[Archived from original facebook event page on 26 December 2021]
15 August 2017
Event details: 16, 20, 23, 26, 30 August & 3 September 2017, 3 – 11pm
Give time this month to contemplation, to beginning a different relationship with commuting, communing, the commons, and commitment. For the next three Wednesdays (16, 23, 30 August) and alternating between Sundays and a Saturday (20, 26 August, 3 September), the wares library at soft/WALL/studs will be open into the night for this purpose of dwelling – evocative of the dwelling as in home and shelter, but more than the temporary; dwelling as in spending time with ideas and imaginaries, more than the momentary present; a dwell as a state of pause and lull, a reconfiguration of time and space where mutual care and study could be practiced, apart and away from the machinations of competition, reactionary imposition, and financialised space.
To reshape down time, the states of depression or recovery that overemphasise our unproductivity, we dwell on two texts as guideposts – The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, 2013), To Our Friends (The Invisible Committee, 2015) – speaking to the urgency for analysis and organisation that is both sensitive and incisive, rooted in rage and love.
wares is a reading library and infoshop project that began from a recognition of the aloneness and yearning that marks contemporary life. How are we to break the alienation we experience under capitalist productivity? The violence of accumulation and enclosure? Exceeding isolated selves, what kinds of communality could we weave? What theoretical, affective, tactical, and aesthetic tools have to be recuperated to allow us to organise an actionable politics of radical emancipation? Collecting a tapestry of books, zines, and other printed matter for sharing, wares is at a nascent stage of coming into being. Beyond the objects it contains, or the subjectivities it transmits, are the unwritten futures that we can chart.
For a list of books currently in the wares library: http://goo.gl/qmves7
19 August 2017
The space will be open five more times over the next weeks. We're thinking about more than just an open book. Amidst the familiar 'down time' associated with depression and solitude; 'decompression' and other coping adjustments made to temporalities of labour and sociality violently ordered under capitalism; how can collective care – for one another, for our dwellings – begin? What can we write together? Tomorrow, a dear friend will be preparing some simple vegan food with us, do come by to share and dwell, and feel free to bring your own friend, food, drink, book – the space is open for ideas and iterations on collective study.
“A lot of the questions from people on Facebook were, ‘how do you enter into the undercommons?’: well, you know, the ‘undercommons’ is a box, and if you open it you can enter into our world. A couple of people seem to be reticent about the term ‘study,’ but is there a way to be in the undercommons that isn’t intellectual? Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. These activities aren’t ennobled by the fact that we now say, 'oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to be have been studying.' To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What’s important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.”
Fred Moten, in conversation with Stefano Harney and Stevphen Shukaitis – The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2013 (page 110): http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=516
20 August 2017
What's cooking? "Trying a different approach." Come find out! We'll be here till late tonight
22 August 2017
Opening again tomorrow, 3 – 11pm
30 August 2017
This Sunday will be the last instance of <down time / dwell time>, at least in this iteration and for a while. The space will be open and our friend K will be sharing some cooking with us again: a pumpkin and ricotta rice dish ("an attempt", they say). Come join us!
3 September 2017
