Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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If this critique is not grounded in a certain optimism, a shred of belief that the
imagined better world can exist in some form in this world now, it risks turning
into another theoretical model, abstract and cynical or another excuse to wait
for the perfect momentthe revolution, the collapse, the last judgementa sure
recipe for hopelessness. Ideas without a place to test them in are like reflections
in a world without mirrors. An alternative is always a speculative projection
with geographical coordinates.
Improvising Utopia
Improvisationis, for me, a key to survival. Improvisation is really
where I would start thinking about an aesthetics of everyday life.1
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
When I received the beautiful pendant I was days away from radically swapping
my geographies, from a mega polis to seventeen acres of field, from a world
renowned university to a ruined farmhouse. Whilst most of my colleagues and
family were unable to imagine quite why I was doing it, they did acknowledge
that once an idea entered into my head I never let go easily and that for me, the
idea of giving up a professional job to become an apprentice Utopian made
absolute sense.2
All genuine alternatives (i.e. a proposal which truly attempt to address
an identified problem through its root causes, rather than merely tweak its
consequences) always begin as Utopian. The etymology of the term is a medieval play on words (referring to a good/happy place and yet meaning no place)
which suggests that an alternative society is impossible, that a better world will
never exist anywhere beyond our imaginations. Five hundred years later our
culture fears Utopias more than ever, especially when they are bent on being
put into practice. Time magazine put it succinctly when they wrote Basically,
Utopia is for authoritarians and weaklings.3
The horrors of Stalinism and National Socialism have overshadowed
our right to dream of radically different models of societyadjust society yes,
remodel it no! But the shadow that those utopian nightmares were made of
was not the fact they these were ideologies with geographies, it was that they
were violent hierarchies founded on the quest for perfection. Control and
purity are the chimeras of totalitarianisms. The promise of a radiant future
tomorrow, conceived of as perfect and fixed, has always justified atrocities
today. From the second coming to communism, from the package holiday to
the Eden of retirement, life, we are told, will be better later. Capitalism has
perfected the art of sacrificing the present on the altar of the future. Dominique
Mda sums up the paradox succinctly: At first, the point was simply to raise
our standard of living. But when will we consider that it has been reached?
When will we feel that we have attained abundance, total well-being, a life
in perfect congruence with ourselves, if not at the mythical end of history,
which is for ever postponed. We are always going through the motions, the
tensions and all that they determine, whilst knowing secretly that we will
1
2
3
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Les Sentiers de lUtopie, film still, 2008.
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of the weekend, from the science of climate change to the abolition of slavery,
from workers rights to organic agriculture, yesterdays marginal and impossible eventually becomes todays normal. There has never been a better time to
desert the centre and multiply the edges, the greatest creativity and change has
always taken place there, and its from the edge that we can jump and fly.
This is certainly what we uncovered whilst travelling through Europe
between August 2007 and March 2008, visiting and documenting eleven nonhierarchical Utopian communities in order to produce our book-film Paths
Through Utopias.6 We explored projects as diverse as a direct action Climate
Camp set up illegally on the edges of Heathrow airport to a hamlet squatted
by French punks, an off grid low impact permaculture community to occupied
self-managed Serbian factories, a free love commune in an ex Stasi base to a
farm where private property had been abolished. The trip firmed up our conviction that alternatives are not only possible but already exist in their thousands,
and that Utopias are transgressive in that they allow the creation of a space
where previously there was none, in which new and different ways of relating
to the world can be practiced.7
Cutting cracks in capitalism to create spacein both time and place
is the role of twenty first century Utopians. Contemporary life is so consumed
by waged labour that there never feels like there is any space to begin to think
about other ways we might want to live. We can make time to grow things on
an allotment at weekends or join a LETS scheme to live with a bit less money,
but there are few spaces left where we can join up the dots and experiment with
every aspect of our life. In the rush to make a living we might have forgotten
how to live.
The deep sense that space was missing in our lives was the catalyst
that pushed us to unite the conceptual and the actual in our land based project
la r.O.n.c.e. It was born, as so often, out of a chance encounter with like-minded
people, who also took part in local and international protests against the nefarious consequences of capitalismfrom climate camps to summit mobilisations.
We had met one of them, a Frenchman named Eric, in the snow of Copenhagen,
as The Labofii was recycling hundreds of discarded bicycles into tools of civil
disobedience in order protest against the hijacking of the UN conference on
climate change by the neoliberal agenda of western governments and corporations.8 He had turned up one day, had liked our project, offered his skills and
hardly left the workshop for ten days. Months later, a common friend had emailed
us to say that Eric and his partner had found some abandoned land in a beautiful corner of Southern Brittany, which not only nestles an exceptional microclimate but also an incredibly vibrant network of peasant activism. Three of
6
7
8
For the moment, only published in French as Les Sentiers de lUtopie (Paris: Zones-La
Dcouverte, 2011) and German as Pfade durch Utopias (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2012).
Lucy Sargisson, Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression (London: Routledge, 2000).
The project, entitled Put the fun between your legs: Become the Bike Bloc, was
devised at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and implemented in Copenhagen during
COP15. The aim was to recycle bicycles into tools of civil disobedience in order to
support Reclaim Power, the day of mass action where delegates in disagreement
with the development of the negotiations would leave the conference and join activists outside in a Peoples Power Assembly. The repression was brutal, delegates
were beaten as they tried to leave the conference hall, hundreds of activists were
arrested, but the Peoples Assembly took place nonetheless.
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them had been living in the area for years and were deeply embedded in the
local networks, and they were looking for others to buy the land collectively.
We visited and quickly realised the potential of the site, the local networks, and
the people and decided to take the plunge. This meant leaving the UK where I
had been living for more than fifteen years, resigning from an academic tenured job, selling our flat, moving away from social movements and rebel friendships that we had slowly but securely built over time and starting afresh. It was
a difficult decision to get to: we went through moments of absolute terror at the
idea of transforming our lives, moving away from everything that was familiar
without really knowing what we were getting into. Alternatives rarely come
without some letting go
It turned out that the purchase of the land took more than a year, which,
although it was frustrating in many ways, also gave us, the collective of six
launching the adventure, plenty of time to hash out our aims, objectives, and
common ground. For eighteen months, as we were still based on each side of
the Channel, we dealt with owners that disappeared, went back on their decision to sell or tried to increase the price for no reason, whilst regularly discussing
our vision for this common project of ours.
It was clear from the outset that we all shared an understanding of
the capitalist system as profoundly alienating and destructive, and therefore
one that needs to be deconstructed rather than improved upon. As a result, our
project is not to be a retreat from the evils of the world, but a base for both
creating and resisting, of saying YES this is an alternative and NO, we will not
consent to the encroachment of capitalism. Its an attempt at a crack, a space
to develop new tools and skills, new forms of creative resistance, new ways of
being together that can widen the fissures that are appearing around us.
We have not left capitalism, its front lines run through all of us, there is no
outside, but we aim to use the resources of everyday life to constantly struggle
within, against and beyond the present condition.9
Our politics is rooted in a rejection of hierarchies, all forms of oppression and discrimination, as well as a thriving for autonomy and self-management.
Again, these stances come as much from political analyses and theoretical
abstractions as they do from embodied experiences. We all have studied critical
texts, ranging from anarchist theories to deep ecology via feminism and critical
theory, in order to understand the complex mechanisms of oppression and
destruction under capitalism. But importantly we have also undergone its impacts
in our own lives, in our own flesh and psyches. We all, directly or indirectly,
have experienced the blow of patriarchy or racism, witnessed the devastation
of the natural world, or the burden of alienation.
I was in an interesting and gratifying job, yet I still had to adapt to
the frequently exasperating and volatile directives of a disconnected hierarchy.
Too often, I felt that I had little control over the priorities that framed my day
to day activities, frustratingly feeling like a clog in an immense bureaucratic
machine, whose inner works were becoming increasingly meaningless, and
against which I had little leverage. The British governments policies, especially
under the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition and the unprecedented budget cuts
9
Paul Chatterton, Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-Management and the
Common, Antipode Vol.42, Issue 4 (2010).
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The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Put the fun between your legs: Become
the Bike Block, Special swarm trainings and
tactics of how to deal with violent police
attacks with bike barricades, Copenhagen,
2009. Photograph by: Robert Logan.
Creative Commons.
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and destruction of public services that they undertook, meant that education
was no longer understood as a common but as a private investment into the
job market. Disappearing into the horizon were notions of education as critical
and emancipatory. I felt that I was increasingly meant to produce cannon
fodder for the job market, whereas I was trying to provide spaces for critical
reflection and analysis of students conditions. It was this growing sense of
disaffection that was the main driver for my escape, as well as a sensation
of being torn between the emancipatory pedagogies that we were able to
develop with the Labofii, and the suffocating constraints under which I was
working in the university. This discrepancy gradually appeared absurd and
unnecessary: why not create an autonomous space where my life and work felt
coherent and meaningful?
The autonomy that my companions and I work towards is not that of
the free-floating disconnected individual with highly egoistic desires; the
autonomy of consumer choice and capitalist entrepreneurs, which characterises
and fuels the capitalist society.10 On the contrary, we want to regain control of
our own lives, and we feel that we can more easily do so through a collective
project, via reciprocal and mutually agreed relations with others rather than
imposed relationships in hierarchies that we never chose nor respect. We want
to find a meaning to our lives that got lost amidst too much disconnection.
After years of urban living in a megalopolis where every need becomes fulfilled
by the purchase of an item or a service, where such basic ability as food growing,
building and mending things are lost in the frenetic rhythm of work-commuteconsume, the notion of autonomy through collective living, learning, and
sharing skills felt like a new lifeline.
That said, the autonomy that we are pursuing is a complex interrelation of the individual and collective dimensions. As De Souza points out,
personal autonomy, i.e. the ability to make decisions in freedom, is unattainable in a society which is characterised by structural asymmetry in the distribution of power.11 Likewise, there are too many tragic examples where the
collective needs have ended up being the justification for the crushing of all
individual freedoms. Striving for simultaneous collective and individual autonomy, we have decided to use consensus as our decision making process.
Neither compromise nor unanimity, consensus is the process of taking all
opinions and ideas into account in order to get to the best possible solution for
the group. It is based on a collective commitment to mutual listening and respect, thus opening up a space for the emergence of collective intelligence, not
silencing the minority (through voting) or seeing a group process being derailed
by one individual.
Overall we locate our project in the autonomous geographies defined by Chatterton and Pickerill as featuring personal freedom, a mistrust of
power and rejection of hierarchy, and the advocacy of self-management, decentralised and voluntary organisation, direct action and radical change.12
Finally, our project is framed by Permaculture. Described by some as the art
of beneficial relationships and by others as the science of connections,
Paul Chatterton and Jenny Pickerill, Notes towards autonomous geographies:
creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics, Progress in Human
Geography Vol.30, No.6 (2006).
11 Ibid.
10
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Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays (Berkeley: Shoemaker
& Hoard, 2005).
At the time of writing, it has only been six weeks since we finally bought the land.
Very little has therefore been done there.
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Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Livestocks Long Shadow
(2006).
See: Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1974).
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that will take place on site. Finally la r.O.n.c.e will host the permanent base for
the Labofii, which has been nomadic for the last seven years. The Lab is not an
institution or a group, not a network or an NGO, but an affinity of friends who
recognise the beauty of collective disobedience. Since 2004, we have organised
projects and trainings, which we call experiments that put together artists
and activists, creating beneficial synergies between these different but complementary constituencies. Our projects facilitate processes by which the courage
and social critique of activists radicalise and embolden artists, whilst the creativity of artists fires up the imagination of activists. These experiments aim not
to make art but to shape reality, not to show or comment upon our world but to
change it. They can take place in contemporary art spaces (the Tate Modern in
London, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, Kampnagel in Hamburg) or in social
movements (squatted social centres in London or Copenhagen, Climate Camps
in the UK, Summit mobilizations). They can take the form of mass civil disobedience using rafts to shut down a power station17, using the body to develop
new methodologies of resistance such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown
Army, or offer free trainings in art, activism, and permaculture to young artists
and activists, using creative and critical pedagogies.18 Whatever the context we
have always refused to separate our ethics from our aesthetics. How we live is
as important as how we make art and revolution, in fact it is inseparable.
Why fly to a conference on socially engaged art when our work is a critique of
climate change? We actually prefer burning our bridges and destroying our
cultural capital than compromising; we have pulled out of commissions from
high profile galleries (such as Copenhagens Nikolaj Contemporary Gallery)
that required our work to be within the bounds of laws we despise, we have
disobeyed curators (from the Tate Modern) who invited us to do a workshop
on the role of disobedience and then told us that we could not take action against
the institutions sponsor, British Petroleum.19
At la r.O.n.c.e, we intend to further develop our practice, using the
land, a forest garden,20 the workshop, and all the activities offered on site as
inspiration, material, and pedagogical tools. Seeing art and activism as inseparable from everyday life, we intend to explore the notion of a Bauhaus or Black
Mountain College for the twenty-first century. The aim is thus to organise
trainings where the concept of art as a means of living differently is experienced
rather than merely studied, through the collective sharing of skills, work (from
cooking to building, planting to making) and life over substantial periods of
time. We intend to create a hub of local and international artists, activists,
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18
19
20
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growers, and friends who will use la r.O.n.c.e as a base to learn and forge new
relationships.
From Shakespeares to be or not to be to Sartres Being and
nothingness, the question of being, has been beaten to death by thousands of
years of art and philosophy. But for the Labofii the important question is how
we can be together, how we constitute friendships and affinity groups, troupes
and collectives, communes and societies. It is also a question of how to conquer
our culturals anxiety and terror at the strangeness of nature. Cracks in capitalism are places where we can begin to open to new forms of sensibility, new
aesthetics, new ways of sensing the world and our relationship with it.
Art After Art
It reminds us of the time when it was still possible for free theatre to try out
loving anarchic social utopias This is about saying goodbye to representation
and is therefore the most radical form of theatre
Frauke Hartman in The Frankfurter Rundschau, Reviewing: The
Labofiis Flow, Swarm, Flood. International Summer Festival, Kampnagel,
Hamburg, 2010.
La r.O.n.c.e will be an experiment in art after art, a taste of the art of the future
performed in the present, an art performed by all, not by the ego driven specialist artists, not as fiction that separates but action that connects. It is an art that
embeds itself in our homes and offices, shapes our meetings and gatherings,
suffuses our bedrooms and kitchens, designs our celebrations and resistance,
organises our villages and cities. Ambitious in its courage to mould the mess of
the social world yet committed to a human and local scale in its applications, as
the great radical nineteenth century artist and activist William Morris wrote,
such an art will gather strength in simple places, not just in rich mens houses.
Its absolutely not about turning our life into art (and then displaying
it in the palaces of culture) but about using the processes we are used to associating with art to transform the experience of everyday life itself. This art will
no longer be seen as an end but a means, a way of doing things, a way of making
our worlds with the same craft and pleasure that artists apply to their work.
Art will be the technique for reconstructing reality, not in a metaphoric way,
but a hands-on practical way. The meal you eat for lunch will be as much a
material for this practice as the way you next make love.
The key to practicing this art of everyday life will be paying deep attention to
ones daily activities, immersing ourselves in the act of doing so that like a
dancer, every step, every breath and gesture is conscious and considered.
Nothing will be automatic anymore, nothing is just doing, everything is doing
as best as we can, doing that generates pleasure within us and which is in the
service of the life around us. The function of such actions is to bring maximum
potential and connection to every situation, to open us up and bring us together.
Rather than carelessly reproducing the rituals of money and power in the autopilot mode that consumerism encourages, we act to wake us from the anaesthetic hold of capital. We aestheticize life because it brings all our senses back
from the dead. It has taken a lot of cultural work to isolate our senses, to
separate the art of vision from the art of taste, the sense of smell from that of
touch. Each sense has been split from the other, forced into artificial isolation
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and into a specific genre of art of its own. With this isolation, comes hierarchies,
vision over touch, sound over smell. The separation of art and life however is
an older wound.
To live a radically different life we need to change not only our way
of thinking but also our bodys way of feeling. We need to train ourselves in
new modes of perception, new sensibilities to the world that enable us to feel
so disgusted by the dull familiar actions of daily life that reproduce capitalism
that we are unable to carry them out anymore. A trip to the supermarket with
its industrial toxic foods will feel like being a tourist in Auschwitz, taking a
flight on a plane and pouring tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere will feel like
we are dropping cluster bombs on the poor. Buying cheap clothes from H&M
will feel like having child slaves crouching in the corner of our bedrooms.
We need a new sensitivity where we become so shocked by the banal horrors
of this system that puts profits ahead of life, that we are prepared to leave it,
prepared to say goodbye.
This is the plan anyway, we signed the contract on the land just a
month ago. Maybe, hopefully, the end result will have little to do with this map
of intentions. It will not matter, for as Macherey rightly put it To look toward
Utopiashould be by definition to escape, to cultivate margins, to move off the
beaten tracks, in order to improvise out of a spirit of adventure and to get to
results that will not necessarily be those which had initially been planned.21
21