We’re back! That was a long pause. Well, those of you on Discord know it hasn’t been total stoppage — the space still opened from week to week, albeit on a more informal tempo, though as our availability was reeled in, months have inadvertently passed without much news on here.
What happened was that one of us had a medical emergency, which forced some unexpected and dramatic life adjustments, and also put the brakes on how we’ve done things — to rethink how to continue. We’ve always tried to foreground disability given how a lot of us contend with illness, madness, and an uncaring capitalist world, but this still hit hard.
During this time, we’ve rested, aided, and tended to our hearts and relations, certainly not always successfully, but as our loose assembly extended, friends and comrades of wares stepped up in big ways to take on the tasks of caring for the space and each other. Many are frequent lone visitors who had incidentally only just begun meeting through the self-activity springing from commun~. It’s a process, slowly unfurling, webbed, finding ways through affinity.
In this interim, we attempted exciting stuff, like joining the Labour Block showcase in January, even as bleak news of this world circulated and bombarded without end. As unabashed fascisms everywhere shed pretences veiled by liberalism, we cannot simply think here as exceptional, exempt, immune. In fact, power is already deeply enmeshed.
Let’s return to a question: How is it to be done? Where do we place our efforts? What other path is to be found, tread? Which parts of the machine were worth holding onto anyway?
Some energetic desires are simmering, imbued with hunger, rage, and love, ideas to share skills and feelings and sounds for the liberatory right here in this modest sanctuary — why not help bring them to life? And we do need help.
If you like what we’ve been doing, enjoyed inhabiting the infoshop library, and want to build together, consider supporting our work.
With 8 possible days to visit this fortnight, it’s a sign of where we’re headed as caretaking and hosting capacity is further collectivised, so come through, hang out, find each other! Encounter makes possibility.