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 as well. 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 varying 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 medical emergency, they’re doing well and still in the midst of recovery, 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 go on behind the scenes from week to week, unexpected departures and shifts in employment and housing have dampened energy and moods, making for our long lapse recently, but we're slowly and surely returning to activity.
We want to build some distributed resilience shared between more of us: many people pitching in small sums lightens the burden on a few people paying large sums. The present 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 spaces, artists and publishers, bringing the library outside, and contributing to developments in liberatory organising 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 for in(ter)dependence is so privatised, financialised, and increasingly under threat.
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 ethos; a fledgling distro for anti-commercial zines, books and other printworks you can’t find at typical stores; a site for collective creative and rebellious imagination 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 post engagement and fighting this alg0-monster, tell your friends offline, convince those with the means to share, carry our stickers and flyers to give 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, new materials added in 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 this wretched world, and see you around soon!
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.
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]
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.”
[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.
[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
[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.
