AMBER LANDGRAFF in Conversation with THE CARROTWORKERS’ COLLECTIVE

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The Carrotworkers’ Collective, based in the UK, organizes around the issue of the unpaid internship—the proverbial carrot dangled in front of emerging cultural workers with the promise that working for free will eventually lead to a paid position. The Carrotworkers’ Collective (CWC) attempts to dispense with some common myths about unpaid internships—especially that internships are a necessary pre-requisite to getting a job. Given rising youth unemployment rates, [1] it is difficult to justify a system that demands going more into debt by spending years working for free. The CWC questions the acceptance of this as the status quo, promotes the value of work and provides support to interns who find themselves in this position.

The problems that the CWC describes will sound familiar to anyone who has undertaken an unpaid internship. It is important for an intern to understand her rights when facing this kind of situation. CWC questions the slippery slope separating (unpaid) internships and (paid) work. Though it may seem a subtle distinction, it is very important for interns to know that if their positions are necessary to the functioning of their host institutions, technically they should be paid a minimum wage for their work within those institutions. It is also just as important for employers to begin to recognize that there is a problem with a system that relies on working for free, and to begin to have conversations with their employees about how they can work together without taking advantage of interns’ labour.

This interview took place over several email exchanges; to protect their anonymity for the purposes of protest, industrial sabotage and whistle blowing, the members of the CWC will remain anonymous.

The Carrotworkers’ Collective are a London-based group of current or former interns, cultural workers and educators primarily from the creative and cultural sectors who regularly meet to think together around the conditions of free labour in contemporary societies. They undertake participatory action research around voluntary work, internships, job placements and compulsory free work in order to understand the impact they have on material conditions of existence, life expectations, subjectivity and the implications of this for education, life long training, exploitation, and class interest. Contact them at carrotworkers AT gmail.com if you would like to get involved.

Amber Landgraff is the director of XPACE Cultural Centre, where she focuses on advocacy for student and emerging artists. She completed her Masters of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial Practices at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has interned at FUSE Magazine, Toronto Free Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

AL: Can you describe your motivation behind starting the Carrotworkers’ Collective? How many members are currently involved in the collective? What experiences are required for membership in the collective?

CWC: We started CWC with a desire to establish a platform that could address the exploitation of free labour across the cultural sector and beyond. Our point of departure (and our point of arrival, transformation and closure as a group) was the production of a counter-guide to internships in the arts. With this production process running over three years and being accompanied by various moments and processes of militant research, [2] facilitation of events and participation in social movements, the group’s membership has grown and shrunk over time. At the core there have always been some eight to twelve people. We all share a background in cultural work and an interest in inventing other ways of organizing and thinking about work—this isn’t a formal requirement but a common focus that we share and co-develop.

What do you think stands in the way of interns organizing around issues of free labour? What could be achieved by organization?

This is a problem we face frequently. The most common rejoinders we hear go something like: “But this is only a middle class issue;” or “This is just a rite of passage everyone has to go through;” or “Doing an internship and getting in debt shows that you are committed!” We need to reiterate how the rise of the rhetoric of the so-called creative industries means that the cultural sector includes more people from different class backgrounds than before (at least for now), and that these class assumptions cannot be made. We need to point out that cultural workers earn less than the median wage in the UK—so economically defined, this is certainly not a middle class issue. We work a lot on de-naturalizing the situation we are in—internships as they exist now are a relatively recent phenomena—it was not always this way, even though the rhetoric surrounding internships implies they are something everyone had to go through. But perhaps most importantly, we try to work with the dilemmas people really inhabit—to acknowledge the desires, the romance and the idealism that often fuels us to carry on in this sector. We believe it’s important to start from where we are—to not defer our politics to elsewhere. We often hear people in our sector say that the real politics happen elsewhere—somewhere else and to other people. But we think it is important to start from where you are (as an artist, a cultural worker, a teacher, and so on) and make links transversally, first to broader systemic issues and then to other struggles and groups. We make support structures and shared spaces to re-think how our desires, which are currently directed into individualized, competitive, hierarchic modes of being, can instead be oriented toward other forms of common culture and work-based education.

Have your relationships to the value of your own work changed since starting the Carrotworker’s Collective?

We often draw attention to the common answer in the cultural sector to the question: “What do you do?” Often, the reply comes: “You mean my real work, or the work I do for money?” What this answer belies is a profound sense of schizophrenia in how cultural workers understand and value their work and their time, and a curious assertion that waged work is somehow unreal. We would probably begin to answer this question by looking at this distinction between our individual work and our work with the collective. Our work as a collective often gives us a great sense of support in our workplaces—for example, for those working in education, we are now armed with tools, arguments, statistics and counter workshops for the professional practice and work placement imperatives that flood us under the name of improving graduate employability. Imagine a recent graduate working for free as an intern in a commercial London gallery. She orders expensive food for her boss for lunch and taxis for the director to go three blocks down the road, and wonders simultaneously why there is money for these expenses but not enough in the budget to pay her a fair wage, and why it is she feels she can say nothing about how angry this makes her. For those working in super-exploitative situations such as the one described above, the group offers support and space through which to connect the battles, negative experiences and affects in the workplace to an analysis that helps make sense of things. We use analysis as a practice of organizing around what would be needed in order to offer less exploitative alternatives for interns. It can give us the confidence to challenge certain policies and behaviours and make us see that exploitation and free labour in the cultural sector is a really common problem. As artists and cultural workers, the work with the collective gives us ways to produce tools, processes, visuals and encounters in new ways that not only address the issues but also point toward another way of working beyond the competitive, individuated and schizophrenic modes to which we are accustomed and are expected to conform.

What is the difference between a volunteer, an intern and a worker?

Legally, this is a rather slippery field in the UK. A recent case won by the union BECTU (who mostly represent media, theatre, film workers) awarded months of back pay of minimum wage to an intern in the film industry because she was able to prove that what she was doing was in fact work. In the National Minimum Wage legislation in the UK, the main difference between working and volunteering or interning is the category of “obligation.” So for example, if you are required to come in at a specified time, to leave at a specified time, or if you are required to give notice, you are working. The legislation also specifies that interns, volunteers and those on work placements should not be doing work that would have otherwise been done by a paid member of staff. There is an exemption in the National Minimum Wage legislation however, that says charities can employ volunteers with no obligation to pay, train or reimburse time. Presumably this exemption was meant to cover people volunteering for Oxfam, Amnesty and the like—but because most of our public art galleries, private foundations and museums are registered charities in the UK, they have used this legislation to avoid falling foul of another BECTU case. So, for example, internships at the Tate are now advertised as “Volunteer Internships.” As we say in our Counter-guide, the law is an ass; it will not protect younger workers, or workers in museums and public galleries. [3] It will not enforce the learning that is supposed to be key to the internship experience and it will not deal with the basic fact of ongoing non-compliance by many organizations that simply know they can get away with it due to the false scarcities of employment in the cultural and creative sectors.

What qualifies as work? What makes work valuable?

In the world we live in, shaped by patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, it’s mostly wage labour that qualifies as work, not so much the feminized labour of taking care or of reproduction. That division between productive and reproductive work was relatively clear in the industrial era, with its two poles of the factory and the home. Now, with what some call post-Fordist production modes arising—flexible and self-employment, short-term contracts, information economies—what actually counts as work is no longer as clear. Aside from reproduction, so many precarious, flexible and informal labour practices have emerged, across which much working time is unpaid and across which the boundaries between work and life are blurred (just think of the entrepreneur, or the artist, and the way their lives come to be completely tied up in their work).

What makes work valuable economically are hierarchies of skill, provenance, visibility, which are in turn defined by market-driven acts of policy. In the UK, the points-based system for immigration is a good place to start understanding the way work is valued, determining the movements of the actual bodies of workers: the points-based system distinguishes “high-value migrants” from other workers, depending on what the UK economy needs. Generally, what’s valued highly is work that requires a lot of training or education, so-called highly skilled labour: creative labour sits on the rim of that. What makes work valuable to us, now that’s an entirely different question. There, the answer is about the way we relate to people we work with, the capacity for autonomy and care we have in our work, the freedom of thinking and inventing, and of course the material conditions of our work.

How do you respond to people who see the unpaid internship as a mandatory stepping-stone for working in the arts?

Only in the last decade has the unpaid internship become common. While there’s been a lot of talk about the boom in the creative industries, the increasing number of graduates in the field has been matched by a systematic decline in public spending in the arts, resulting in less jobs and pay overall. More generally, the idea of a linear progression from study to internship to paid work is becoming more and more mythical, as we see many people who have done successive internships that result in no reliable paid work. Instead, we see something more like a revolving door and a patchwork of precarious work, more free work and under-employment. We ask people thinking of embarking on an internship if an internship is really the best way of getting the experience they need, we ask if their free labour can be invested in producing another kind of culture, and if accepting the situation might be setting them up to accept terms and conditions that are disrespectful to them in the longer term. We argue that if one must intern, another internship is possible!

But hasn’t it always been the case that internships have been required for future paid employment? What has changed?

No! Professions that have historically had internships—such as medicine and law—paid their interns and internships in these sectors are genuinely periods of learning—not dogsbody jobs. Internships appear to be everywhere in every sector now, but this is a recent phenomena. The more systemic changes that have produced this situation have been discussed by many people, including, for instance Ross Perlin’s recent book InternNation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, and Shiv Malik’s book Jilted Generation: How Britian has Bankrupted its Youth. Broadly speaking, the pervasiveness of free labour is surely tied into the mutations in post-Fordist production talked about above and the rampant spread and entrenchment of neo-liberalism that has seen real wages of the middle and bottom earners stay still or shrink over the last thirty years, while income at the top has gone through the roof. It is no fluke that the weakening of organized labour from the Thatcher/Regan era onwards, coincides with these remarkable shifts in wealth distribution. In so-called western democracies’ societies of control, contemporary exploitation often takes this form of manipulation, hyper individuated responsibility and a complete capture of desire.

In my own experience, I ended up working several unpaid internships, coupled with a variety of self-motivated projects before I saw a positive affect on my own employment. This experience has made me question the value of my internships. I found myself getting really impatient with the suggestion that I was simply paying the same dues that everyone in the art world had to pay, particularly when I found myself facing debt from student loans and high cost of living. Does the lure of future paid employment lead to people taking on more work and justify interning for longer periods of time?

Unfortunately, your story is one we have heard many times. It is astonishing that what you have experienced is passed off as paying your dues. Some CWC members in our thirties didn’t have to do what you and many others are doing. This is a generational issue. And this is compounded by debt, unaffordable housing, rising food, transportation costs and so on. The clear message seems to be that working in culture is for the independently wealthy only. What you call the lure and what we call the carrot are the same thing. But we need to begin by asking what we really want to be doing and learning. If the paid job that comes along involves you in turn being forced to recruit and exploit an army of interns, if it involves endless fundraising or courting wealthy benefactors for an institution, it’s not exactly the carrot you were promised. So even if you follow this path, it often leads to disappointment. Through collectively analyzing, supporting and addressing these issues, we can simultaneously begin to build a vision of our own carrot—our own future and collective imagination of what our cultural sector, and by extension, our society—could look like. Then at least we have something to fight for.

I’ve also noticed that there has been an influx of MFA and PhD programs that encourage an unpaid internship as part of the educational process. Some schools even boast of this requirement as a draw to attend the program. Does this legitimate the need to undertake an internship in order to find future paid employment?

This is our experience in the UK too—and even at the undergraduate level. Those of us who work in universities are constantly resisting this push. It must be said though, that the push comes not only from management, but often from students themselves too. This is perhaps a signal of how successful the ideological shift that says education is merely for the benefit of individuals and their future pay packets. The same ideology subsumes education to the demands of industry and produces a generation of graduates who get locked in the mechanisms of social control that high-level debt so insidiously produces.

To answer your question however, yes, it does seem that the widespread incorporation of free labour into university degrees legitimizes the internship regime. And there are some American universities that actually require students to pay for these placements! A question we frequently ask is “What do we learn from free labour?” It would probably be a mistake to oppose intellectual or academic learning to vocational or work-based learning, however. Both categories are imbued with complex histories, assumptions and values, and work-based learning doesn’t have to mean simply learning how to self-exploit or learning your place in the hierarchies of the system as it is. For example, “The Pedagogy of Work,” a process developed by Celestin Freinet and a European network of radical educators in France (1930s to 1970s), rejected the idea of learning by doing in education as career development. Instead they believed that the school was a place in which to invent forms of life and work based on the needs and desires of people. Freinet’s idea of ‘Cooperative Learning’ involved students and teachers in the collective production of newspapers, food and spaces. Participation in the internship or co-operative learning in this sense took the form of assemblies that included students, teachers and other members of society engaged in collective decision making about social life.

Do you think unpaid internships privilege a work force able to afford to spend months working for free?

Undoubtedly. It is part and parcel of the contemporary entrenchment of social immobility, inequality and class division.

Do you think a proliferation of unpaid interns is affecting the stability and number of paid positions in the arts?

Yes. We really try to emphasize this in our work. Not only does this situation affect interns, but it also works its way through the entire workplace. Jobs and positions are constantly being turned into so-called internships. Those with paid jobs in institutions undergoing cuts in funding often find their workloads balloon. Instead of addressing this core issue, they are often told to just “get an intern” to fill in the gaps. As interns are supposed to be in addition to normal staffing and are supposed to receive training and mentoring which there is no time to give, this is an openly disingenuous and likely illegal move to outsource the cost of cuts and labour to individual interns. The solution, however, isn’t to pit one group against the other, but to look at how the intern and the worker have more in common than they think—and look at how the situation can be fought collectively.

A lot of small institutions face a discrepancy between the demand for programming and the funding available to put on that programming that encourages a reliance on unpaid work. In some ways these institutions may have very little other options except to support and continue this kind of precarity because of their own precarious situations. What other options are available for these institutions other than to rely on unpaid labour?

In our work within another broader collective, the Precarious Workers Brigade, we termed the situation you describe here as institutional precarity, and looked at how this played out in some London-based institutions. We think it’s important to question the rhetoric of having no other choice. Gallery and Museum Directors can decide not to compete on the level of frenzied over-programming and spectacle-production and decide instead to work sustainably and together on some of these issues. What has been remarkable in the UK in the last six months is how leaders in the universities and the arts, compared to leaders in the health sector for example, have been so weak in opposing the recent round of massive government cutbacks. One official arts campaign slogan reads “Cut us, don’t kill us”—hardly a fighting stance. There are possible glimmers of working together to address this in groupings of independent arts organizations in London, such as Common Practice, who are trying to influence public policy on wages and fees among other things.

You have been doing projects and interventions encouraging interns to question what constitutes work. Can you describe these projects? What has the response to these projects been?

One of the tools we’ve developed are maps upon which people can chart the balance between paid and unpaid work in their lives, to question what it is they actually call work and what escapes from that (very little in the case of cultural workers, to be honest!). We see those mappings as functioning a bit like Marx’s workers questionnaires, as tools for reflection and politicization as well as for research and gathering data. The maps are quite fun to fill in, accompanied by a conversation—we’ve had a lot of interesting discussions and faced the impasses and question marks of our work/life balance through people’s concrete experiences. Developing ways to narrate and also to make tangible those impasses is key, and that’s what this tool encourages, through the conversation format and the visualization process. Out of those chats we come up with new concepts for thinking about work. We’ve learned a lot.

Many of our projects and actions are concerned with desires. One tool we continue to work with is the photo-romance, whereby we gather together our own stories and experiences and then perform them, as a series of scenarios and moments where our various desires and anxieties relating to free labour are crystallized. The photo-romances act as a form of consciousness-raising; in these moments of both rehearsal and reflection you can experience the problem of your situation and also begin to imagine a way to change it, to look for escape routes.

We also organized The Creative Jobs Survival Fair, which was a space to obtain the support and advice needed for finding creative work, whilst at the same time revealing the more absurd side of things—stalls such as fake reference writing, debt forgiveness and an envelope-stuffing contest among others—but all very telling of the absurdly precarious situations we are faced with as cultural workers.

We recently published a counter-guide to internships, which gathers together all of the tools and resources that we work with and acts as a survival guide for those interns already out there, whilst also making the important links between interns, employers and the larger system we struggle with on a daily basis. Drawing on real examples and experiences, and offering tips and tools for navigation and negotiation, the counter-guide is also very much a tool in itself for imagining how we could organize otherwise, what work do we want to do, and what kind of society do we want to live in.

What can interns do to make their own situations less precarious?

Competition thrives on individual insecurity, the production of hierarchies and of manufactured scarcity. The only way to go beyond individualized despair is to recognize that it is not your burden alone to bear, but rather this is a shared condition and that you are in good company. You can decide to compete, but you can also join others and re-imagine other ways to do culture. We can only speak from our experience: when we started our research process, internships were thought by many to be an inevitable fact of life, a somewhat unfair but necessary rite of passage. The belief in the internship as a step towards that dangling carrot of a satisfying life in paid employment was still, to some extent, intact. Since then, the thousands of young people, graduates and unemployed caught in the revolving door of one internship after another, and a new right-wing government who propose free labour as the solution to cuts across every sector, have exposed the internship for what it is: an empty promise extending well beyond student life, whose primary aim is to teach us to bow down, to know our place and to be happy with less.

In Autumn 2010, a broad and exciting movement of students and workers came together in the UK to fight the government’s savage cuts to education and the public sector, and to fight all of those processes that were already underway under the last Labour Government: debt, privatization, internships. At that moment, we suspended working on our counter-guide to free labour and joined in. The movement has given us many new skills and experiences. We have learned to work collectively, to figure out ways of struggling against cuts without advocating for the old system that we are also so critical of. We have learned the importance of linking our own precarious struggles to those working in other sectors. We have made friends at demonstrations and put our free labour into thinking about how to organize our internships, work and education differently.

NOTES:

[1] Twenty percent of youth in the UK are unemployed compared to the 7.7 percent total unemployment rate, and while Canada’s statistics may seem more favorable at 15.6 percent of youth, it is still double the unemployment rate of Canadians overall.

[2] Militant research is not just another method of investigation used in the social sciences. It stems out of a critique of the supposed neutrality of academic knowledge and of its specialists vis à vis their inert objects of study. Instead, militant researches (and maybe this term should always be plural, as each experience unfolds differently) are interested in the relationship between knowledge and action as a possibility to bring about a political transformation in the present. For militant researchers, the actual process of investigation, the format it takes, who participates in it, its temporal rhythms and the relationships it creates are as important as the new ‘knowledge’ it creates and the ultimate political goals it may achieve. Militant researches know that each experiment in the production of knowledge will traverses our bodies and affect our common subjectivities.

[3] Even though there are clear definitions about what constitutes work and therefore what should be compensated for through minimum wage, the law itself is not fully up to defending our rights as free workers.

WEB LINKS OF INTEREST

Precarious Workers Brigade People’s Tribunal

ARTISTS’ PROJECTS IN THIS ISSUE:

PETER MORIN PORTRAITS OF THE TAHLTAN LAND STORY (Pages 18, 19, 24, 36; 2011)

ERIN MARIE KONSMO & LOUIS ESME CRUZ UNsettling, ReImagining, acKNOWledge (Page 7; 2011)

Louis Esme Cruz is a Mi’kmaq, Irish and Acadian author, educator and artist based in Toronto, Three Fires Territory. Some of his writing and art works appear in Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, Feminism FOR REAL, GLQ: Indigeneity, Nationality and Sexuality and Redwire Magazine.

Erin Marie Konsmo is a Metis/Cree Indigenous Feminist and artist from Innisfail, Alberta. She is currently an Intern for the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and on the National Aboriginal Youth Council on HIV and AIDS. A Toronto based artist, Erin has shown her work as part of the ‘Resilience’ exhibit in the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts, and is included in Feminism FOR REAL, Shameless Magazine, and recently on Racialicious post OCCUPY WALL STREET: The Game of Colonialism and further nationalism to be decolonized by the “Left” by Jessica Yee.  

UNsettling, ReImagining, acKNOWledge is an Indigenous response to the Occupy movement. This piece calls on everyone to reimagine a vision that will recognize Indigenous place, land, bodies, and end the many versions of the ‘Game of Colonialism’.

CHASE JOYNT & ALEXIS MITCHELL TEACH ME TO QUESTION EVERYTHING (Page 31; 2011)

Reiteration of a poster project produced and disseminated virtually beginning in the fall of 2011.

FORMS OF THE STRUGGLE/EDITORIAL

Occupation is a form of life that sits at the heart of our ongoing series, States of Postcolonality. This current issue, which is neither part of the series nor entirely separate, has developed out of a formative engagement with the condition of occupation. The politics of occupations are mixed-up, historically and geographically uneven. The occupations that concern us here are a form of anticapitalist struggle conjured well by the Catalan phrase “em planto,” which carries a double meaning of “I plant,” and “I have had enough.” [1] These occupations, if we allow ourselves to be optimistic, move from a systemic critique of capitalism and its divisive devices of exploitation towards a prefigurative politics shaped by mutual aid, solidarity and radical inclusivity.

Since the 17 September 2011 occupation of Manhattan’s Liberty Square, near Wall Street, occupations of public parks and plazas have proliferated, grown and been forcibly evicted, prompting some to dub this season the American Fall. In describing these singular and sited instances of resistance as the Occupy Movement, we do not seek to flatten the unique form and process of each. As FUSE contributor Harsha Walia stated when she spoke at Occupy Toronto in early November, each site has its own dynamics, strengths and challenges. Speaking of Occupy Vancouver, rebel-blogger D has remarked that it is an engagement with the complexity of contradictions between issues, ideologies and approaches that makes the occupation a “real event of thinking and acting.” [2] Nonetheless, particularly in contrast to the transient summit-hops of the anti-globalization movement, there are significant tactical, or formal, differences to this new wave of protest. These formal manifestations consist of a type of connective tissue linking many singular occupations, with their disparate issues and geographies, into something that can properly be recognized as a global movement.

In and of itself, occupation as a form of resistance is not new. Examples abound in recent memory alone: squatting as a means of defending homes against foreclosure by US organizations such as Take Back the Land and City Life/Vida Urbana (beginning in 2008); the student occupations of university buildings in Berkeley and New York (2008–10); the occupation of Tahrir Square and public squares across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region during what has come to be known as the Arab Spring; overnight camp-outs in the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin (2011) and even the all-night people’s filibuster at Toronto’s Budget Committee meeting on 28 July 2011.

As Silvia Federici argues in a recent interview with FUSE contributor Max Haiven, the occupations of this year emerge “from the confluence between the feminist movement and the movement for the commons.” [3] This movement, which “places its own reproduction at the centre of its organizing” — through its creation of kitchens, libraries and free-schools, for instance — is indebted to legacies of feminism: “Consensus-based decision-making, the distrust of leaders (formal or charismatic) and the idea that you need to prefigure the world you want to create through your actions and organization, these were all developed by radical feminist movements.” [4] After 500 years of resistance to colonialism, it is safe to say that Indigenous populations across the Americas also have significant expertise and insight that should be highly respected and valued by any new movement.

In this issue of FUSE, we can see how the forms of occupation might be read as a kind of permutation and condensation of longer-term approaches to social and environmental justice. Etienne Turpin’s Reflections on Stainlessness develops a materialist history of the Anthropocene through resource extraction and organized labour, reminding us that before 15 September 2011, there was 1 May 1886. Kevin Smith and Clayton Thomas-Muller’s Social Licence is a description of solidarity work between UK-based arts-activism groups and First Nations activists that critically intervenes into the interdependence of the oil industry and cultural institutions. Peter Morin’s Portraits of the Tahltan Land Story is an exquisite visual expression of Tahltan Nation (northern BC) knowledge, a material projection of a “language that comes from the land.” [5]

Writing from the Netherlands, Haseeb Ahmed calls for the formal alliance of artists and arts organizations with other sectors facing funding cuts under an umbrella of radical, organized Left resistance to ultraconservative so-called austerity measures. Chase Joynt and Alexis Mitchell offer us an example of gender justice at the intersection of media activism and public education through an iteration of the massively popular poster campaign they initiated this September. Nasrin Himada and Red Channels skirt around the contours of an open collectivity, a type of social organization that allows for hyper-production without feeding into the banalities of (creative) capitalist accumulation. As the occupations of the American Fall move into foreclosed residential and commercial buildings for the winter and increasingly develop alliances with ongoing local struggles, the continued vitality of the movement will depend on its ability to build on the forms and tactics of long-standing anticapitalist efforts.

[1] I am entirely indebted to Hilary Wainwright, socialist feminist and long-term editor of Red Pepper magazine, for this linguistic insight. H. Wainwright, “Indignados movement takes root in Barcelona,” Transnational Institute (October 2011).

[2] D, “Occupation: Antagonism and Potentiality,” Vancouver Media Co-op (20 October 2011).

[3] Max Haiven, “Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy – An Interview with Silvia Federici,” znet (25 November 2011).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Peter Morin, personal correspondence, 6 September 2011.

LAUNCH PARTIES and EVENTS in Toronto, London (ON) and Winsdor in the new year, stay posted for dates.

The current issue of FUSE, Forms of the Struggle, has developed out of a formative engagement with the condition of occupation. A special collection of writing and images from contributors Harsha Walia, Syed Hussan, Max Haiven, Erin Konsmo and Louis Esme Cruz on the #Occupy movement introduces the issue. Articles and projects from Etienne Turpin, Kevin Smith and Clayton Thomas-Muller, Nasrin Himada with Red Channels, Haseeb Ahmed, Peter Morin, Chase Joynt and Alexis Mitchell, demonstrate practices connected obliquely to #Occupy and its forms through a materialist history of struggle.

Plus reviews of Heather Iglioliorte’s Decolonize Me (by Linda Grussani), Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell’s Border Sounds (by Natalie Kouri-Towe), Aganetha Dyck and William Eakin’s Light (by Julian Jason Haladyn and Miriam Jordan), and Leah Decter’s (official denial) trade value in progress (by Nahed Mansour).

Related posts:

1. Decolonizing the Occupations: Shortlist of Links
2. Seeking critical responses to the “Occupy movement” from indigenous, radical and/or anticapitalist perspectives
3. States of Postcoloniality/Egypt

This summer, the Serpentine Gallery in London (UK) played host to the latest installation of the Bidoun Library, an itinerant collection of books, periodicals, audio-visual art and ephemera produced or utilized in the Middle East. The Library’s wide range of printed matter is acquired from sources as diverse as the region’s artists and activists, to state departments and international corporations long entrenched in the oil industry.

Founded in 2004, Bidoun is a collective of internationally-based artists, curators and writers who oversee a range of educational outreach, exhibitions and publishing projects including the much-renowned contemporary art periodical Bidoun and the pop-up Bidoun Library. Through these projects and collaborations, Bidoun seeks to create a forum for critical reflection on cultural production within the Middle East and Middle Eastern diasporas, as well as on political, academic and cultural iterations in regards to the region from Western and mainstream sources. The first instance of Bidoun’s touring Library was at Abu Dhabi Art in November 2009.

The tensions, opinions, mandates, ideologies and other insights that are reflected in collections and archives of small press publications, zine and ephemera, such as those curated and compiled by Bidoun and other artist-run spaces including Toronto’s Art Metropole are crucial for filling out and sometimes countering traditional, mainstream and unquestioned narratives both local and global. Furthermore, archives of printed matter can make visible the multiple connections and movements inherent in transnational culture. As the current archivist at Art Metropole, the role and function of such collections are of great interest to me. The following exchange, between Babak Radboy of Bidoun and myself, took place over email in August 2011.

[...]

How do publications and artists’ books make their way into the Library? Do you get a lot of submissions, or must you continually seek out publications and unique book works?

To answer this question directly might be a bit misleading. The thing is, the library is not a collection of the coolest or best art books coming out of the Middle East—although we may possess many of them—it is in fact a material critique of cultural production and the discourses that presuppose such books. The basic premise is that since the bound, print object has been displaced by new technologies as the primary vehicle for information, books and periodicals have acquired a new opacity and thus a new vulnerability to material critique. They are no longer just the transparent envelopes for discourse, they are objects—and as objects are subject to the pressures and incentives of material production and a wide range of material objectives; economic, historical and political.

[...]

To continue reading, purchase the single article, the whole issue, below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

Denise Ryner is the current Registrar/Archivist at Art Metropole, a Toronto-based artist-run centre that collects, publishes and distributes artists’ -books, -editions, -multiples and related ephemera. Her current projects include a curatorial collaboration with Barbara Fischer, director of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, on a year-long exhibition titled Location/Dislocation that considers the implications of a variety of uprooting, as well as establishing forces ranging from post-colonial diasporas, multiculturalism, cultural re-articulation, economic exploitation to urban gentrification. Denise has recently joined the editorial committee of FUSE magazine. This is her first contribution to FUSE.

Babak Radboy is an artist and art director living in New York City. He is the creative director of Bidoun magazine and the curator of the Bidoun Library. He is currently nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for Best Art Direction for the music video POWER for Kanye West. We are living in strange times.

Related posts:

1. Current issue: 34-4/EGYPT
2. Any Celebration is Premature
3. Anything But Its Own Uncovering

For most people outside of Egypt, the revolutionary events of February—as part of what is now referred to as the Arab Spring—were received via a rapid torrent of images that formed an endless evolving montage on broadcast news channels. Though inevitably truncated, fractured and fragmented by the media filter, the potency and evocative immediacy of these images—images transmitted from an artillery of ubiquitous mini-recording devices operated by the participants themselves—demanded a response. Seen through a cinephilic lens, the images emerging from Egypt called to mind another assortment of images from the previous spring: the heteroglot assemblage that was Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, composed of footage culled from cellphones, anamorphic video and HD, whose evocations of contemporary global cataclysms economic, environmental and political rhyme uncannily well with the collectively authored tapestry of images that represented the Arab Spring to the world. As is so often the case (for the vast majority of the Western world, at least), the reality of revolution was made inextricable from its representation—a mise-en-abyme requiring a Godardian critical intervention to sift through its proliferating visual traces and restore to them the autonomy they had lost in the rush of narrative.

In this situation, film curation and exhibition necessarily become essayistic practices, critical programs in poetic dialogue with social reality. While history offers innumerable instances in which the imperialist impulse of commercial film distribution and exhibition has used the developing world as grist for its mill—for instance, the nascent Technicolor process proved both its technological and commercial viability through such “exotic” documentary films as Cairo, City Of Contrast (1938)—one could also cite a number of instances in which film programs have been effective tools in understanding and responding to revolution. In instances such as Maurice Lemaitre’s abstruse screening events under the banner of Lettrism, to Robert Flaherty’s pioneering documentary film forum, one can see how film programming forms a contemporaneous archaeology of the reality of global events. Navigating recent examples, one finds an incipient catalogue of programs that examine Egypt’s current landscape. In shifting scales, each film explores different planes and perspectives of an intangible political reality. Our pursuit here will be the juxtaposition of two recently screened film programs focused on Egypt: French filmmaker Emmanuelle Demoris’ Mafrouza cycle, and Egypt Rising: Portents of Revolution in Recent Egyptian Cinema, curated by Rasha Salti.

Three weeks after the initial events of the Arab Spring, film professor, writer and programmer Gabe Klinger traveled to Egypt with Emmanuelle Demoris to present Demoris’ twelve-hour, five-part documentary film series collectively named the Mafrouza cycle (2007-10), after the eponymous Alexandrian neighbourhood in which the films are set. Demoris first encountered Mafrouza and its residents ten years ago, after accepting an invitation from a group of French archaeologists to explore the ruins of the necropolis of Alexandria. After Demoris met the people who had built their homes in the ruins, the archaeological impulse became secondary as she spent four years living with them and chronicling their daily lives with a low-grade digital camera—a cinematic tool intimately connected to the democratization of image-making.

While there is no direct connection, French distribution was secured for Mafrouza immediately after the events of the Arab Spring, which also facilitated Demoris and Klinger’s trip to Egypt to present the films at the American University in Cairo and the French Institute in Alexandria. The latter is only a stone’s throw from the improvised neighbourhood itself, or rather what is left of it; since Demoris finished filming, all of Mafrouza’s residents have been displaced by the city to make way for a real-estate development. The presence of a number of Mafrouza residents at screenings of the films no doubt helped contribute to the exciting, sometimes impassioned discussions that Klinger and Demoris moderated afterwards. While it would be both glib and slighting of the films’ aesthetic condour to view them solely in hindsight of the Arab Spring, the durational intensity of Mafrouza over its ruminative, yet gripping twelve hours helps reveal not only the textures but the density of daily life, that which can give weight to such ecstatic, all-too-infrequent bursts of liberation as Egypt witnessed in February.

For international film programmer Rasha Salti—who presented the six-film program called Egypt Rising: Portents of Revolution in Recent Egyptian Cinema at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox in June 2011 as part of the Luminato Festival—a contrasting conflation of fiction and non-fiction is embodied in a surreptitious shift in Egypt’s independent filmmaking. In these films, simple, archetypal stories told by Egypt’s first generation of independent filmmakers provide an alternative historiographical context in which to understand the successive revolutionary events.

[...]

Prior to the Arab Spring, filming was not allowed?

Before Mubarak fell, it was illegal for Egyptians to film in the streets. All of a sudden, there are no rules and it’s impossible to put people in jail for filming because everyone’s doing it. I think we’re going to see some very prominent examples of that in the coming years. But, I think there is still a long way to go. There needs to be a screening culture where young people can see things, and a critical culture and aesthetic rigour that are currently lacking. That’s why it’s so crucial to show Mafrouza in this context.

[...]

To continue reading, purchase the single article, the whole issue, below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

Rasha Salti is currently the Toronto International Film Festival’s programmer for African and Middle Eastern Cinema. Salti is an independent film and visual arts curator and writer. In 2011, she was one of co-curators of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial for the Arts, with Suzanne Cotter and Haig Aivazian. Salti writes about artistic practice in the Arab world, film, and general social and political commentary, in Arabic and English. Her articles and essays have been published in The Jerusalem Quarterly Report (Palestine), Naqd (Algeria), MERIP (USA), The London Review of Books (UK), Afterall (US) and Third Text (UK).

Gabe Klinger, a Chicago-based teacher, writer and film programmer, was born in São Paulo, Brazil. He is currently an assistant professor in fine arts at National-Louis University. Klinger co-founded and is head programmer of Chicago Cinema Forum, a non-profit devoted to talking about and disseminating important and challenging works in film history. He has served on juries at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema (Argentina), the Viennale (Austria), and the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (Brazil), among others. As a journalist and critic, Klinger has written for over twenty journals, regularly attends film festivals all over the world, and is a member of the International Federation of Film Critics.

Image Credit: Hesham Issawi, Cairo Exit, 2010 (digital still). Digital presentation, 100 min. Egypt/United Arab Emirates. Image courtesy of TIFF Egypt Rising Film Program and Hesham Issawi.

Related posts:

1. Current issue: 34-4/EGYPT
2. Any Celebration is Premature
3. States of Postcoloniality/Egypt

As the revolution continues to unfold here in Egypt, it is clear that any celebratory posturing is premature, if not entirely delusional. However, recent events have undoubtedly created a rupture in the social, cultural and political landscape whereby, for the first time in decades, previously suppressed debates and discussions about issues of public concern are happening in local ahwas (coffee houses), work places, online, in the streets and in public squares. The revolution has, at least for the moment, destabilized the state’s ability to control public discourse and the circulation of ideas.

A striking aspect of the Egyptian revolution is the frenzy of creative response and accelerated cultural production that has gripped Cairo and other parts of the country. The creativity and sense of urgency expressed in the streets continue on as competing groups give voice to their visions for the country’s future. However, the question remains what legacy the revolution will have on the country’s cultural organizations, artists and art production.

Egypt’s cultural scene has been dominated and officially administered by the Ministry of Culture, which acts as both patron and censor, since it was established in 1952 following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military coup and rise to power. Matters of taste, aesthetics, and what constitutes appropriate art and culture for the public (and, therefore, what would be funded or exhibited publicly) have been tightly controlled by the state. Despite this, a number of independent arts organizations have been gradually established outside of the purview of the Ministry of Culture, including Cairo’s Darb 1718 Contemporary Art and Culture Center; the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC); and the Townhouse Gallery.

Such spaces play a significant role in the advancement of contemporary art and cultural praxis by making space available for local artists to produce work, and by reframing the interlocking discourses of art, culture and politics beyond the control of the state. Independent art organizations also serve as a much-needed supplement to an (art) education system that has been neglected by the state, and is, therefore, out of sync with current issues and ideas that circulate in academe and the international art community.

[...]

To continue reading, purchase the single article, the whole issue, below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

Joseph Banh is a Canadian cultural consultant, visual artist and writer currently based in Cairo, Egypt. He is interested in the dynamics of global cultural flows as expressed through contemporary cultural production.

Moataz Nasreldin, founder of Darb 1718, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1961. He lives and works in Cairo. Reflecting the processes of cultural complexity currently under way in the Islamic world, his work goes beyond the particularities and boundaries and gives voice to concerns. The sense of a geopolitical and cultural context and the need to maintain a link with his land of origin are the key elements of the life and work of the artist. Using a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, video and installations, his work speaks of Egypt—its traditions, its people, its colours—without ever falling into the exotic or creating distances.

William Wells started his career in the arts in 1980, as one of the co-founders of London-based Unit Seven Studios, a multi-disciplinary artist-run collective. He also served as an educational advisor to Britain’s Arts Council and Crafts Council. In 1985, Wells moved to Cairo, where he worked for development agencies before returning to the curatorial and arts management fields, setting up art programs and agencies throughout the Middle East. In 1998, Wells established the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art.

Mia Jankowicz is the Artistic Director of Contemporary Image Collective (CIC). She studied visual cultures and curatorial practice before running the international residency programme at Gasworks, London. She has contributed texts to various magazines, catalogues and readers. With Anna Colin, she has collaborated on the ongoing, independent curatorial project Disclosures.
In 2012, she will curate PhotoCairo 5, CIC’s large-scale, contemporary visual arts project.

Image Credit: Claudio Curciotti and Eleonora Trani, Egypt Reborn, 2011. Musical performance. Commissioned for the opening day of the exhibition accompanying Darb 1718′s “Art of Illustration” workshop. Image courtesy of Darb 1718.

Related posts:

1. Current issue: 34-4/EGYPT
2. Anything But Its Own Uncovering
3. States of Postcoloniality/Egypt

Olive McKeon

The following text is excerpted from FUSE Magazine 34.4 (September 2011). In order to read the full text, you can purchase the article below.

A sledgehammer meets glass, distant shouts, sirens, the air thick with tear-gas and smoke, shards of glass sparkling on the concrete, smoldering cars, the street strewn with objects askew. Bodies running together, bodies forming packs that spread out into lines and condense again into tight swarms. Riots often employ a familiar set of compositional devices: bodies circulating in atypical pathways, the spatial displacement of objects, the breaking of brittle surfaces, the burning of combustible elements. While one can certainly give an account of these moments within a struggle as resulting from a particular calculus of social and material forces, what can one learn from an inquiry into the riot’s formal dimension—its shards and ashes, its clamor and mess, its inescapable sensuality?

This essay examines the “Battle of the Camel,” a street confrontation between pro- and anti-Mubarak forces that took place in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (“Liberation Square”) on February 2, 2011. This mounted camel charge became a spatial contestation of political legitimacy enacted on a corporeal level. By embodying social antagonism within urban space, riots such as the Battle of the Camel often fall prey to the accusation of destructiveness, a claim that overlooks the far more destructive role played by capital within social relations on an ongoing basis. Riots shift the power to disrupt urban space from capital and the state to the riot’s collective body. In thinking through the dynamics and significance of the riot as a form of struggle, its embodied dimension plays a crucial role. The actions of the body add an additional layer to the coding of the riot that exceeds textual signs such as chants and posters. As an embodied set of actions, the practice of the riot produces its own logic and permissions not only for the rioter but also for urban space in general. The corporeal struggle over space and time that emerges during a riot resonates with attempts made by choreographers such as Anna Halprin to experiment with which movements are possible in a street context. The present analysis of the Battle of the Camel, and riots more broadly, attends to the formal aspects of struggle, a dimension that is often overlooked or neglected. Turning towards the body and its crucial participation in the elaboration of a political struggle makes evident a corporeal contestation of legitimacy at play in Tahrir Square, and riots in general.

My description of the Battle of the Camel is pieced together from the video footage and international news sources available from my distant location in California. In writing about such a recent and unprecedented unfolding of events in North Africa and the Middle East, I am aware that a complex politics of representation surrounds any attempt to name or describe these events. I do not wish to generate a narrative that too quickly explains and contains the uncertainty of what has and will occur within the unfolding cycle of struggles.

Beginning on the January 25, a protest encampment against then-president Hosni Mubarak occupied Tahrir Square, a prominent public square in downtown Cairo. Events on one particular day during the popular uprising, Wednesday February 2, 2011, became known as the Battle of the Camel. A pro-Mubarak rally convened on the morning of February 2, following a televised announcement the evening previous, during which Mubarak declared that he would not run for re-election in the fall in order to appease protesters. [1] Mercenaries hired by the regime, paid 50 Egyptian pounds (roughly $9 USD) for the day, and plainclothes police officers held a rally in Lebanon Square in Western Cairo, during which camel riders and horse-drawn carts paraded in circles around the square. Around noon, the Mubarak supporters moved from the west of the city to central Cairo, approaching Tahrir Square. Gathering around the Egyptian Museum and pushing through the army tanks that blocked the street leading into the square, pro-government forces mounted on camels and horses besieged the anti-Mubarak protesters. Carrying clubs, rods, sticks and staffs, they burst into Tahrir Square and provoked bloody confrontations as they rode directly into the encampment. Gunfire accompanied the arrival of the camel entourage, possibly the army firing upwards in order to disperse protesters. The anti-Mubarak demonstrators pushed back against the incursions into the square, causing the mercenaries to flee. The violence continued into the evening, as pro-Mubarak forces threw rocks and homemade bombs from the Qasr al-Nil Bridge leading into the square.

In video footage of this daytime Battle of the Camel, it is apparent that the mounted joust generated a complex set of movement dynamics in the square. Groups of galloping camels cut channels through the dense crowd. A constant barrage of varied sized rocks flew like confetti in the air above the heads of those running on the ground. Huge swaths of the square began to dash as if fleeing an encroaching natural disaster, generating gaps that the pro-Mubarak contingent filled. The line between the two sides slid around the traffic circle at the centre of the square, recalling opposing football teams negotiating the position of the line between them during each play. Both pro- and anti-Mubarak demonstrators wore plain clothes, making the sides visually indistinguishable to outside observers. In waves of acceleration and deceleration, space became overturned, claimed and filled. In the attack of the square, the camel riders did not have a specific territorial objective beyond heading into the crowd and busting it up. The space of the square became abstracted from its specific functions and qualities during the attack and defense of positions in space.

The movement dynamics reflected a spatial joust for political legitimacy. The aggregation of bodies in the square had an abstract relation to the ouster of the president. The form of the struggle decoupled from its supposed ends. The square became an arena to enact a power play in which the position of bodies performed the struggle for control. Despite the abstraction of political legitimacy into space, bodies in the square could not escape the materiality of the violence—they suffered beatings, injuries to the head and deaths. Amidst the waves of back-and-forth violence, the struggle for space mediated the struggle for control of the country. The uprising in Egypt succeeded in generating a mass delegitimation of a regime that had previously organized social relations, the process of which continues to unfold with uncertainty.

[...]

To continue reading, purchase the single article, the whole issue, below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

Olive McKeon is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She writes on the intersections between dance studies, Marxism and feminism.

Image Credit: Tahrir Square, Cairo, February 4, 2011. Photograph by Mona Seif. Creative Commons Attribution license.

Related posts:

1. States of Postcoloniality/Egypt
2. Anything But Its Own Uncovering
3. Current issue: 34-4/EGYPT

The following text is excerpted from FUSE Magazine 34.4 (September 2011). In order to read the full text, you can purchase the article below.

The Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), the only not-for-profit artist-run centre in the city, was established in May 2006. Housed in a bare but spacious second-floor flat with high ceilings and exposed brick walls, it is a refreshing anomaly in Alexandria, Egypt.

ACAF’s committed staff, comprised of Bassam El Baroni, Mona Marzouk and Mahmoud Khaled, have fostered an inviting contemporary art space offering workshops, artist talks and exhibitions as integral components of its programming—all free of charge.

Over the past six years, during my brief but annual returns to Alexandria and ACAF, I have been repeatedly amazed, though not surprised, by ACAF’s ability to remain faithful to its mandate, which pledges an “ongoing engagement with projects that bring together established and emerging artists, university students and diverse practitioners in contexts that recognize the value of an informal, non-hierarchal, open-ended circulation of information and experience.”

I most recently visited ACAF on August 8, 2011, to conduct an interview with Bassam El Baroni. His nuanced observations on the predicaments and tensions in current discussions about the relationship between art and politics in Egypt (and beyond) left me questioning my own previous understandings of independent art scenes, street art, contemporary art and revolution.

[...]

When establishing Alexandria’s first alternative or independent contemporary art space, do you think you created a dichotomy wherein ACAF directly opposed the existing art scene?

This has some truth to it, but it’s not entirely correct. Is the independent scene really independent? What does “independent” mean? How can we be truly independent if we are constantly pushed to pose ourselves as independent? I think institutions perform their independence in order to survive and be able to receive the little financial support that is available. I think that as an institution there is a certain performativity of independence that calls for constant posing as the alternative to the official discourse. But with ACAF, on a working level, we’ve tried to avoid that as much as we can.

In a recent interview with Hassan Khan in ArtTerritories 2, I was looking for the hidden reasons for this problematic dichotomy, as you call it, that people tend to use between the independent scene and the governmental, or official, scene. This has always been problematic because the ideology that we call “the official discourse” might have started out as official discourse, but it is no longer just propagated by institutions. It is actually deeply rooted in Egyptian society and part of many people’s identity. Posing yourself as the alternative to this is quite problematic.

[...]

To continue reading, purchase the single article, the whole issue, below, or subscribe to FUSE for as little as $24!

Bassam El Baroni is a curator and art critic from Alexandria, Egypt. He is the co-founder and director of the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, and was co-curator of Manifesta 8 (2010), held in Murcia, Spain. Recent exhibitions and engagements include: the ongoing collaborative archive project The Arpanet Dialogues, started in 2010 with Jeremy Beaudry and Nav Haq; Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Re-enacted Decade (2009), co-curated with Helga-Marie Nordby at UKS, Oslo, Norway; and Cleotronica 08 (2008), an international media art festival in Alexandria, Egypt. Since 2009, Bassam has developed and performed a series of dramatized context-specific lectures entitled “FOXP2,” which combine notions of pre-history, genealogy, economics and art criticism to create episodes of possible universalisms.

Nahed Mansour is a Toronto-based artist who works in performance, installation and video. Her works have been presented throughout Canada, including: SINGER (Whippersnapper Gallery, Toronto); Varied Toil (Modern Fuel, Kingston); Vertigo/ Vitiligo (La Centrale, Montreal); Kh (MAI, Montreal); Measuring (SAVAC’s MONITER 8, Toronto); Disorientalism (AKA Gallery, Saskatoon); and Darkening Cells (7a*11d Festival, Toronto). Since completing her MFA at Concordia University, Montreal, she has worked as a Program Coordinator at Mayworks Festival-Toronto, while continuing to pursue independent curatorial projects.

Image Credit: Street Art in Alexandria, 2011. Photograph by Kole Kilibarda.

Related posts:

1. Current issue: 34-4/EGYPT
2. States of Postcoloniality/Egypt

Facilitated by Gina Badger and cheyanne turions

No Reading After the Internet has invited FUSE to co-present their November salon, which will feature research material from FUSE’s upcoming issue. Through group reading and discussion, we will consider the current “Occupy” movement in relation to colonial dynamics in Canada.

Image Credit: October 17, 2011 in St Lawrence Market, Toronto, Canada. Photograph by Flickr user ryPix. Creative Commons Attribution license.

About

No Reading After the Internet is an opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scope within which such work exists. This program departs from Cineworks’s Thought on Film series. Whilst still very interested in cinema, the focus of this incarnation is softened to accommodate the broad (and ever expanding) scope of media art.

Though the idea of a reading group isn’t new (consider Rainer Ganahl’s Reading Karl Marx and Kristina Lee Podesva’s D&G Reading Group Or How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Colours?), No Reading nonetheless poses itself as a space for experimental learning and discussion. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a space within which to retrace the steps used in constructing understanding, productively challenging individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. To participate in No Reading is to invoke an exuberant not-knowing, seeking out moments of collective illumination. The strategies we have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous exhibitions and happenings.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of their familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the salon. No pre-reading or research is required.

No Reading After the Internet is a project of the collective efforts of Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk, Alexander Muir and cheyanne turions.

Related posts:

1. Seeking critical responses to the “Occupy movement” from indigenous, radical and/or anticapitalist perspectives
2. Decolonizing the Occupations: Shortlist of Links
3. Announcing FUSEblog Series: Burn the Archives!

Manissa McCleave Maharawal: ”So Real it Hurts - Notes on Occupy Wall Street”

Anti-State STL: “Are We An Occupation or Just a Gathering?”

Solid to the Core: “Decolonizing the Occupations: Answering the Challenge posed by Indigenous Activists” (and a related video)

Jessica Yee/Racialicious: “Occupy Wall Street: The Game of Colonialism and Further Nationalism to be Decolonized From the ‘Left’”

Adrienne K./Native Appropriations: “Representing the Native Presence in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Narrative”

Oakland Commune/Bay of Rage: “THE OCCUPATION MOVEMENT: ON GREED, UNITY & VIOLENCE”

JohnPaul Montano: ”An Open Letter to the Occupy Wall Street Activists”

Unsettling America: “Decolonize Together”

Republic of Lakotah: “An Indigenous Platform Proposal for ‘Occupy Denver‘”

Crimethinc: “Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists“

Related posts:

1. Seeking critical responses to the “Occupy movement” from indigenous, radical and/or anticapitalist perspectives

The FUSE Editorial Committee met last night to work on our upcoming December issue and a recurrent subtext to our conversations was the need for a response to the exclusionary rhetoric of the “Occupy movement” (we’re collaborating with LIFT and cheyanne turions on a salon on this topic on November 2 – come!). We’ve been sitting on the edge of our chairs watching the development of an “agenda” and rhetoric for occupation that is missing a deep sense of movement history or a substantive critique of ongoing legacies of violence towards marginalized groups – unlimited to genocide, racism, misogyny and homophobia. We have been heartened by the rising volume of critical responses and we’re eager to see how these manifest in presence at the occupations set to start all over Canada on this Saturday the 15th.

In the rapidly approaching December issue, we’d like to include some open letters/reports that respond to this in Canada specifically. We are currently collecting links and references for people who are making visual and/or written critical responses to the racism of the Occupations (we’re especially but not exclusively focusing on the ways that language of “occupation” obscures the fact that North America is built on stolen land). It goes without saying, we hope, that the intention here is to radicalize the rhetoric around the movement and orient it clearly towards social justice and anti-imperialism – not to “shut it down” or create division.

If you or your colleagues are writing about this and can get us a draft of a 1,000-2,000 word text in the next week for publication in our December issue (final copy due November 7), please get in touch ASAP and let me know what you’ve got on deck.

Write to editor AT fusemagazine DOT org and put OCCUPY in the subject heading.