Category: Archive

[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

[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