Author: wares

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Interview with SGABF

Even though we took a while to gather thoughts in this interview by Singapore Art Book Fair, a couple of things mentioned within haven't quite happened yet (what is Loose Assemblies? We'll explain soon!). Still, it was a great opportunity to talk about what the infoshop library is about, our approach to zines, print, and art, what dreams we have, and how we hope to organise. Thank you to the team for your questions and for publishing! We're including a few photos from our (pre-revamped) room and an excerpt below, with more in the link.

"In any case the zine as a form shouldn’t just stand on its own, but supplements other media and scales of action. Perhaps its usefulness comes in being accessible, still novel, intimate, inconspicuous, and mobile. When we talk about the political, it’s about an emancipatory horizon, about figuring out how life can be shared and held in common. Not just resisting capitalist catastrophe, but to overcome and thrive. There, we will need to have art around for healing, contemplating, educating, and sharing, which can be collective and generalised, happening alongside other needs and interests. We should start imagining what that could be like, together with how to get there and the things we can be doing right now to bring that into being."

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Two Hundred Years of Dispossession

Two Hundred Years of Dispossession
And Counting

It doesn’t matter what they call it, settling on “commemoration” of this bicentennial only thinly veils the fact that they know what's wrong: that a history and legacy remains intact and unbroken, a foundation for what we still live with today, and that their desire to celebrate and acknowledge its “benevolence” has to be cynically checked for “political correctness” in place of actual confrontation and dismantling.

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Activity Archive

Against the Disquiet #2

[Archived from original facebook event page on 28 December 2021]

19 January 2019

Event details: Friday, 25 January 2019, 5pm – 12am
Joined by: cosmologists and PUPA

If we describe our lived world as at once disquieting and pacifying, what could help push against the enveloping sense of exhaustion, isolation, and powerlessness?

wares is organising intentionally quiet evenings for reading and rest accompanied by ambient sound and music. This, in response to the noisy spectacle of leisure and escapism; to negate social relations defined by being labourers for and consumers of value and content; to serve as a spatial node for worlds to meet and potential imaginations for autonomy to materialise. (Business as usual? NAW!)

You are invited to pick up a book, zine, pamphlet, or other printed matter to dwell with, either in our shared library or the main room of soft/WALL/studs. We will be joined by live ambient improvisations played over the course of the evening. Come through at any point, and stay for as long as you'd like. We ask of each other to enter a quietness and attentiveness in inhabiting the space, to respect the need to be silent or at rest, and encourage communing at other registers to instead happen along the exterior parapet.

The music will be shaping these zones, but also allowed to sit in the background of contact; we hope to dissolve the line between performer and audience, stage and floor, and have us be mindful of not approaching only as spectators, but meeting as listeners and active agents in common. In a loose assembly, we’re making music for a library, but also holding space for more folks to initiate and collaborate against the disquiet.

Entry is free, however we welcome donations to the space, or for drinks, stickers, and publications. These proceeds help sustain activities as well as our musician friends and would be very much appreciated – but so too would your presence and care!

“Ambient is never only music. It is a confluence of sound, situation and listenership; moreover it’s an unspoken contract between the creator, listener and place, seeking to achieve a specific type of musical experience.”

– 12 notes on future ambient
continue reading "Against the Disquiet #2"
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Business as Usual? NAW!

[Archived from original facebook event page on 28 December 2021]

16 January 2019

It's that time of the year again.

What the art week represents now is a normalisation of production and consumption under capitalism. The fate of the contemporary art fairs shouldn't even matter to us. Let them come, let them fail. All we have to know is that any idea of art driven by excitement for grooming the collecting class serves only a select few. Yet the logic of the market goes well beyond the walls of warehoused gallery booths and the commodified luxury object. This is evident in the very origin of the art week, and the way vibrancy is forcefully created through funding a deluge of activities to appear at the same time. This is an image operation for tourists and traders, but a mere extension of treating artists as content creators. They tell us this is good for the industry, necessitating the hardening of professionalised hierarchies, as if this programme could get infinitely bigger, in denial that the competitive system of art being modelled after is designed to not accommodate everyone. We clamour for gigs, thankful with whatever we land, implicitly accepting that hype and exposure in a space of scarcity is still better than nothing at all. But that scarcity is symptomatic of something untenable, like the vast differences in wealth distribution and the possibilities for life we see foreclosed everywhere.

#NAWartweek

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Activity Archive

Against the Disquiet #1

[Archived from original facebook event page on 28 December 2021]

16 December 2018

Event details: Friday, 21 December 2018, 5pm – 12am

If we describe our lived world as at once disquieting and pacifying, what could help push against the enveloping sense of exhaustion, isolation, and powerlessness?

From this Friday, wares begins organising intentionally quiet evenings for reading and rest accompanied by ambient sound and music. This, in response to the noisy spectacle of leisure and escapism; to negate social relations defined by being labourers for and consumers of value and content; to serve as a spatial node for worlds to meet and potential imaginations for autonomy to materialise.

You are invited to pick up a book, zine, pamphlet, or other printed matter to dwell with, either in our shared library or the main room of soft/WALL/studs. We will be joined by live ambient improvisations played over the course of the evening. Come through at any point, and stay for as long as you'd like. We ask of each other to enter a quietness and attentiveness in inhabiting the space, to respect the need to be silent or at rest, and encourage communing at other registers to instead happen along the exterior parapet.

The music will be shaping these zones, but also allowed to sit in the background of contact; we hope to dissolve the line between performer and audience, stage and floor, and have us be mindful of not approaching only as spectators, but meeting as listeners and active agents in common. In a loose assembly, we’re making music for a library, but also holding space for more folks to initiate and collaborate against the disquiet.Entry is free; as usual, donations to the space, for drinks, stickers and publications would help cover costs and be very much appreciated – but so too would your presence and care.

“Ambient is never only music. It is a confluence of sound, situation and listenership; moreover it’s an unspoken contract between the creator, listener and place, seeking to achieve a specific type of musical experience.” – 12 notes on future ambient

continue reading "Against the Disquiet #1"
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Activity Archive

wares and thorns at the art book fair

[Archived from original facebook event page on 26 December 2021]

22 June 2018

Event details: 29 June 2018 – 1 July 2018, 12 – 8pm

wares infoshop library is going to be at the Singapore Art Book Fair.

We will be launching and selling our first two publications: one, an artist's book on the oversight and preclusion of fugitive histories, and another, an essay zine continuing from #NAWartweek, directly addressing the art world and its entanglements with capital.

[[EDIT: this turns out not to be true; it turns out editing this essay and making a zine takes way longer than you'd expect, sorry! We have an excerpt and a preview cover if you'd like to take a look and comment, but we are only launching one publication – though we've got a couple of others from friends, as well as stickers, flyers, and selections from the library!]]

Details, excerpts and images follow in the discussion section, but if you can, come on through and say hello!

There may be more, and there is room for more. We'd love for you to get involved, let's make stickers, pamphlets, posters, and plans together.

"One publishes to find comrades!" 

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NAW~ refusal in a time of spectacularised productivity

[Archived from original facebook event page on 26 December 2021]

24 January 2018

After a long hiatus, wares will be doing more this year, but it didn't feel right starting that off while so much else was scheduled to happen in January. For years the spectacle has been taking over. We decided to look into the cultural landscape of Singapore and the conditions that frame contemporary art today and try to understand it in a larger picture. Our response timed with Art Stage and the Singapore Art Week is rooted in withdrawal and cultivating refusal. Needless to say, this is not another thing to consume, but a holding open of space that could persist otherwise. We say NAW, we are over this, we're resting.

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Down Time / Dwell Time

[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

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Open Library · dwelling some ware(s)

[Archived from original facebook event page on 26 December 2021]

7 August 2017

Event details: Wednesday 9 August 2017, 3 – 11pm

A dwelling is often taken to be synonymous with “home”, but it could carry a suggestion of being temporary, or something taken as purely utilitarian, like a shelter for living. Which is not to say it is lesser than a home, because what too is that? What makes up that notion of home, so easily attached to biological family, to nation-state, to security encapsulated in a wall? To dwell upon, is also to spend time with something – an idea, a sentiment, an image, an imaginary, perhaps an emancipatory future. Like a mechanical dwell, how and where can we find the time and place to pause, to wait, to laze, to be, together, in mutual care and study apart and away from the machinations of competition, reactionary imposition, and financialised space?

If you require somewhere to dwell, with thoughts and texts to dwell upon, to gather contrary to the spurious festivities of spectacularised nationalism, soft/WALL/studs will be open on 9 August to host wares' first open library event.

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? 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

continue reading "Open Library · dwelling some ware(s)"