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!
To close out the calendar, a rare proper post featuring this little print flyer from the Institute of Barbarian Books. They had sent a whole bunch over with an order of zines a couple of years back: on the reverse is an illustrated flag also printed in 3 colour riso, and inside the fold, information in English and Japanese on the struggle for liberation and the transnational BDS movement. It’s (been) hard to gather words as demoralisation lingers still, this perennial insulation suffusing over everything on the island fortress, a hostility many have mistaken for safety. How is it that we exist amidst such apparent abundance yet seem so incapable? Or is it precisely the appearance of which that has made us so? An elaborate illusion that has us convinced there will be a slice of pie left to partake in – if only we worked hard enough and win? What explains the hemming and hawing upon orders of silence, all while productivity trudges on, in dense atomised isolation. Crisis normal. But a shared crisis. The terrifying reality of the nation state and extractive interests plays out both in genocide and the everyday curtailment of even the act of imagining a path apart. It must be evident that the call for liberation is necessarily for all – or makes no sense; to be free from these colonial and colonising structures of oppression, those ableist, racist, sexist hierarchies that end life with such ease. If anything has become clearer, it is that everything will have to begin from the interpersonal, how we meet and share our time, energy and care for one another, to fight for and build a life worth living, something shared in common. But there is much to be done.
With such stubborn adherence to so-called “justice” and “peace”, they've killed another man. The fifth in four months. There's just grief and anger, which reinforce further how we must move past (think past, plan past, make past) the nation state and capital for other, better ways of collective life. On the housing blocks, council-installed flags line the corridors pretending everything's fine.
[Originally published as a series of slides on instagram, we reproduce it here verbatim, each image slide accompanied by transcribed texts, with image descriptions at the end of the post.]
As with searching for a new space, this has been another big step to take. Between that, choosing and learning the platform, life and work, and everything urgent or distracting in this broken burning world, it's taken longer than expected to get things ready.
For four years, wares has been a self-funded project, its physical site afforded by larger creative groups sharing most of the heavy burden of rent. Such arrangements are now past and has been difficult to find again, perhaps a symptom of the times, or just obscured by this rushed situation we didn't choose.
While we have thought of alternatives to getting a new space, they still need major reorientation and will dampen momentum and desires for sure. It's been difficult to know truly whether such a space is needed and wanted by community, if only because this “community” hasn't quite come into form yet – and even if in our guts and hearts, through what we've experienced here and elsewhere with each other, or from what dozens of you have said while visiting over these past weeks, it is something we want – and want to share with more.
It's taken a while to get back to this. This past year and a half has been a lot, with so much being so overwhelming, and still it piles on – anxieties sustained, isolation intensified, precarity multiplied, segregations reinforced, complacency entrenched, struggles pacified, horizons obscured… all entangled between infinitely scrolling news cycles of inescapable doom, rehashed political theatre, and spectacular ecological catastrophe. None of this needs reminding, and yet at the same time, it all seems so easily hidden from view as things return to normal.
If you haven't been able to be present, to be “of value”, to “contribute”, to either “resist” nor “see the positive”, to know and speak and be heard amidst all this, you're most surely not alone. Even this has taken months to write. An even longer journey to realise: It's alright. You're enough.
There is no denying the palpable feeling of fatigue and grief all around, a feedback loop of powerlessness that may have us each turning to distractions while toiling, waiting for things to get… better. Those of us who can anyway.
Help and empathy run up against the limits of uncaring structures. It almost seems like the closest thing desirable and imaginable is indeed “return” to familiarity which some would call “normal” – even if normal was always twisted, punishing, and blanketed by atomised hopelessness. And as if the lasting effects of living through all this could simply be brushed off later, always later, as the “new” normal they decided on is once again forcefully instituted from the top down.
What is or should normal be? Could its understanding and experience still be changed now, be dissolved into myriad divergences, when it's easier than ever to conflate nation-state, capital, and authority with expertise, ability, and possibility? Does the urgency for response to climate crisis make it seem like these systems of rule could magically start working differently? When they haven’t for the crises normal of pandemic or everyday harms? How could we possibly break expectations of peace, joy, and comfort away from this colonialist reality moulded by extraction and death? What is “safety” predicated on the border, on exclusion, on hierarchy, but violence?
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."
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.
[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.
