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The calendar ticks down to a conclusion. It’s a time for reflection, respite, or evasion, but toil also churns on in this machine, its repetitions endless and inescapable, ostensibly as sure as the planet’s orbit.
Where are we headed? It’s necessary to ask as we continue to witness and experience both extraordinary and everyday horrors of this brutal world — a reality imposed by capital, state, and nation, competing empires and their adherents play at deadly games of domination all while value is invented and extracted from every last crevice of life. Powerless, the drive to consume seems the only way left to feel anything.
This horizon while totalising is also false, the fatalism it produces ignores the ways in which life fights on from below — small or large, it is a fight. There can be more, but we’ll have to stop getting pulled along, and we’ll have to build it.
What sustains us? What nourishes us physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually? What do we hold in common? Are we meeting in person to nurture the rebellious desires and capacities for mutual care, hidden from persistent stares to map constellations “creating pathways between the fragments”, seeding that “armed joy”, conspiring towards “something more decisive than a group of friends”? Or have we truly forgotten how even to dream, to allow ourselves the supposedly unrealistic and unworkable? What has been ceded and what will we steal back?
After a short break on the last days of 2025, we turn over the page on renewed focus.
What’s all this for? Consider uncertainty as something that could possibly be embraced. There is no perfect knowledge, no perfect time, no perfect plan. Our attempts are made in the now, and could very well falter. But openings can be found in the gaps of sureness, a pliancy and dexterity yet still informed and supported by means and ends meeting — a continual process of partisan inquiry, curiosity, relating, making, and being. Continuing as our struggles do.
If you’ve visited or written to us before, you might have gotten one of our very irregular email newsletters last week. In it is a recap and update on our funding efforts with information for making direct transfers, as well as summaries on past and ongoing plans, sketching out some possibilities in inviting you to use the space. We must have missed some people, so get in touch if you want to be on this mailer, find our email or contact form on the website.
There’s also a new channel on here for more direct communication. We will use it to repost visiting info, posts, updates, calls, reads, and maybe more, but it’s really just a bandaid, an “exit in progress.” We need better tools, our own tools. But for now, if you’re organising solidarity events, direct aid fundraisers, or have asks for support, send them our way and we can help recirculate them. In a similar vein but for multi-way comms, if you’ve visited and are interested to meet others, nudge us about Discord.
As part of prep for Labour Block (24–25 Jan) our visuals are getting refreshed, some of which the keen-eyed would have already spotted on Patreon. We want to make a reintroduction and rearticulation for wares as other bits of graphics, the website, and visit processes get tinkered with, towards wider dropping of G suite tools. Stay tuned! Options to visit may be patchy in the coming weeks as we get busier with the prep, but as always, get chatting and we can work timings out together.
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It’s been a rough few months.
This dispiriting world we inhabit, there often doesn’t feel like any point in going on.
But being in this space tends to draw one back in to refocus intentions. From the shelves brimming with ideas to plants lush with life and when friends and fellow travellers gather in joy or commiseration, there is a comfort in the knowledge and actuality of not being alone, of the constellations that made and surround this possibility.
Surely it should continue and be further nourished, be another way for us to keep finding each other, and though little experiments are in progress, we have challenges ahead and truly need your help.
Last year, we made the commitment to renew our lease by another two years, in the blink of an eye we’re now more than halfway through it, having just marked the infoshop’s third year open in Tiong Bahru-Bukit Merah.
This does mean there’s just about half a year left, and soon we’ll have to talk to the landlord about the lease again. There’s also the possibility of moving if a better place is found or offered, but a top priority now is to find a more sustainable way for us to make rent. We won’t be able to go on regardless if we can’t afford it, and here’s how you could assist.
We’ve had a Patreon for years that isn’t highlighted enough. It allows for easy monthly subscriptions and we want to use it to raise at least $600 per month. For greater assurance though, we hope it could cover rent in full, which will likely be going up to $1200 or more.
We could reach our lower goal with 80 more people contributing $6, or 40 at $12. To give more options, we’ve just added a $9/month tier and one-time payments through “products”. Paynow is also available to those we’ve already met and trust, and for larger sums. What would it take to gather three times of 80?These numbers are a fraction of the over 3000 of you following on Instagram, which might be for one reason or another but we sincerely hope there are friends and comrades who are not just willing but excited to help us out at this critical time.
Since 2018 wares has been self-funded by the loose assembly of friends building up and caring for the project, with rent, books, printing, maintenance and more paid from our own pockets. At present, a couple of us cover 80% of rent in asymmetric splits, which is topped off by around $200 coming from Patreon plus fluctuating donations and sales — all of which has gone back into the project.
We want to change this as it’s becoming untenable in an already hostile world with rising costs and shifting personal situations.
Back in March we mentioned one of us had a disabling medical emergency, they’re doing well and still in the midst of healing, but as someone who contributes a big part to rent, this has meant for them a strained ability to keep up with precarious wage labour and in turn a shrunken window for desired tasks at the infoshop.
In their own words:“I would really love to dedicate more time and energy to wares as I adjust to new rhythms, and I think I could do that if so much of it didn’t go to worrying about and working for rent, especially now with the medical bills too. It’s hard to ask for help but I and we truly need it for the space to go on, and we want to go on.”
There have been other unsteadiness among us too, while things still happen behind the scenes at the library from week to week, hosting visitors and getting together when we can, unexpected departures and shifts in employment or housing have dampened energy and moods making for our long absence recently. We're slowly and surely returning to activity but there’s nothing to guarantee that we could weather more sudden changes or that contexts and capacities will stay the same.It is therefore crucial to build a sort of distributed resilience shared between more of us longer-term: many people pitching in small sums lightens the burden on a few people paying large sums.
The current set up has us just maintaining level, often dipping low, unable to push forward with things we want to do, such as hosting projects, organising events, acquiring inventory and print equipment, sustaining direct aid, connecting with radical spaces, artists and publishers, bringing the library outside, and contributing to developments in liberatory agitation and thought locally.
We will talk more about some immediate plans soon but for now, we hope you’d heed our call, especially in a city where space is so privatised and the forces leveraged by capital have increasingly put in(ter)dependence under threat.
Where, how, and for what reasons are we gathering?
Help support Singapore’s only communal library featuring a wealth of printed matter lovingly curated for autonomous liberatory thought and practice.
Keep open a social space and hub for rest, gathering, work, and self-organised activity led by an intentional anti-authoritarian ethos;
a fledgling distro for uncommercial zines, books and other printworks you can’t find at typical stores;
a site for collective creative and rebellious imaginations to be nurtured, expanded, and circulated;
a node of continuity among transnational networks of friendships building another better world.We understand money can be tight, spreading the word absolutely helps too. Aid us with “engagement”, reposts, and fighting this machinic nightmare feeding on our lives. Tell your friends offline, share with us your stories, convince those with the means, carry our stickers and flyers to gift or paste away, and of course, come visit, dwell, share, and explore.
We are open! (and will get on top of the emails)
Check out our reconfigured space with a wider entrance and air purifier now, the heaps of new material added over the past months from friends and friendly publishers, and much more to come.Thank you for being here, for your solidarity, rage, and love in spite of this wretched world. See you around soon!
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We’re back! That was a long pause. Well, those of you on Discord know it hasn’t been total stoppage — the space still opened from week to week, albeit on a more informal tempo, though as our availability was reeled in, months have inadvertently passed without much news on here.
What happened was that one of us had a medical emergency, which forced some unexpected and dramatic life adjustments, and also put the brakes on how we’ve done things — to rethink how to continue. We’ve always tried to foreground disability given how a lot of us contend with illness, madness, and an uncaring capitalist world, but this still hit hard.
