Weaving Cultural Memory and Imagination to Transform Chaos into Creativity

Initiative Title: Living Story Landscapes
Short Description of Initiative: Living Story Landscapes envisions the healing of ecosystems with historical trauma from places of refuge into sanctuaries of life. Using a trauma-informed approach to ecosystem protection and restoration with communities healing from colonization, climate emergencies, and conflict, it works with the process of “restoring” and re-storying” collective belonging and identity with nature, in service of a bioregion’s resilience and regeneration, for both human and non-human life. It draws on cultural memory and imagination, bridging the arts and sciences, and working in collaboration with artists, wisdom keepers, regenerative innovators, the academe, local governments, and social enterprises.

Sectors: Civil society; Indigenous peoples; Cultural; Creatives
Website: www.livingstorylandscapes.com
Instagram: @livingstorylandscapes
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livingstorylandscapes
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/livingstorylandscapes

Sarah Queblatin works with cultural memory and imagination as a response to the polycrisis. As a regenerative design and development specialist, she has been weaving collective experiences across peacebuilding, biocultural heritage, mental health, and humanitarian innovation for over 15 years. She founded Green Releaf Initiative to advance regenerative solutions in disaster and displacement contexts. Sarah also serves as a LUSH Spring Prize juror, a council member of the Global Ecovillage Network Oceania and Asia, a founding member of Permaculture for Refugees, and an inner council member of the UNDP-convened Conscious Food Systems Alliance.

Her initiative, Living Story Landscapes, envisions the healing of ecosystems with historical trauma, transforming places of refuge into sanctuaries of life. Grounded in a trauma-informed approach to ecosystem protection and restoration, it works with communities healing from colonization, climate emergencies, and conflict. The initiative focuses on both "restoring" and "re-storying" collective belonging and identity with nature, in service of a bioregion’s resilience and regeneration, for both human and non-human life.

Amid the backdrop of the polycrisis, Sarah’s work seeks to shape existing or emerging learning centres for bioregional regeneration by drawing from cultural memory and imagination. Her approach bridges arts and science by collaborating with artists, wisdom keepers, regenerative innovators, academics, local governments, and social enterprises.

Photo by Sarah Queblatin for Living Story Landscapes. Listening circles with indigenous wisdom keepers with University of the Philippines Cebu.

How can cultural memory and Indigenous wisdom serve as tangible tools for community and climate resilience?

For many years, I struggled to trust my own voice. I believed others, especially those with influence, could speak for me. Founding and running my own non-profit helped me believe in myself and in my ideas, even when they didn’t align with mainstream thinking.

I had to unlearn the conditioning that told me I wasn’t good enough, that I was too idealistic, or too emotionally invested, “a bleeding heart” archetype. I often judged myself for feeling the suffering of others a lot, and that my response to this was to shape solutions that would come from wholeness and not from fragmented solutions. I often judged myself for feeling others’ suffering deeply, and for wanting to create holistic, not fragmented, solutions. That’s not a mainstream view in my country, where development is often siloed: food, economy, energy, etc.

I had to begin listening to my own voice and trust that my heart, rooted in compassion, would attract the right people and resources to bring these ideas to life.

Photo by Sarah Queblatin for Living Story Landscapes. Listening circles with indigenous wisdom keepers with University of the Philippines Cebu.

What local practices or Indigenous wisdom keepers have most influenced your approach?

It may not be an exact expression of the invisible that emerges from this process, but it is the making of it that matters. It is how we create meaning from the wisdom and stories held in place that becomes important. The intangible coexists with the tangible as an expression of its “soul.”

This is part of the human journey—or in the case of my project, it is part of a place and its people discovering their relationship to soul: the soul of their forest, their rivers, their land.

Art can serve as that bridge, translating what is felt into paintings, music, or embodied expression. This work gives value to the relational alongside the rational. The cognitive with the affective. The data with the story. Without narratives, the information we gather—facts, numbers, charts—has no meaning.