So one guy (Jean-Louis) is a medical doctor with a passion for trusting people and their local response, we’ve got a girl (Rani) who is a film and theater director, a guy (Benjamin) who’s a hybrid between a director, a photographer and a producer, another girl (Celicia) who’s in love with authentic human connections poetry and collective intelligence, a guy (Aimé) who is a fan of big-impact campaigns and into philosophy and anthropology, another girl (Alessia) who is super creative and loves projects aimed at making a difference. They get together to make a one-of-a-kind fully Belgian podcast. They’re very different, which makes them super complementary on the one hand, and sometimes impossible to work together on the other. They try, sometimes fail, and they grow along the way. They practice what they preach, and get together for real conversations in deep listening circle mode. What they create is bigger than the sum of their parts. And that makes them happy :)
Jean-Louis is 72 years old, and has 13 grand-children. If his whole life as a public health doctor on all five continents has taught him anything it is that if you encourage people to listen to each other deeply, dream and join hands to act together, there is no challenge they cannot overcome. Including a health threat. So when covid broke out and he saw the way his country and much of the world was proposing to deal with it- with top-down injunctions and very little public conversation- it made him angry. It made him want to act. To share his trust in local responses and his dream of what our world would look like if people, communities and organizations joined hands to act together from a place of shared humanity, and thus shared responsibility. That trust doesn’t come out of he blue, but from experience with the Constellation. He wanted to speak with young people as they are the actors and guardians of what is right for today, to shape their tomorrow.
Jean-Louis’s initial spark encountered the energy of Kimia Studio’s team. Somewhere in Schaerbeek,the small studio shared the same dream : "what if the content we produce could lead to social change ?". Musicians, artists, sound engineers and directors working together with one goal : quality content for qualitative change. Launched in 2019, the studio specializes in podcast & photography and seeks to involve citizens in the creation, but also in the use of the projects made. We think of them as situations of encounter between a content and the public. From this encounter springs the spark of change The only condition to set up a project with us is the will to accompany a social transformation, to decentralize the citizen's view on a subject. A high impact is possible if the project is created by people who share the studio's values and are recognized for their skills in their fields. This is why we only work with professionals recognized in their fields. Finally, we like this quote: "It's important for people, especially people who are more aware of what's going on, that they don't fall into the more negative theories, that governments, that corporations have kidnapped humanity actually. There is a lot of truth in that, but if we get stuck in that, we are participating in that negativity. It's important not to become what you're fighting, that is, you can't change this system by doing the same thing that this system has done. If we become as negative as they are, and we fight them in this way, we end up in the same point. It doesn't help, you have to stay positive, staying aware of what's going on without ignoring it. You have to have this joy of living, this openness, this positivity, because negativity destroys itself. All we have to do is build the world we want to see in our future." Nassim Haramein
Because diving into the unknown is better than doing nothing men and women, young and old, grandfathers and mothers, lawyers, school teachers, journalists, people from all walks of life living in different countries came together to support one man’s crazy idea: that one way through the chaos we are experiencing right now was to sit down, talk to each other deeply, from the heart, and record our conversations so that they may inspire others. This group of women and men were the first “trailblazers” of this adventure. Courageously carving new paths in uncharted territory, they decided to support a budding project with no clear view of what the final object would be nor of how it would be used.
The project is now CIRCLO: daring to listen, a one-of-a-kind bilingual podcast crafted as a tool to encourage deep listening and spark open-hearted conversations.