Breaking the usual format for a quick one, here are a few dates you could visit these couple of weeks, rather limited due to it being a busy period and folks not being around, but there's lots of new materials in since Labour Block, so feel free to come by!
Category: Quicknote
There are no visiting options this week as we're busy with prep for Labour Block, happening Saturday (24 Jan) and Sunday (25 Jan) 1–8pm at Scape. We will be bringing part of our zine library out to share in a reading and resting zone, and will have publications and printworks for sale, including some newly gathered from friends in the network. As we've said in similar past outings, it's understandable that such an event, particularly with the way it is in proximity to the logics of commerce and even though it has been intentionally framed as a counter, can be overwhelming, so there is no expectation to turn up. But of course we'd love to see friends and supporters, and there may be creative practices you may like to discover, we encourage you to mask up with a good respirator if you do come (we may have a few KF94s to give away).
If you'd like to help us plan the following weeks, send in your appointments ahead of time. Looking to be back very soon!
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.