Decolonizing Marketing Facilitator Spotlight: Getting to know Rūta Žemčugovaitė
Author: Gary Spinks
In our Spotlight series on guest co-facilitators for our upcoming Decolonising Marketing Course, we talk to Ruta Zemcugovaite – co-founder, writer, researcher, communications designer, and facilitator at Sympoiesis.
Thoughtful and softly spoken, her verdict on ‘business as usual’ practices is startlingly blunt.
Ruta describes mainstream, business-as-usual marketing like a mute “cancer” that has lost its capacity to communicate with other cells in the body. Coming from a place of trauma and being a cause of trauma, marketing is fragmenting systems, lives, psyches, minds and nature – deaf to the world around it.
She says: “We’re at the time where we are being asked to drop pretence from our communications. We’re being asked to become real and to deeply question and understand our values.”
“We’re at the point where we can collectively see and point out at communications that are false and no longer work – and have harmed us.”
Ruta says healing will require creativity, imagination and reintegration with a wider living world. She is inviting leaders to be “willing and brave enough” to see the truth of their own organisations – what they stand for and what is happening within their teams (as a ‘living organism’).
Born in Lithuania and based in Berlin, Ruta’s own path of healing has taken her into fields of study and work such as creative writing, psychology, trauma, alternative healing modalities, humane technology, attention economy, coding, and surveillance economy.
Together with partner Niels Devisscher, Ruta co-founded Sympoiesis, offering communications design services in the regenerative space, and running workshops on multi-species imagination and design.
On the forthcoming Decolonising Marketing course with Zebra Growth, Ruta will place trauma, healing and creativity at the heart of the learning and ‘internal journey’.
She says: “What I’m essentially working with is healing through storytelling. And how we can re-empower ourselves – and each other – through storytelling. How we can learn to tell truth and how to access our bodies to be able to do that.“
“I want people to experience a certain kind of inner liberation that comes with allowing ourselves to add our bodies into the process, not having to divide ourselves, not having to fragment ourselves in the process of communications and marketing.”
“In fact, the opposite, to be able to integrate ourselves through the process of communications and see communications as an opportunity to deepen our healing.”
Ask yourself: What is my Truth? What is the truth that I’m trying to communicate? What blockages and patterns are in the way – and why are they there?
Ruta said that regeneration is at the core of the living systems. Not a fad but fundamental to our existence.
She says: “Decolonizing marketing, for me, translates into healing our capacity to communicate and understanding our power – the power that comes with this work – and directing it towards streams of regeneration.”