
– A longer talk by Yin, An Indigenous perspective on modernity and decolonial futures, hosted by Grant Berghan for the Te Tiriti Based Futures & Anti Racism conference in 2022.
– Academic paper by Liz Cameron, Indigenous ecological knowledge systems – Exploring sensory narratives, published in Ecological Management & Restoration, 2022.
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READ: Holding Space, Together by Alessandra Pomarico with Kū Kahakalau and Kate Morales
Published by Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection, an anthology published by Valiz in 2021, edited by Carolyn F. Strauss
Pomarico shares personal, poetic and pragmatic perspectives on coming together and operating collectively. Her words are generous and ever multiplicitous; folding wide-webs of principles and protocols for togethering into, and through, reflections from her decades-long career contributing to radical pedagogies through Ecoversities and international learning commons.
Alessandra Pomarico, PhD in Sociology is originally from Italy and based in NYC. She curates international and multidisciplinary artists’ residency programs at the intersection of arts, pedagogy, social issues, nano-politics, and the poetic of relationship in community building. Alessandra’s challenges have echoed in lasting alliances, some memorable failures, artistic projects that blend into life, and solid friendships.
Kū Kahakalau is a native Hawaiian educator, researcher, cultural practitioner, grassroots activist, songwriter, and expert in Hawaiian language, history, and culture. Dr. Kahakalau’s research has resulted in an indigenous research methodology called Māʻawe Pono as well as a pedagogy of aloha (love/compassion), which promotes the revitalization of Hawaiian language and culture, hands-on learning in the environment, community sustainability, food sovereignty, and Hawaiian self-determination in education and beyond. Her current focus is on developing EA Ecoversity, a Hawaiian-focused postsecondary program that is envisioned to become the first component of an independent Hawaiian system of education.
Kate Morales braids visual media, performance art, ritual, theater and play in the pursuit of collective eco-social healing. Founder (in 2022) of the Somatic Scribing Lab, a hub for politicized artists and facilitators, Kate also hosts and produces the Somatic Scribing Podcast; directs Playlab, an intergenerational embodied research ensemble; and is a writer and convener of transnational conversations about queer pedagogy.
Further reading
— ACFA has published a text which builds on this essay, Together, to gather, to get there by Dr. Jacina Leong.
— There are many great texts within Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection. Editor of this anthology, Carolyn F. Strauss, works with Slow Research Lab, who do exciting artistic, curatorial and paracademic work.
— The Ecoversities Alliance (mentioned by Pomarico in the essay) is an open, semi-structured international network of community-led initiatives “with the question on how education and learning can look like if it is in service of life/spiritualities/earth/
