start

Subversive Beauty by bell hooks. On Felix Gonzalez Torres work.
https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/attachment/en/5b844b306aa72cea5f8b4567/DownloadableItem/5f6a10395fc13852548b456c

"As counter hegemonic art, it requires that we identify not with the artist as hegemonic figure or with the beautiful art object, but rather we identify ourselves as subjects in history through our interaction with the work. This is not art that subliminally subjugates, coercively enthralls or enraptures. It welcomes our presence - our participation." (p.45)
"In the work of F.G.T. this call for reunion is a political moment, an act of resistance. Once we embrace his vision of the collapse of public and private, the convergence of the individual and the collective, we open ourselves to the possibility of communion and community. The beauty of that union is celebrated in Gonzales Torres work. Yet as the signs, symbols and 'date-lines' tell us, that union will not come without struggle and sacrifice, without active resistance against those forces of domination that seek to shut down our agency, our will to be self-actualized. G.T art declares that to be political is to be alive - that beauty resides in moments of revolution and transformation even as his work articulates 'new modes of contestation'. In grappling with subversive beauty, with aesthetics of loss. Gonzalez-Torres insists that our lives be that space where beauty is made manifest, where the power of human connection and interaction will create that loveliness that will 'never pass into nothingness'." (p.49)

PROPOSAL

REPAIR AND REBUILD/ REPAIRING AS REBUILDING/ REPAIR TO REBUILD

"There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it." (T.J.Demos) In the times we live in, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the crisis and injustices we face. In the face of the rise of fascism, the environmental crisis, increasing social disparities and injustice it is clear that things cannot go on as they are. Things must change and inevitably, they will. We will not be fooled by narratives of progress, that blindly trust that technological progress will save us all. Regressive forces are and have been actively trying to prevent and turn back liberatory processes, and the modern promise of freedom and equality for all has never included all peoples, but is instead is based on exclusion.

The world must change, and there is no time to lose, no time to wait for the promises of modernity to be fulfilled. We seem to live in a world that is abundant. Instead we see that we live in a world of ruins. No abundance of consumables can conceal this. We see the ruins of community, of ritual, and of plurality in a continent that is and has forcefully been attempting to construct its own homogenous identity.

Therefore, we propose to approach the world, both the material and the metaphysical, with an attitude of repairing to rebuild. We want to ask ourselves: what is there already? what do we want to keep? What is broken, what do we need to repair? Which pieces can we pick up, what needs to be discarded, what can be planted, what mended, reused, redone?

This can be applied both on the material as well as the relational and historical level. Can we learn how to fix things that would otherwise be discarded? Can we rediscover knowledge that was purged from the present in the name of progress? Can we rebuild relationships to the world around us, both human and otherwise?

IDEAS:

- Learning about the species that we share our environment with. All of them, not just the ones coined native. Going to dog park and identifying all the plants.
- Teaching each other our languages. Making a dictionary in which we mix our languages.
- Writing together in different languages, and then make a version of it in which we translate every line in every language possible for us.
- Go to stedlijk museum together. Everyone picks a work and researches it. Then share.
- Reading books together on building a community that is based on mutual aid.
- Sharing skills that we have. Person can offer to facilitate a session, where they teach a skill that they have.
- Research session where we break out into groups to do research on different conflicts that are happening in the world and then share this via jigsaw learning
- Learning how to fix things together, eg. our bikes, socks, clothes, whatever. If one person has something that they really need to get fixed, or something they need or want to build we all learn how to do it together, or we all help them to get this thing. F.ex. we all build a bench for our house to sit in the sun :)
Learning how to make our own clothes.
Learning how to build a bench.

Documentation: take a picture at every session intentionally, so that there is not just always someone randomly taking pictures.

First session:
- Starting with speed dating (20 minutes), speak for two minutes each
- Eating together, discussing what we want from this collective: We share our idea for the collective, why we started it, concept for the activities we will do. Ask people to share why they joined.
- Breaking out into small groups of 3s/4s, sharing each other’s stories. Each person takes notes, writes down a line or two that they liked. Together they decide on a line from each story to share with the whole group. As a group we make a story out of the lines. We translate every line into as many languages as are collectively available to us, so we create multiple texts.
- Taking an intentional photo at the end of every session

Second session:
- Starting with sharing a response to the exercise we did
- Check that everyone has filled in the etherpad
- Everyone can come up with a prompt

Inspiring Initiatives/Collectives:

Through Art we Care: https://throughartwecare.com/?page_id=63

Radical Ecologies: https://www.radicalecology.earth/projects/migrant-futurism
"In his 1990 text, Poetics of Relation, the Martinican writer and thinker Edouard Glissant describes the violence of what he terms “root identity” - an approach to self that is “founded in the distant past in a vision, a myth of the creation of the world” where, in contrast, he offers an alternative possibility of self-fashioning “produced in the chaotic network of Relation” that “does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates”, that “does not think of a land as a territory from which to project onto other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps”.

Glissant’s vision lies at the heart of Migrant Futurism, a project that recognises and critiques the worldwide proliferation of strategies of nativism and nostalgia arising in response to the ecological crises of the 21st century that in turn inform the escalation of border violence, race and gender violence, the violence and inequality that produce and are produced by anthropogenic climate change where current policy scenarios are projected to displace 2 billion people - one fifth of all humanity - outside the human climate niche by the end of the century, setting the scene for global apartheid on an unprecedented scale.

In contrast, we observe how throughout human history, displacement has served as a significant event that has inspired new dimensions of consciousness in relation to our planetary existence. Artists and thinkers have repeatedly given form and voice to ecological insight and through them new futures have been imagined and enacted. This is what we understand as Migrant Futurism, a diversity of strategies that we find illuminating dimensions of our ecological life throughout history and alive today in so many contexts."

Could be interesting:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9783956795275/radical-futurisms/
"There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance."

Radical Feminist Therapy, Bonnie Burstow:
https://we.riseup.net/assets/449336/Radical+Feminist+Therapy+Burstow%2C+Bonnie.pdf

DECONSTRUCTING MASTERY
Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant: https://monoskop.org/images/2/23/Glissant_Edouard_Poetics_of_Relation.pdf
Teaching To Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom, bell hooks
Unthinking Mastery, Julietta Singh
Liminagraphy, Zuleika Bibi Sheik

We live in a world that places our different identities (genders, sexualities, races, languages, and classes) in a hierarchy. It attempts to naturalise this hierarchy, and thus, it also silences the marginalisation and oppression that comes hand in hand within these socially constructed categories of difference. For people who are in privileged positions, talking about difference includes acknowledging how their position is maintained by this exploitative hierarchy. Thus, difference is constantly construed as a negative thing.

However, we want to transgress and reimagine these categories that define how we interact with one another. We want to resist these colonial and imperial logics of stability and closure, and rather understand how we can be with each other differently; how we can relate to each other and understand our differences outside of these categories.

To do so, Glissant proposes the concept of 'Opacity' in Poetics of Relation. Essentially, Opacity works against the oppressive nature of ‘grasping’, which entails the exclusion and appropriation of the obscure by means of understanding through Western thought. Instead, we will call on the alternative gesture of ‘giving-on-and-with’, which explores a totality that “is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity”. We are able to acknowledge the unknown and the obscure, and not feel displaced or threatened by the discomfort we find in it.

We will practice this in our first session by telling different stories to one another. We will jot down lines from the stories that stuck with us, and then translate this into all languages that we know possible to make a multi-lingual story at the end. In our own little way, this is a means of disrupting the colonial lingual hierarchy which often dictate how we communicate to one another. Moreover, by engaging with languages that we are unfamiliar with, we create a space to learn differently. The point is not to understand everything that is written down, instead, we want to learn from the unknown. We want to learn how we can be with difference without needing to explain it or master it.

This is also something bell hooks writes about in Teaching to Transgress.