John’s work comes from lived experience: trauma, prison, and survival. Through collage, staging, and performance, he turns repetition into recursion. What once dragged him down now becomes a method of spiralling up.
We invited John into fellowship because his practice already embodies the symbolic tools RIZOM is building: interruption, re-staging, and transformation. He shows us how destructive loops can be broken, how risk can be redirected, and how survival itself can become a living practice of meaning.
What follows is John’s testimony, followed by our reflections on the insights, impact, and signals it carries.
PULSE
Before diving into this edition, we invite you to take a look at last week’s newsletter, which was around Leadership.
We received this thought from Sihem Ghars
“Le vrai leadership naît dans la rupture de confiance : il donne du sens pour bâtir un impact durable.”
“True leadership is born in the rupture of trust: it gives meaning to build a lasting impact.”
Sihem Ghars, Militante & Entrepeneur, fondatrice du collectif Incesticide.fr qui agit pour la sécurité sexuelle des enfants. / Activist & entrepreneur, founder of the collective incestide.fr who advocates for the sexual safety of children.
INTEL
On RAP and Spiral
In his own words, John Costi - RIZOM’s first Symbolic Field Fellow - describes what it means to spiral, and how art transformed repetition into recursion:
“At thirteen, I experienced a violent, knife point, sexual assault that permanently altered the trajectory of my life. The aftermath was defined by what was so often described by adults at the schools, P.R.U’s and C.A.M.H.S clinics I attended as a ‘downward spiral’: I lived in descent, years of crime and drug abuse culminated in me being arrested for five armed robberies on William Hill Bookmakers around North London.”
“Another term I heard and got to know intimately was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, for me it was not an abstract medical term. It was a lived condition that infiltrated every aspect of being, pumped through veins and fogged all thought, it affected me at a cellular level.”
“PTSD can drive risk-seeking behaviour. The logic is stark: risk becomes proof of survival and a way to demonstrate that you will not be paralysed or frozen. Each encounter with danger functions as a test. If you emerge, even bloodied, you have ‘won’, or better yet, ‘past’, however this compulsion is recursive and destructive. In seeking to overcome the role of victim, you risk becoming a perpetrator, compounding harm while generating fleeting validation. My adolescence was consumed by this cycle.”
“My art practice directly engages and redirects this same recursive mechanism. It transforms destructive repetition into constructive recursion. Rather than re-enacting trauma through harm, I re-enact it through making. My work returns to past events (memories, fragments, documents, personal and collective scars) not to relive them, but to reconfigure them. Through collage, staging, repetition, and remixing, I construct what I call an ‘external DNA of survival’, the remnants of destruction fertilise and nourish the becoming.”
“I am more than my rap* sheet.”
“Material outcomes of this process are artworks, but the deeper function is methodological: each act of return becomes an act of transformation and reinvention.”
“In the studio, the ‘risk’ is revisiting and handling traumatic material... If the process threatens collapse, I intervene: I call ‘CUT!’, change the frame, and ‘down tools’. This interruption is itself a reclaiming of agency.”
“The ‘re-‘ is central to my process: revisit, remix, re-enact, re-stage. Each recursive gesture shifts trauma from fixed narrative into malleable form. From the vantage point of the upward spiral, I can look back with distance, edit the sequence, alter the lighting, redirect the shot. The spiral no longer descends; it ascends, offering new windows from which to witness and reinterpret my life as I spin my existence.”
* RAP Sheet: Record of Arrest and Prosecution, similar to a criminal record
INSIGHTS
Orbit, Not Circle: The Laws of Recursion
John’s experience reveals something crucial: PTSD created automatic loops of risk-seeking. “Each encounter with danger functions as a test—if you emerge, even bloodied, you have ‘won’.” These are downward spirals — destructive recursions where compulsion repeats without transformation. Pure survival as reaction.
The turning point comes in the pause. “If the process threatens collapse, I intervene: I call ‘CUT!’, change the frame, and ‘down tools’.” This creates breathing space: a gap long enough to feel, reframe, and redirect. Pausing transforms survival from reflex into agency.
Recursion shapes everything. In physics, orbits are recursive loops — planets circle stars, gaining stability from return. In biology, DNA replicates through recursive copying. In culture, ritual and habit give continuity to human life.
But not all loops are equal:
Destructive loops collapse into entropy: feedback amplifies until nothing new emerges
Constructive loops renew momentum: each return generates difference, opening possibilities
This is the physics of circularity. Closed loops without release collapse — echo chambers, addictions, compulsions that tighten until they choke. Open orbits sustain momentum, generating new vantage points like planetary paths that never quite repeat but always return.
John’s transformation demonstrates this principle:
His downward spiral: trauma reinforcing itself, risk compounding harm
His upward spiral: each re-entry into the past generates transformation
The difference is that pause — the moment of “CUT!” — the breathing space that prevents collapse.
The same principles govern organisations. Recursion creates an interior life. Culture isn’t measured only in outputs or KPIs, but in the recursive loops that generate an “inside” — a shared sense of what it feels like to belong here. This inner coherence gives metrics meaning and makes transformation more than surface change.
Consider Toyota’s production system. Workers can pull the Andon cord, halting the entire line. This enforced pause interrupts the automatic loop of errors compounding invisibly. What appears costly becomes regenerative — a chance to reflect, correct, and learn. Toyota calls this Kaizen: continuous improvement through recursion with difference.
Tesla demonstrates another version. Traditional cars leave the factory frozen in time. Tesla’s vehicles receive continuous over-the-air updates. Each product cycle adds new features. The car is never the same object twice — each return is a reconfiguration spiralling upwards.
The implications are clear. Loops are unavoidable — in life, biology, business. The choice is whether they descend automatically into destructive circles or ascend into constructive orbits. The pivot is always the pause: the capacity to stop, reflect, and redirect. Without it, entropy wins. With it, recursion becomes renewal.
IMPACT
From Extraction to Regeneration
John’s practice demonstrates that loops can descend destructively or spiral upwards into renewal. The same principle governs organisations and economies.
The choice is simple: extractive loops that deplete, or regenerative loops that sustain.
Thames Water exemplifies extraction. Years of debt leverage and profit extraction created a closed cycle — each financial manoeuvre circled back into greater fragility. What should have been a life-sustaining utility spiralled into collapse.
Patagonia’s Worn Wear programme shows regeneration in action. Rather than make, sell, discard, they built repair, resale, recycling. Each loop increases value rather than diminishing it. Waste becomes resource, consumption becomes continuity.
Every organisation runs on loops — financial reporting, customer engagement, product cycles, strategic reviews. Extractive loops eventually exhaust the system they feed on. Regenerative loops create resilience and long-term coherence.
As John says of his artworks: “trophies… evidence not of harm endured or inflicted, but of transformation and ‘becoming’ achieved.” Each regenerative loop in business can stand as a similar trophy — proof that repetition doesn’t have to be destructive.
The regenerative economy won’t be built on technology alone. It will be built on symbolic reconfiguration: moving from extraction to regeneration, from closed circles to open orbits.
ECHO
THE ARTIST CUT
RIZOM: You describe your early years as a “downward spiral.” What does it mean to spiral today?
John: “The ‘re-’ is central to my process: revisit, remix, re-enact, re-stage. Each recursive gesture shifts trauma from fixed narrative into malleable form. From the vantage point of the upward spiral, I can look back with distance, edit the sequence, alter the lighting, redirect the shot. The spiral no longer descends; it ascends.”
This distinction - downward versus upward spiral - lies at the heart of symbolic recursion. Trauma drives destructive loops: repetition without agency, compulsion without transformation. But John has shown that recursion can be repurposed. Each return to the past becomes an opportunity not to relive but to reshape. This is the Basho Loop in practice: raw affect enters, symbolic transformation emerges.
RIZOM: In your studio, you often say you call “CUT!” when collapse threatens. Why this language of interruption?
John: “In the studio, the ‘risk’ is revisiting and handling traumatic material... If the process threatens collapse, I intervene: I call ‘CUT!’, change the frame, and ‘down tools’. This interruption is itself a reclaiming of agency.”
Here, interruption itself becomes agency. In trauma, the freeze is annihilation: there is no chance to intervene, no capacity to shift the frame. By introducing “CUT!” into his process, John creates a symbolic disruption — what RIZOM calls Metanoia™. Collapse is not final; it can be halted, reframed, redirected. This is more than a coping mechanism. It is an act of authorship: choosing when to stop, when to change angle, when to begin again.
RIZOM: You’ve described each artwork as a kind of evidence of this process. How do you see these outcomes?
John: “Every artwork is a ‘trophy’ of this process: evidence not of harm endured or inflicted, but of transformation and ‘becoming’ achieved. My work is therefore both archive and antidote. It documents survival while actively reshaping the conditions of that survival.”
The word “trophy” usually suggests conquest. In John’s practice, it means something different: each piece is evidence that destructive recursion has been transfigured into constructive recursion. The artwork carries the scar but no longer bleeds from it. It functions as archive, to say a record of survival, and as antidote, a live intervention that prevents trauma from freezing the self in place.
RIZOM: Many would describe your journey as “coming full circle.” But you resist that phrase.
John: “They are not full circle moments, as often described by interlocutors, but a completed orbit. The past remains present, but it is no longer immovable. By continually re-entering it through practice, I ensure that trauma does not freeze me in place. Instead, each return propels me upward, toward greater agency, intention, and ultimately kindness.”
This refusal of the “circle” is critical. A circle closes; it returns to the same point. An orbit carries momentum, generating new vantage points. Each orbit returns with a shift. Each return to the past is not closure but propulsion. It demonstrates what symbolic authorship means: to take what once destroyed, and make it the ink of transformation.
SIGNAL
John’s testimony is far more than personal. It signals how art, when practised as constructive recursion, can reshape the conditions of life and be deployed as a source of inner strength. “This interruption is itself a reclaiming of agency,” John reminds us. The implications ripple outward into rehabilitation, mental health, and leadership.
First, for rehabilitation and justice. John describes his art as both “archive and antidote”. It documents the scars of trauma but actively reshapes them into transformation. For prison systems and re-entry programmes, this offers a clear lesson: rehabilitation is not achieved through punishment alone, but through symbolic practices that allow individuals to re-stage their histories and reclaim agency. Each artwork becomes what John calls a “trophy… evidence not of harm endured or inflicted, but of transformation and ‘becoming’ achieved.”
Second, for mental health and trauma recovery. PTSD often locks people into destructive cycles. John shows that these cycles can be redirected through symbolic re-entry: “If the process threatens collapse, I intervene: I call ‘CUT!’, change the frame, and ‘down tools’.” This capacity to interrupt collapse and re-author the frame could inspire therapeutic practices where repetition is no longer compulsive but intentional, where trauma is revisited only to be reshaped.
Third, for leadership and society. Leaders today often find themselves caught in spirals of crisis: symbolic ruptures that no dashboard or performance metric can explain. John’s insight (“They are not full circle moments… but a completed orbit”) offers a new model. The past cannot be erased, but it can be re-entered differently. Each orbit can propel us toward “greater agency, intention, and ultimately kindness.” A method of survival, and a philosophy of presence and resilience that leaders can adopt when facing disruption.
For RIZOM, this is a live example of the symbolic turn: destructive recursion can be re-authored into constructive recursion. The downward spiral can become the upward spiral.
For our readers, the invitation is simple:
The Spiral Diagnostic:
Where are you repeating without progress?
What would your “CUT!” moment look like?
How could you turn this loop into momentum?
👉 We invite you to take a moment to reflect and reply with your answers.
You’re Already in the Loop.
Each reading is a return to what matters and a step toward shaping your own symbolic architecture.
👉 Until then, share a word or a metaphor that captures your mood today.
We’ll choose one to open next week’s PULSE.
See you next week as we explore new stories and new resonances.
The RIZOM Team
At RIZOM, this is the paradigm shift we’re working toward: from intelligence as competition to intelligence as coherence, from winning to meaning.
If this resonates with you, we invite you to reach out and explore with us how RIZOM can open new possibilities for your organisation.