What Is a Cultural Intervention — and Why It May Be a Potent Antidote to the State of the World Today?
- Chichi Amatodo
- 4 days ago
- 31 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
What is a cultural intervention? It is not a performance, even when it happens on a stage. A cultural intervention is what happens when the person on stage singing about love goes home and isn't an asshole to their partner. Put it like this: imagine going to your doctor for advice on living a healthy life, and discovering halfway through the appointment that he smokes forty a day and hasn't seen a vegetable since 1984. That is the gap between a performance and a cultural intervention. A performance tells you how things should be. A cultural intervention is built by people who are actually trying to live that way and create structural change that brings society along.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Before Capitalism Captured the Arts
Artists Who Refused the Bargain
What Makes a Cultural Intervention
The Pop-Up Tribe — and Why the Children Are at the Centre
So — Can a Performance or a Song Alone Be a Cultural Intervention?
What a TLC Performance Actually Is, — and Why It Is Not Just a Gig
Track Your Woman's Bleed — The Method Made Fully Visible
Collaboration with PRALER, Roots to Repair and Planet Repair
Join the Living Revolution
Bibliography
It is — real, practical things: ensuring a mother has proper support in the 'gig', then going further — feeding mothers organic food, investing in support groups, advocating for the laws and funding that make that support a right, not a gift, because the reality is that parents are bringing up the future of humanity, and it's going to take more than singing about it to ensure the next generations don't turn into Epstein. The difference between music that soothes and music that intervenes is that one wakes you up and gives you the tools and pathways to act. That action creates the societal and planet repairs the world needs. As the saying goes — art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to smash it into pieces. [11] TLC has picked up the hammer…
This is the mission The Loving Collaborative has been attempting — and humbly accomplishing, with a bit of trial and error — for over a decade. Through various forms of the arts, celebration of rites of passage, mutual aid, permaculture, activism, health and many other things across three continents, TLC has been developing a method of cultural intervention: a way of making art that is the change society and the planet needs — powerful enough to move from a song hummed by one man around a sacred fire, to a whole valley rising to celebrate women's wombs — recording together, gathering in ceremony, building with their own hands a womb altar constructed for generations yet unborn — and now that same song & it’s education will be reaching many across the world, and hopefully creating a funding stream that flows directly into the hands of the movements doing the repair work our planet needs.
This post is about what a cultural intervention actually is, why it may be a potent antidote at a time when the sentient human experience and human rights are being sabotaged at every corner — and how TLC's method has been evolving, project by project, into its fullest expression yet: one that not only creates cultural change and planet repairs, but is also building an ethical economic model to sustain the people and places involved.
Before Capitalism Captured the Arts
To understand what a cultural intervention is, it helps to understand what happened to art when it stopped being one.
For most of human history — the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of years our species has existed — art was not entertainment. It was not an industry. It was not a product. Art was how communities processed grief, transmitted wisdom across generations, celebrated the passages of life, maintained their bonds under pressure, and made sense of what it meant to be alive. Song was ceremony. Dance was medicine. Storytelling was how a people understood who they were.
Then something changed. The Industrial Revolution — and the capitalist logic it unleashed — gradually transformed the relationship between people and their culture. Art became a commodity. Artists became entertainers. Audiences became consumers. Folklore, which by its nature belongs to everyone because it was made by everyone, began to be replaced by 'content' owned by brands who made it into pretty things and, worse still, sold back to those who needed real folklore in their lives. Brands are killing folkloric wisdom doing this — fast fashion, polluting and culturally appropriating — when instead they could be honouring the original cultures by investing in their practices: natural dyes, weaving, and everything that keeps those traditions thriving, because folklore is kept alive by all who practise it.
This was not an accident. Elites have always understood the power of the arts. The Roman strategy was explicit: panem et circenses — bread and circuses. Give the people enough entertainment to release the pressure of their discontent, and they will not revolt. The manipulation of turning art into entertainment is that it keeps the emotional power of art intact while severing its connection to action. You can be moved. You simply don't move. Add ‘divide and conquer’ into the equation, and there you have it, a recipe for societal moral disaster.
“The time of us and them is coming to an end”
Line from TLC song 'The Living Revolution'
The Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter argued as far back as 1942 that capitalism was inherently unable to survive as a permanent system — that its own internal contradictions would eventually make it unworkable. [1] And historian Sven Beckert, writing from Harvard, puts it simply: capitalism has a beginning — which means it is not natural, not inevitable, and not permanent. [2] So let's consider solutions to the current economic model. And FYI, Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum has officially listed 'anti-capitalism', i.e. a criticism of capitalism, as an indicator of domestic terrorism — meaning this very paragraph could flag this article on an FBI watchlist. Oh dear, dropped a mind bomb did I?… [12]
We are living in the moment when those contradictions are visible to everyone. Mass species extinction. Grotesque inequality. The fragmentation of community. The epidemic of loneliness and suicide. The crisis of masculinity. The erasure of women's history and wisdom. None of this is how it has to be. And the artists who have always known this — who refused the bargain of entertainment and chose intervention instead — point the way to what is possible.
Artists Who Refused the Bargain
History's most powerful cultural interventions have come from artists who understood that their work was not separate from the world's suffering — it was a response to it, a weapon against it, and a vision beyond it.
Nina Simone understood this with bone-deep clarity. At the height of the US Civil Rights Movement, when the fight for Black liberation reached its most desperate pitch, she did not perform around the edges of history. She put her entire being into it. As she put it, an artist's duty is to reflect the times — and at a moment when every day felt like a matter of survival, she believed you simply could not help but be involved. [3]
Her song Mississippi Goddam, written three months after the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four children, was banned across the Southern US states. It was suppressed. It was ultimately vindicated as one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century. The art did not change laws on its own. But it gave the movement its heartbeat, its courage, and its voice.
In AbyaYala, Mercedes Sosa — known as La Voz de Latinoamérica, the Voice of Latin America — wove the same thread through the Nueva Canción movement: folk music fused with political consciousness, rooted in the land and the people who worked it. She sang in defiance of Argentina's military dictatorship, which 'disappeared' [murdered] over 30,000 leftists and social activists. In 1979, she was arrested on stage in La Plata, her audience detained, and a military officer publicly searched her body to humiliate her. She was forced into exile. She kept singing. After the junta crumbled, she returned to Argentina and performed to thousands. And despite everything she had been put through, she had the great vision and the honourable heart to say:
"Todos nosotros — seamos artistas o militares — debemos colaborar si queremos mantener la democracia en pie y caminando."
"All of us — whether we are artists or military — must collaborate if we are to keep democracy on its feet and walking."
Mercedes Sosa, c. 1982–1984, as published in Plough magazine.[4a]
All of us. Not some of us. Not the artists alone, not the activists alone. Everyone — every skill, every passion, every person willing to show up — is a piece of what keeps the world moving toward something kinder.
Caetano Veloso, the Brazilian musician and founder of the Tropicália movement, was imprisoned and exiled by the military dictatorship in Brazil for using art to resist cultural and political repression. His work insisted that music could hold contradictions, provoke thought, and refuse simple answers — and that this refusal was itself an act of resistance.
"Cynicism and even pessimism free you from responsibility."
He chose optimism instead — believing art could help people feel responsible for their future and the future of their society. And so he wrote Alegria, Alegria deliberately upbeat about freedom while a military dictatorship engulfed Brazil, provoking a generation to keep living and keep resisting. [10]
Bad Bunny's 2026 Super Bowl halftime show — watched by 135 million people, performed entirely in Spanish, the first time in the event's history — was a direct act of anti-colonial defiance at the most-watched cultural moment in North American television. Surrounded by flags from across the Americas, he used his platform to criticise US colonialism in Puerto Rico and honour the working-class diaspora. "This is for my people, my culture, and our history," he said in his statement ahead of the performance. [5] Trump called the performance "an affront to the greatness of [North] America." The Secretary of Homeland Security suggested ICE agents would be "all over" the event. Bad Bunny performed anyway.
And yet — in the weeks following, Bad Bunny collaborated with Zara on a 150-piece clothing line, giving the world's largest fast fashion brand — linked to documented labour and human rights violations in its global supply chain [6] — access to the cultural capital he had just spent years building. We are not here to cancel Bad Bunny. We adore Bad Bunny. But we are here to point out that even the most genuinely revolutionary artists can find themselves, somehow, holding a Zara carrier bag...
Should Art hold commercial value when the person who made it caused serious harm?
ChiChi and Drew of TLC call this the Picasso Effect. Pablo Picasso — celebrated as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century — was, by all credible accounts, a man who treated the women in his life as raw material. He was a serial abuser, a misogynist, and a cultural appropriator whose paintings continue to sell for tens of millions at auction, because apparently "genius" is considered a sufficient alibi. [7]
But should it be? TLC (and other decent human beings) questions this. Should art hold commercial value when the person who made it caused serious harm — whether personal abuse, exploitation, or alignment with forces of oppression? Should an artist be vindicated by the beauty of what they put on canvas if the life they lived was a cruelty to those around them? Surely the art and the life give value to each other — a deeper inspiration, a truer genius, one that comes from actually being a decent human being.
Drew calls this "life art." The idea that the most extraordinary canvas an artist works on is their own life — how they show up for their partner, their children, their community, the earth beneath their feet. In which case, the commercial value of any artwork should reflect the quality of that life art — not the many zeros that follow a Picasso at auction. Because otherwise, what we are doing is paying a fortune to be inspired by a man who was, to put it plainly, a spectacular dickhead. And that, surely, is not the revolution anyone had in mind.
What Makes a Cultural Intervention
This is where The Loving Collaborative's work becomes distinct.
TLC was founded by ChiChi and Drew on a principle that sounds simple and is, in practice, extraordinarily demanding — and anyone who has worked with TLC knows that an experience with them comes with a 'life art' upgrade included, whether you asked for one or not. The principle is this: the art must be the change in its very creation and in who is creating it — not just about the change. You cannot sing about mutual aid while operating extractively. You cannot run a workshop for men about the sacred masculine without addressing the toxic Manosphere and all the embarrassing gifts it gives to the world on behalf of men. Because if the mother of your children is not only giving birth and raising them but also scrubbing the bathroom because you are apparently too much of a man to locate a sponge, then the sacred masculine is going to need a slightly longer workshop. And you cannot create ceremony around the sacred feminine if the people involved haven't treated the women around them with the kind of honour that would have a man knighted at the Round Table.
Because sometimes we are blockaded by thinking something is impossible — until we see another achieve it. We know the phenomenon: a record stands for years, considered the absolute limit of human capability, then one person breaks it — and suddenly everyone can. Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile on 6th May 1954. Within 46 days, another runner broke it. The barrier wasn't physical. It was belief. Cultural and societal shifts — and the structural power changes that follow — work the same way. Women's right to vote, and to exist in law as something other than property. The abolition of the slave trade and the long fight for equal human rights. Indigenous peoples fighting right now to defend their land. These societal norms seemed impossible to shift — until they did. And behind each of those shifts were remarkable people who were the change, demanded the change, and fought for it. If Dr Martin Luther King had owned a slave, what weight would his words have held? None. So why do we not apply the same scrutiny to artists who conduct their personal lives incongruously to what they sing or paint? We need examples. We need to know it is possible.
This is where ChiChi's bullshit radar comes in. If someone is on stage, leading a community, or running a project — look at the quality of the relationships in their life. Their partner. Their ex-partners. Their children. Are they happy? Are they safe? Or is that person leaving a trail of misery behind them while singing about love? Being discerning is part of how we do better, and create a cultural intervention rather than a nice performance.
And like being a parent — you cannot fake it. Children learn by what you action, not by what you tell them. If you tell them to be kind to nature, but they see you take a tree down with no care — they see no care. We must be the example in our actions. And this too is what fuels a performance into a cultural intervention: it is led by people living the proof, or at least trying to :)
A cultural intervention performance reminds us of what is possible, and where the real power for change truly dwells — within all of us, weaving life together, joining forces. The parents, the lawyers, the nutritionists, the bathroom tilers and everything in between. In ancient times it was drums and bugles that called in the troops — a song now, in these times, can be a call to all those who resonate with its statement. They may come in all shapes and forms, but they are all needed to gain momentum, and maintain the stamina and diversity required to be robust enough to shift the societal norms that do not serve kindness.
TLC has held itself and the communities and people involved accountable to a Life Art path — constantly learning, adapting and collaborating, with a lot of love and the occasional humbling mistake along the way — no one is perfect, luckily — and every person, and their passion and skills, is a piece of a puzzle that helps complete the picture of how to birth a kinder paradigm.
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."
— Maya Angelou
Across more than a decade of work on three continents, TLC's cultural interventions share five consistent qualities — regardless of whether the medium is dance, music, visual art, or ceremony:
The art form is chosen for its social medicine, not its aesthetic. Tango, because it erases class, age, language, and political division at heartbeat-to-heartbeat level — a dance that in the milongas of Buenos Aires welcomes all ages, all walks of life, cheek to cheek. Murals, because they make a statement to the community that needs to be heard, and can get everyone involved in a way that isn't threatening but fun for all — from the littlest toddler all the way to the granny. Song, because it carries what words alone cannot: the felt sense of truth that bypasses the defended mind and lands in the body.
The process mirrors the values it expresses. In 2012, commissioned by Mumford & Sons to decorate a piano for Hyde Park Festival, TLC didn't make something pretty to be admired from a distance. They made a piano dedicated to the human hand — moulded hands swimming across its surface — and then, in what can only be described as either a beautifully democratic gesture or a very brave one, gave the piano's hands crayons and let 100,000 festival-goers go at it. The piano arrived at the festival pristine and left covered in messages: protests of injustice, declarations of love, and, obviously, a couple of boobies and willies in all their shape and form. It became a reflection of its people. The process was the art.
It would take Drew and ChiChi a little longer to fully join the dots on the environmental and lack of social impact of the work they were doing — even with the best of intentions. Drew had been selected as part of the 'Best of British Urban Art' and exhibited alongside Banksy at the Saatchi Gallery — both ChiChi and Drew stepped out of the art industry quite dramatically, but that's a story for another time. Let's just say it became clear it was a farce, and it has since come out that the Saatchi name carries its own violence. Which is the kind of thing that happens when you understand the concept of being eco-friendly and socially conscious in theory but are still, if we're honest, quite naive in practice. That lesson came later, and came hard, when TLC moved to South America and saw firsthand the social and ecological damage that the consumption habits and colonisation of the northern hemisphere were wreaking on the global south.
In Bahia, Brazil, working alongside the marine turtle rescue centre Projecto Tamar, TLC used social critical design techniques — and through making a collaborative mural with local children, drawing on beauty theory and SCD thinking, found solutions that really served the community in many ways, from the plastic waste reduction to creative expression of the children, and tackling harmful creationism beliefs that led to domestic violence issues.
In the farmlands of Mendoza, Argentina — where the very blueberries and wine sitting cheerfully on European supermarket shelves are picked by workers living in conditions of modern slavery, which is worth sitting with for a moment next time you reach for the little blue berry delights — TLC used art to help farmworkers confront their anxiety and shyness of picking up a pen, and channel their considerable courage into an artwork that then led to an NGO being able to teach them to read and write and learn what their human rights were. Art as access. Art as dignity.
The Eco-Warrior Sacha wrote a song that grew out of an edible forest, a community of revolutionaries, rapping street kids, and bonfires under the full moon.
At Buddhafields Festival 2025, TLC invited Palestinian lawyer and singer Jute to open their set — a woman of extraordinary courage who had shown the full breadth of her heart and grief at a peace circle TLC organised for Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers. Jute's voice poignantly echoed the resilience of her soul, expressing what as humans we all feel, beyond the borders and politics. From the stage, ChiChi dedicated the next song to Jute and to everyone in the room who understood the immensity of what is happening in Palestine right now — because some pain, she said, is beyond words, beyond intellect or comprehension. The song that followed was Dear Admiral, I'm From the Country You Bombed — written by ChiChi to process the compromising position imposed on her by finding herself under the same roof as the admiral of the British Navy, who fought in the Falklands War, in her English partner's family home.
Dear Admiral, I’m from the Country you Bombed Lyrics
1.
was it all worth it
did it seem so important at the time
was it 100% worth it
i wonder a few decades on did it matter who was right and wronged
2.
was it truly worth it
all those lives killed
mothers giving birth to canon fodder on both sides
give orders take orders take lives yes sir
3.
it seems the beginning of humanity’s demise
think, was it all worth it
4.
boys who did not choose to lose their lives
patriots killing victims of genocide
5.
was it all worth it
do you have nightmares
what memories of blood beset your mind
6.
with songs written of peace
do you feel awkward
does it just seem
it was just so important at the time
7.
do your medals give you pride
having destroyed entire lives
do you feel anything at all
8.
it seems so insignificant
as you stroll through the garden
a man who was a boy a best friend a best man
9
how does it feel to banter about a county you bombed
more cake sir? yes please
pleasant drive? certainly
happy birthday old boy
10.
was it all worth it
did it seem so important at the time
was it all worth it
did it seem just so important at the time.
A process that, through art, led to part of the undoing needed for those of us touched by the injustice of the world. This song has helped many people find the tears, find the heart and the courage to face what needs to be addressed.
The song was performed by Drew and Sebi of TLC: two men from countries that in the 1980s would have been pitted against each other as enemies in that very war, now standing on the same stage, adoring each other, singing about it together. That, ChiChi told the audience — and Jute — is the proof that peace is always possible and will prevail. No one really wants to be an asshole, humans are innately kind, even if we forget from time to time.
This is where we can all experience how the arts allow the soul to be witnessed, to be expressed, to begin to put itself back together. In such a materialistic era, it is easy to forget that this is the purpose of the arts — it is not just pretty and decorative. It is our greatest human sentient experience. It is also how we bond, and maintain those bonds when the harder times hit and our relationships are challenged. The arts are an integral part of how we process, somatically release what holds us captive, and begin to find our freedom — and find each other as human hearts, rather than the bullshit we have been fed and forced into that divides us.
The Pop-Up Tribe — and Why the Children Are at the Centre
We are a social species that has been orphaned from the tribe. Like organs of a body separated from each other, we are missing the parts that complete us — the mothers, fathers, cousins, aunties and uncles, allo-parents, grandparents. We are not meant to raise our children alone, or to be without elders we admire and trust. [14] The TLC set tries to create a temporary restoration of what we have lost — a reminder of what is possible, and ChiChi encourages the audience to find it again, there and then.
The parents in that space are not just audience members. They are, literally, nurturing the future of humanity — and they need every ounce of support they can get, so that the next generation is raised from a place of thriving abundance rather than exhaustion, isolation and coping strategies. This is why TLC collaborated with Mamma Village Glastonbury and a food-growing permaculture project to gift organic vegetables to mothers — rich or poor — to thank them for nurturing the future of humanity. TLC also recorded a song around a campfire, sung by the volunteers at the food-growing project, for the unborn babies they were feeding. That song raises funds for the artists and for Mamma Village.
And the children — in the performances, the rehearsals, and TLC life? They are not spectators either. They are at the centre. Sometimes — when they want to, and usually they insist — they take the stage themselves. Ayun, ChiChi and Drew's son, wrote these words at five years old and sang them on the same set at the Buddhafields mainstage:
"There's a spirit in my heart, There's a spirit in the mountains, There's a spirit in the fire, There's a spirit in the river."
If you need proof that the next generation already knows what it's doing — there it is. And they are another reason artists must lead by example to accomplish possibly the most important part of a cultural intervention: it shapes the fluency of a child's understanding of the world, and who they will grow up to be.
Child development psychology has known for decades what ancient cultures never forgot: children learn primarily through watching and imitating the adults around them. Performers, even if they are strangers, are part of the village that influences a child's development — people on a stage carry particular psychological weight, especially when a child experiences them live, in the room, close enough to feel real. What lands in a child's nervous system in those moments is not just entertainment. It is evidence of what people are. So if what they are witnessing is kind people who practise what they preach in the very set — then we are, quietly and powerfully, investing in the future caretakers of this world. [15]
It starts local and scales to macro. Every TLC intervention is rooted in a specific community — a valley, a festival field, a marine rescue centre, a farmworkers' school. From that root, it connects outward to a larger systemic reality: colonial food systems, ecological destruction, masculine disconnection, the global south's stolen wealth. The local is the door. The macro is what waits on the other side. This is the case with most things, everything is connected.
Mutual aid is the model — not charity, not commerce - mutual support. The founding father of anarchism, Kropotkin, writing in 1902 as a direct counter to Social Darwinism, argued that cooperation — not competition — was the engine of survival and civilisational development. His research showed that species and human communities which practised mutual support consistently outlasted those organised around dominance and extraction. [8] This is not an idealistic claim. It is an evolutionary one. TLC's model — skills exchanged, resources pooled, proceeds shared fairly across all contributors — is not unusual in human history. It is, in fact, the oldest economic model there is.
The art is accountable to political reality. Nothing TLC makes is decorative. Every song, every performance, every ceremony reports back to something real: a specific injustice, a specific community, a specific need. The art does not float above the world. It is of the world — and it is learning, right now, to fund what the world needs.
So — can a performance or a song alone be a cultural intervention? And can it be enough to shift the reality we live in?
What is the point? Will it stop wars? Change laws? Create justice? Give power back to the hands of the people and the planet? No. Not on its own. But when culture motivates itself from being a cultural phenomenon to becoming a driver of structural power change — then we can say it is part of the spark. It is culture moving itself.
Every change there has ever been has moved in the rhythms of dance, music, poetry. When life gets uncomfortable enough, hard, painful — what soothes us? When a loved one dies? When we march for change? We as a species move in the currents of emotion that flow through us with the springs of our artistic expression, because the artist's way is a discipline — refined, practised and honed to be the pinnacle of what is felt. By the time it reaches an audience, it is at the zenith of its capacity to evoke. But will 'being expressed' change laws? No. Without real, material, structural changes being actioned, the changes needed can be sung to high heaven — and the status quo will be exactly the same. The suffering and inequality continues. Performances have long been used by elites to distract the masses, to placate and redirect focus toward whatever is convenient for maintaining the order of things. But it does not need to be like this. We can let ourselves be moved by the fuel of a performance — but we need the emotion it evokes to drive the action. That is part of what makes a performance into a cultural intervention.
What a TLC Performance Actually Is — and Why It Is Not Just a Gig
Walk into a TLC set and something happens that is difficult to explain and impossible to forget. It is not a concert. It is not a workshop. It is not a ceremony — though it is all of those things, woven together into something that has no single name because it has never quite existed in this form before.
What TLC creates in a performance space is a container. A temporary tribe. A pop-up village for the duration of the set, in which the audience is not an audience — they are participants, witnesses, and protagonists all at once. From the moment the set begins, the invisible wall between performer and spectator dissolves. Mothers with small children are held by the community around them. Elders are honoured. Children — when they want to, and usually - they insist — perform songs they have written themselves, supported by the band on stage. Though many people are part of the TLC performance, Drew, ChiChi, their son Ayun, Josie, Inés and Sebi are the main backbone of the band. Each one is a standalone heavyweight genius in many fields.
You will also notice that many people in a TLC set wear a line drawn across their face. This line is a bridge. Above the nose: the eyes, the soul, the universe, the feelings and thoughts that cannot be touched — everything ephemeral, immaterial, beyond the grasp of the hand. Below the nose: the mouth and the body — where what cannot be touched is given voice and movement. Where the soul is sung. Where the universe becomes a dance, tenderness, sound. The bridge connects these two worlds — a visual nod to the ancientness of our need to unite body and spirit, and a quiet act of re-creating the tribe we have been orphaned from.
The set weaves poetry, storytelling, music, folklore and dance into a tapestry that moves through joy, grief, defiance and tenderness — sometimes within the space of a single song. The ancient Andean Carnavalito — a snake dance whose rhythm has inspired bodies to move since before recorded history, seen in every culture from the conga line to the Chinese dragon — becomes a river of people winding through the field, laughing, releasing, finding each other. And so creates the 'togetherness' container that helps us process the challenging subjects the TLC set brings to light.
None of this is performance in the conventional sense. It is the TLC method made physical, made communal, made real in the room. The songs are not performed about the changes the world needs. They are the changes, enacted live, with everyone present as both witness and participant.
This extends offstage too. TLC practises the arts as medicine — not as metaphor, but as daily discipline. The band works in mutual aid of each other: supporting one another in every way possible, tending to each other's families, interests, wellbeing, passions and pursuits. And because to truly be a revolutionary requires being strong of mind, spirit and body, TLC practises sobriety — taking care of themselves and each other, together and apart, in community and on their own adventures.
This is what TLC means when they say they are the Living Revolution. Not a metaphor. A practice. And if you have ever been in the room when it happens, you will know exactly what that means.
Track Your Woman's Bleed — The Method Made Fully Visible
All of the above converges in the Track Your Woman's Bleed project.
The song begins with a prophecy:
"When women return to gifting their menstrual blood to the Earth, there will be a time of peace on Earth."
— Hopi Prophecy, this was transmitted to Drew through womb wisdom tradition, orally.
Drew did not write this song from theory. He wrote it from practice — from years of unschooling, learning with red tent space-holders, birthkeepers, women's temples, and remarkable elders; from applying that knowledge in his own life and 20-year relationship; from watching what happened when he did. He began sharing his experience of tracking and supporting ChiChi's bleed — and when he spoke about it as a man, it struck a chord that spread far beyond their valley. That message went viral, was translated into many languages and reached millions of people online. Then something extraordinary happened.
The Alpujarra valley — a revolutionary cocktail of birthkeepers, anarchists, punk rockers, old campesinos, goat-herders, music producers, adopted van lifers who turned out to be genius foraging weavers, and other creatures great and small — began to gather around the song that Drew wrote about supporting women's bleed cycles. Not because they were recruited. Because the message rang true, and the women rallied to make sure of that. Dancers, choreographers, mothers, musicians, videographers and all flowed in, organically, through word of mouth and open mic nights. Elijah, a musician and producer from New York City, rehearsed, recorded and produced the song for months with Drew. His partner Josefina sang twenty different vocal parts. Students from the birthing temple Da a Luz sang and danced on the track. Local coppersmith Kai made a halo crown from upcycled copper — a reference to the occulted worship of the vulva, the mandorla — and yes, the halo used to represent the clit, and the Christian church has been quietly sitting on that information for centuries, cheeky buggers.
A land art altar was built for the ceremony. People gathered in the mountains — a celebration of women's cycles and the men who honour them. The altar remains, available for any future ceremony: menarchy, menstruation, menopause, rites of passage for generations yet to come. And all of this done with the least possible impact on the ecosystem.
This is the TLC method. The song becomes the community, and the community becomes the song, (and a rather lovely celebration co-created by all involved.)
And then comes the upgrade that makes this project different from everything TLC has done before. Like all TLC projects, Track Your Woman's Bleed was still built on the gift economy — every talent involved was freely given, heart-led rather than financially driven. This is what happens when a project is born from love rather than strategy. But through the song's sales, TLC is now trialling a different kind of distribution — one that fairly gives to everyone who gave their gifts, and funds the movements the song sings about. Because love alone does not pay rent, and a model that burns out its practitioners cannot sustain itself as a service to community. This too was a hard lesson learned.
Track Your Woman's Bleed is TLC's first deliberate experiment in building a fair, sustainable funding stream — rooted in the mutual aid principles described earlier, and distributed transparently across everyone who made it, and projects creating planet repairs. Every Bandcamp purchase feeds directly into this distribution:
Pie chart: Track Your Woman's Bleed — Distribution of Proceeds
This is not a donation to a cause. This is a fair portion given to a community of revolutionary artists, and a direct investment in the movements the song sings about. At a time when Spotify and AI are destroying a musician's capacity to earn, investment in artists is a potential lifeline. Every purchase is simultaneously an act of support for the people who made something beautiful and an act of structural change — funding the red tent movements and womb wisdom practitioners that this song specifically sings about. Each TLC song is paired with the movement it serves. A mantra for the unborn called "You are Safe, You are Loved, You are Welcome" is paired to raise funds for the Mamma Village project in Glastonbury, Foreskin will raise funds for 15Square, a group that advocates for the end of infant genital mutilation through circumcision.
Because when you buy a song, you are not just buying a song. You are buying an anthem, an education, and a funding stream for planet repairs — all at once.
Collaboration with PRALER, Roots to Repair, and Planet Repair
To break down the barriers that divide us, we need to see each other as human beings — as fellow sentient beings and symbiotic ecosystems. This is where the arts hold their greatest power: to shed what has been imposed on us as a species — the borders that tell us where we are from and where we belong, right through to religion and even dietary choices. The time of the Muggle world and the Wizard world must come together.
The Eagle and Condor prophecy speaks to exactly this — the global north and south uniting knowledge and wisdom. Part of creating a cultural intervention is bringing together people who think differently, from different places and cultures, and continuing that conversation. This is how we practise and inspire the understanding that the time of us and them is coming to an end — this is the beginning of creating what we all need in the world, and this is the global dimension of a cultural intervention. For this to happen, we also need to see clearly where reparations are needed — where accountability is a genuine step forward in undoing the injustice, learning and knowing to do better.
Track Your Woman's Bleed is a song about the intimate... — the relationship between a man and a woman, between human beings and their cycles, between masculine energy and the feminine wisdom it has been taught to ignore or dominate. But the intimate and the global are not separate. They are the same wound, expressed at different scales — as it is with all TLC songs.
That is why TLC are honoured to be collaborating with the PRALER Fund — the Planet Repairs Action Learning Educational Revolution. PRALER operates from a clear analysis: the vast majority of wealth in the global north arrived here through crimes against humanity, and reparatory justice requires not just acknowledgement but restitution. Seventy percent of funds raised go directly to global south resistance communities. [9] Their new initiative 'Roots to Repair' project uses art, music and culture as active internationalist solidarity — ensuring that art inspired by colonised cultures directly supports their fight for liberation. TLC's collaboration with Roots to Repair is, in other words, a very deliberate attempt to avoid the 'Picasso Effect' in musicians — and to inspire artists to become the actual change the world needs. Aka: perform as a cultural intervention.
None of this happens in isolation. One of the most beautiful confirmations that TLC is moving in the right direction came not from the outside, but from within the band itself. Josie Cork and Ines Violet — who have played with TLC for years, and are two of the voices you hear on Track Your Woman's Bleed — are also the founders of PRALER's Roots to Repair initiative. They were already living this vision before the formal collaboration existed. That is not coincidence. That is what happens when people who share the same values find each other, and keep finding each other, song by song and project by project.
PRALER and Roots to Repair embody everything TLC believes a cultural intervention can and should be — art that is accountable to the communities it draws from, economics that return resources to those who use it fairly and well, and musicians who don't just sing about the world they want to see but actively heal and build it. TLC is honoured to be walking alongside them, humbly and with much still to learn.
This year, TLC began recording a traditional Mossi folkloric song from Burkina Faso — in collaboration with the communities it belongs to — to contribute to PRALER’s resistance community centre there. A people’s song, returned to the people it came from, with resources and visibility attached.
The song was shared by K. Jean de Dieu Zabré-Toega of the Internationalist Solidarity Centre for PRALER — a song that carries the spirit of the Mossi and Burkinabé people, their fight to preserve their traditions, their demand for just peace, and their right to reclaim their territories and develop their economies under their own terms.
SONG:
m pa na ki!
m pa na Zoé!
tond pa ki!
d pa na Zoé!
ti du ni wa yond n leebg noogo yé!
noogo waala siid koom Yee!
I will not die!
I will not run!
As the best is yet to come!
As the world became good like honey!
Became good like honey!
The movement is not coming. It is already here, and always has been. It is being built, song by song, ceremony by ceremony, purchase by purchase, in mountain valleys and festival fields and online communities and red tents across the world.
"I'm not sure if resilience is ever achieved alone. Experience allows us to learn from example."
— Maya Angelou [13]
At a time when loneliness is an epidemic, community is the medicine. At a time when the masculine has lost its compass, a song that teaches men to honour women's cycles is a compass. At a time when the global north extracts and discards, a funding model that returns resources to the people who created the culture is an act of repair. This is what a cultural intervention does that a performance alone cannot — it does not just describe the wound. It begins to heal it. And we need every person, every passion, every skill to band together and know how important they are to creating the world where we feel loved, safe and welcome.
"Me mataron mil veces. Desaparecí mil veces, y aquí estoy, resucitada de entre los muertos. Seguimos cantando."
"I was killed a thousand times. I disappeared a thousand times, and here I am, resurrected from amongst the dead. We're still singing." [4]
That "we" is everything. She was not speaking only for herself. She was speaking for every artist and brave heart who had been silenced, exiled, erased — and had refused to surrender. That is what a cultural intervention sounds like when it refuses to give up.
None of this is finished. None of it ever will be. That is the point. Understanding what a cultural intervention is vs a 'performance' — and can be — is one more tool in the box, one more piece in the puzzle for the ongoing work of birthing a kinder paradigm. How we show up and patiently learn to do better is the key. From the micro of our personal lives, it respectfully flutters its brave beating wings to the macro.
If you believe art should be medicine not merchandise — if you believe cooperation is stronger than competition — if you believe the world needs decent economic models as urgently as it needs decent performers — you are already part of this revolution.
Join the Living Revolution — How to Be Part of This
There is more than one way into this movement. Find yours:
Buy a song on Bandcamp — and fund planet repair. Two songs available now at thelovingcollaborative.bandcamp.com. You Are Safe, You Are Loved, You Are Welcome funds Mamma Village Glastonbury. Track Your Woman's Bleed releases Summer Solstice, June 21st. Every song is an anthem, an education, and a direct act of planet repair.
Follow TLC on Bandcamp, more songs are coming! This summer: a Burkina Faso folkloric song funding PRALER's resistance community centre, and Foreskin — raising awareness about child genital mutilation. Follow TLC on Bandcamp or subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to know.
hire TLC to perform for a celebration ceremony. Festivals, rites of passage, grief ceremonies, births, weddings and everything in between. See upcoming dates here: [LINK] or get in touch: thelovingcollaborative@gmail.com
See upcoming events, courses and performances. There's a little bit of everything for everyone. See everything TLC has coming up here:
Commission a portrait from Drew. Hand-drawn portraits honouring the people and animals you love — from birth to death and everything in between. A loving gift that doesn't harm the earth. thelovingcollaborative.com/memorialportaits
Collaborate or donate. If your work is doing planet repair in any form, TLC wants to hear from you. If you want to contribute directly:
Share this — personally. Not just the song. The idea. Think of one person in your life who needs to hear this — a partner, a friend, a father, a son, a community organiser, an economist, or a committed pessimist who is secretly ready to be proven wrong. Send it to them directly. That is how movements grow. And if you share the Bandcamp page and leave a comment or review there, it costs nothing and helps the songs reach people who are ready for them.
The Loving Collaborative — thelovingcollaborative.com
Subscribe to our newsletter at thelovingcollaborative.com to stay connected with every new song, project and cultural intervention as it unfolds.
Find us on Instagram:
@the.loving.collaborative — The whole medly
@the.loving.collaborative.heart — He-Art Menswork
@thelovingcollaborative.art — Art & portraits
@thelovingcollaborative.music — Music
Track Your Woman's Bleed releases on Bandcamp, June 21st 2026.
All TLC songs are released on Bandcamp — an ethical, artist-direct platform — and not on Spotify, whose economic model does not fairly compensate artists or the movements they support.
Bibliography
[1] Schumpeter, J.A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper & Brothers, 1942, p.61.
[2] Beckert, S., interviewed in Jacobin, April 2026.
[3] Simone, N., television interview, 1969, widely documented.
[4] Sosa, M., statement made in the period of her return from exile, c. 1982–1984, as published in Plough magazine.
[4a] Sosa, M., "All of us — whether we are artists or military — must collaborate if we are to keep democracy on its feet and walking." — widely documented; original Spanish: "Todos nosotros — seamos artistas o militares — debemos colaborar si queremos mantener la democracia en pie y caminando."
[5] Martínez Ocasio, B. (Bad Bunny), official statement ahead of Super Bowl LX, February 2026.
[6] Marie Claire UK, February 2026; Clean Clothes Campaign, various reports on Zara supply chain labour violations.
[7] TheCollector.com, 'The Dark Side of Picasso: Unraveling the Secrets of the Cubist Master', 2025; MyArtBroker, 'Problematic Picasso: Misogyny & Exoticism in His Life & Work', 2026.
[8] Kropotkin, P., Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 1902; republished Penguin Random House, 2022.
[9] PRALER Fund, praler.net, accessed 2025.
[10] Veloso, C., interview with Washington Post, October 2021; referenced in Billboard, 'Latin Artists Who Used Music to Spotlight Social Issues'.
[11] "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." — widely attributed to Bertolt Brecht, though scholarly research traces its true origins to the Russian Futurist and Constructivist movements of the 1920s, most likely Vladimir Mayakovsky. See: Mehta, A., 'A Hammer, Not a Mirror: The Misattribution of Brecht's Most Famous Line', e-cibs.org, December 2025.
[12] Trump, D., National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-7, 'Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence', The White House, September 25, 2025. Reported by Democracy Now!, October 2, 2025; The Brennan Center for Justice; Time Magazine, March 2026. Legal analysis: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), October 1, 2025.
[13] Angelou, M., "I'm not sure if resilience is ever achieved alone. Experience allows us to learn from example." — widely attributed to Maya Angelou; sourced in Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Bantam Books, 1993.
[14] Doucleff, M., Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2021.
[15] Kearney, M.S. & Levine, P.B., 'Role Models, Mentors and Media Influences', The Future of Children, Princeton-Brookings, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2020, pp. 83–106. See also: Bandura, A., Social Learning Theory, Prentice-Hall, 1977.
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