Nearly everyone knows AS220 as one of the most happening places in Providence, Rhode Island. The “AS” stands for “Artists’ Space”; 220 was the initial address of the distressed building that it originally occupied in 1985. AS220 is now an incredibly vital cultural commons that offers everything: rehearsal spaces, poetry slams, live music and dance performances. Figure drawing, affordable artist studios, a Fab Lab and a print shop. Public access to specialized art equipment, cheap apartments for struggling artists, and more.

While AS220 has all sorts of interactions with businesses, government and philanthropy, it is really an unheralded model of a commons for producing and enjoying the arts. It is financially self-sustaining, independently managed and organically connected as a co-producer with various artistic communities.

AS220’s success as an arts commons stems from its fierce vision of what authentic art should be – and its resourcefulness in acquiring three large buildings in a once-troubled section of Providence’s downtown. The buildings, consisting of more than 100,000 square feet, enables AS200 to generate its own revenue through storefront leases while providing huge amounts of affordable downtown building space to host artistic enterprises. After more than three decades, AS200, with a budget of more than $3 million and 60 employees, is a self-confident, financially secure overdog for the underdog – artists.

AS220’s ownership of downtown real estate may be the financial secret of its longevity, but it could not have survived without its deep commitment to the arts as a commons. This originated in a manifesto written by three artists, Steven Emma, Martha Dempster and Umberto Crenca, in 1982, in which they called on artists to “stop harboring false hopes and come to terms with the present deteriorating situation in the arts.” They urged resistance to all attempts by the state, philanthropy, arts agencies and award systems to control or manipulate artists. “Art has been removed from being an integral part of our society and has been relegated to mere processes which have lead to the production of dry, academic, pedantic, superficial, mechanical and mass-produced works of art devoid of all integrity, honesty and meaning….” the artists wrote. They demanded that art be “allowed to flourish unhampered because art is one of the last areas of culture where humanity defines his spiritual nature.”

Crenca, better known as “Bert,” founded AS220 shortly thereafter and is its artistic director today. He is mostly a painter, but now spends much of his time overseeing the diverse artistic enterprises hosted by AS200 and the real-estate management that sustains this rare empire of vernacular arts and culture. The organization has always been primarily a group effort, however, achieved through the talents of people like Lucie Searle, who manages all of the real estate projects, Managing Director Aaron Peterman, helpful board members, a staff of dozens, and active collaboration with the state and city governments and the business community.

Calling AS200 a nonprofit organization fails to capture its real achievement or inner logic. While it is legally chartered and managed as a nonprofit organization, its deep cultural commitment is to protect the integrity of artistic freedom and creativity. It has refused to become a supplicant desperately trying to please stuffy donors or produce preconceived notions of “what sells” in artistic markets. It realizes that its core mission is not to make money in the marketplace, satisfy foundation program officers, spur urban development or please politicians. Its goal is to help artists to be artists, and to nourish artistic communities as artistic communities.

Walk around the three AS200 buildings and the fruits of this ethic can be seen everywhere. Fascinating and fantastic artworks abound: prints, murals and paintings on the walls, music wafting through the hallways, and posters advertising upcoming exhibitions and performances. AS200 is no genteel, sanitized haven for the fine arts as some society matron might conceive of them. It is a place where both amateur and accomplished photographers, poets, dancers, painters, musicians, hip-hop artists and digital fabricators with 3D printers can be themselves. The AS220 vibe is funky, experimental, transcendent, offbeat and startling.

A conspicuous example is the colorful eighty-foot mural that adorns the side of one of AS220’s buildings. It was designed by Shepard Fairey, the street artist famous for the iconic poster used by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Fairey contributed the mural for next to nothing because of a favor that Bert had shown him years earlier when Fairey had been an unknown artist.

The commitment to local art is shown by AS220’s policy toward rock bands. In the mid-1980s, it was extremely hard for local bands playing original music to get booked at any Providence clubs. Only large, national touring acts or local bands doing cover songs could get gigs. In response, AS220 instituted a “no covers” policy requiring that any song performed in its performance spaces must be in the public domain or licensed under a Creative Commons license. In explaining its policy, AS220 notes, “We believe that corporate control of music hurts our culture as a whole and hinders the free development of artistic expression. The ‘blanket licensing’ scheme enforced by the major music licensing corporations….helps fund major labels that perpetuate homogenized music, marginalize independent labels, engage in pay-for-play radio and undermine musicians.”

The “no covers” policy was later carried over to a special electronic jukebox in its bar and grill that contained only original songs; no cover tunes allowed. This enabled AS200 to avoid paying any fees to performance-licensing bodies such as BMI because the jukebox doesn’t have any industry-produced music. (The jukebox was retired when the staff person who created the jukebox left AS220, leaving no one else with the skills to maintain or fix it.)

This organization’s approach to exhibition spaces is also locally minded and inclusivist. Its mission statement declares, “Exhibitions and performances in the forum will be unjuried, uncensored and open to the general public. Our facilities and services are available to all artists who need a space to exhibit or perform from traditional sources because of financial or other limitations.” The main gallery space at AS220 is routinely booked for years in advance. (But there are other gallery spaces as well.)

Several things are striking about AS220 as a cultural commons: its sheer scale, its diversity of arts activities, and its self-confidence. The place is no platform for co-branding or crypto-marketing. It does not treat people as consumers (“exit through the gift shop”), but as human beings. It doesn’t pander. These institutional traits stem from AS220’s commitment to be an enterprise for and run by artists.

Authentic art is always compelling, which helps explain why AS220 has ended up becoming a highly effective catalyst of economic development in downtown Providence. Its projects directly serve more than 90,000 people every year. Thanks to such traffic and the kinds of people attracted to AS220’s music, galleries, performances and classes, the neighborhood has improved over the years. Nearby buildings that were once beset by drug dealers and prostitutes have been renovated. A fancy hotel has moved in. Other new businesses have arisen.

Beyond its artistic integrity and inclusiveness, AS220 has flourished by showing ingenuity in acquiring and renovating buildings. “Its venture into real estate was spurred on by recognizing that it needed to own its own space if it was going to be viable and sustainable,” said David Dvorchak, communications director of AS220. After losing its lease in one building and facing rising rents at another (due in part to its own positive effects on the neighborhood), AS220 was determined to be the master of its own destiny. Its programming needs also required more space.

So in 1992 it acquired a 21,000 square foot, three-floor building on Empire Street that was almost totally abandoned, and within one year had complied with all building codes and filled all of its space with artists, including a dance company and theater. According to an AS220 history, “This was accomplished with a very limited budget of $1.2 million, tremendous community support, highly imaginative fundraising and most significantly, tons of sweat equity.”

Today the building is home to a community darkroom, twenty studios for artists, a space for youth artists, three gallery spaces, a music performance space with eight to ten events per week. AS220 hosts monthly “Geek Dinners” as a networking event for local tech leaders. It also hosts monthly sewing circles, a monthly comedy series and figure drawing sessions and panel discussions. On the street level, a bar, restaurant and barber shop lease retail space from AS220.

Over the years, the organization acquired two other mixed-use buildings and renovated them to provide space for even more artistic projects. Its real estate holdings are now worth an estimated $25 million.

It is tempting for outsiders to regard the success of AS220 as simply a story of savvy real estate investment and development. But if AS220 were market-driven, its vision would have quickly curdled into commercial, sentimental pap. The organization was fortunate to have leaders that saw its real estate assets as ways to maintain its own independent vision, unbeholden to investors, politicians eager for conventional development or imperious donors.

What a concept: empowering artists by giving them space and autonomy, and building a hosting infrastructure with real equity assets, good leadership and a commitment to commoning. The revenue from its infrastructure helps lower the overhead costs for creating challenging art – and this in turn makes it easier to build a culture of artistic authenticity. The autonomy forces artists to take responsibility for themselves, both economically and artistically. And by helping isolated artists discover their voices and develop robust peer communities, the people of Providence have acquired real alternatives to the vacuous pop entertainment that the culture industries peddle. They have a place where they can become artists themselves.

David Bollier (US) is an author, activist, blogger and scholar of the commons. He is cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group and the author of Think Like a Commoner and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, among other books.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by thagrdnr

The post Patterns of Commoning: AS220 of Providence, Rhode Island: A Commons of, by and for Artists appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Injecting Imagination into Degrowth

Labelled a ‘domestic extremist’ by the police and ‘a magician of rebellion’ by the press, John Jordan has spent the last 25 years merging art and activism.

He has worked in various settings, from Tate Modern to squatted social centres, from international theatre festivals to climate camps, and co-founded Reclaim the Streets and the Clown Army, co-edited We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (Verso, 2004), and co-wrote the film/book Les Sentiers de l’Utopie (Editions Zones, 2012). He now co-facilitates the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii) with Isabelle Fremeaux.

The Clandestine Insurgent Clown Army in action, G8 protest, Scotland 2005. (Image: CIRCA)

1. What is the key idea of artivism?

Artivism, merging the boundless imagination of art and the radical engagement of politics.

Artivism is not really a movement. It’s more an attitude, a practice which exists on the fertile edges between art and activism. It comes into being when creativity and resistance collapse into each other. It’s what happens when our political actions become as beautiful as poems and as effective as a perfectly designed tool. Artivism is the Clown Army kissing riot shields to push the police away; it’s the Yes Men secretly infiltrating the world’s media pretending to be corporate mouthpieces; it’s when flocks of flamenco dancers shut down banks promoting austerity in Spain; it’s when the Brandalism collective hacks hundreds of bus shelters in the midst of a state of emergency and replaces the adverts with radical messages. What it’s definitely not about is making political art, art about an issue, such as a performance about the refugee crisis, or a video about an uprising. It is not about showing new perceptions of the world, but about changing it. Refusing representation, artivism chooses direct action.

Proponents of direct action believe that to change things, it is best to act directly on the matter instead of asking others to do things for us. It is the opposite of lobbying and protest marches. Direct action is about transforming the world in the here and now, together. By breathing the spirit of art onto direct action, we can come up with irresistible forms of resistance. If you see a bulldozer cutting down a forest to build a new airport, you don’t write a song about it, you put your body in its way (maybe while singing!). The most beautiful thing, however, —the aesthetic goal— is winning: enabling the survival and continued abundance of the living forest and its ecosystems. With artivism, the beautiful and the useful overlap.

Artivism as an indiscipline

Some might prefer to call it ‘creative resistance’, and some ‘art activism’. Others, following the words of the German artist and co-founder of the Green Party Joseph Beuys, might call it ‘social sculpture’. The authors of Artivisme: Art, Action Politique et Résistance Culturelle (Lemoine & Ouardi 2010), however, simply say that artivism is an ‘indiscipline’, something with refusal rooted in its heart. In fact, it refuses to be contained by the problematic discipline of art or by the separate identities of ‘artist’ and ‘activist’ —labels that assume that artists have a monopoly on creativity and activists one on social change, suggesting that somehow other people are neither creative nor involved in changing the world!

Artivism treats social movements as a material. Their forms of action and alternatives are forms that our collective imagination can change and reinvent. In the same way that an artist might work with wood or paint, artivism might look at plans for direct action to shut down an open-cast coal mine and imagine how it could be made more powerful and theatrical. It might involve designing the layout of a climate camp so that it is more convivial and open as a place to welcome new people. It might involve inventing new ways of holding horizontal assemblies or designing a shared ritual for before going out to sabotage a military base with your affinity group. When, as Gerald Raunig writes, ‘art machines and revolutionary machines overlap’ (Raunig 2007), we get a moment of artivism.ç

2. Who is part of artivism, what do they do?

A rich, diverse and colourful movement, which can bring down empires in the most unexpected ways

The strategies employed by artivists depend on the political context of their work and are too numerous to fit here, but one brilliant handbook and website of tactics, theories and principles is Beautiful Trouble. One example from the book is how to create protests that do not look like protests as a key strategy for those working in repressive regimes or during states of emergency where public dissent is banned. The Orange Alternative did this wonderfully during martial law in Poland in the late 1980s. Despite protest bans, they called for a ‘Gnome’ gathering, to demand better ‘Gnomes’ rights’. When faced with thousands of young people wearing orange gnome hats, the regime’s soldiers did not know what to do, and the generals did not call the tanks in. For the first time since martial law was declared, a mass of people had taken public space back, had a great time doing it, and managed to spread a sense of confidence far and wide. Within a few years the whole of Eastern Europe was out in the streets. Some historians claim that the movements that brought down the Soviet Empire began with artists, guerrilla theatre and musicians opening up space for dissent (Horáková & Vuletic 2003). Humour has often been at the centre of artivist tactics.

Orange Alternative grafitti remains forty years later on the walls of Krakow. (Image: pnapora)

Another common tactic is reverse-engineering, which asks the hacker question: ‘What can this thing do?’. This involves hacking a daily object and turning it into a machine of resistance. You can reverse-engineer anything, including laws: Students at the University of Texas fought back against the new campus carry gun law by strapping on dildos! The organisers of Cocks Not Glocks explained that, although it is illegal to openly carry dildos on campus, they are ‘just about as effective as [guns in] protecting us from sociopathic shooters, but much safer for recreational play’. This also illustrates the principle of ‘put your target in a dilemma position’, which means that you put your opponent in a situation where they are forced to respond to your action. But whatever they do, they lose, by appearing either ridiculous or violent.

Those involved in artivism are as diverse as their tactics, some went to art school, others to theatre academies, some simply managed to avoid having their creativity sapped from them at school and want to apply it to political action. Artivism’s greatest strategies are perhaps innovation and confusion , as repeating the same tactics —the A to B march, the picket, the internet meme, the blockade, the protest camp, the riot— can quickly lose its impact. The most successful actions are often those where new forms are invented that manage to take the authorities by surprise. That is why movements need to constantly innovate their tactics faster than the authorities are able to respond to them; including, of course, tactics to protect protesters from police violence. In the last decade we have seen a range of creative shields, from the book-block shields made from giant books covers (the image of a cop beating George Orwell’s 1984 is unforgettable), to the Climate Camp’s shields with beautiful photographic portraits of those affected by the climate breakdown pushing through police lines to shut down the builders of a new runway.

Many popular tactics were originally invented by artivists, including Denial-of-Service (Dos) attacks for blocking the websites of opponents, now infamously used by Anonymous.

Creativity and crafting new forms needs time and attention, but given the urgency and speed of activism this is never easy. The spirit of art thus also brings a different rhythm to activism, one that is much more in keeping with the aims of degrowth; a de-accelerated, slower, more considered approach, but no less passionate.

Shields with portraits and tents hidden inside, Climate Camp, Heathrow, London 2007 (Image: Kristian Buus /Labofii)

3. How do you see the relationship between artivism and degrowth?

Opening up the space to dream: nurturing collective creative thinking and the spirit of play within the degrowth movement

At the moment, it feels as though artivists have made fewer connections with the degrowth movement than with other movements such as refugee support, climate breakdown, anti-austerity, alter-globalisation, etc. Why this is the case is hard to fathom.

Climate and the concept of the Anthropocene are huge themes in the art world at the moment. However, much of it is sadly part of a corporate elite using culture as a cheap research and development tool and an effective public relations exercise to promote green capitalism. Volkswagen consultants working with artists and ecologists during the Über Lebenskunst project at Berlin’s art centre Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2010-2012) to look at the future of transport is just one of many examples. At the recent COP21 (2015) in Paris, many big name artists played the role of ‘artwashers’ by creating work for a corporate greenwash event, Solutions COP21, which brought together some of the world’s biggest polluters, from fossil fuel corporations to car manufacturers, from industrial agriculture giants to builders of airports and motorways, for a fair to demonstrate that they had the real solutions to the crisis.

Human Cost, Unsanctioned performance by Liberate Tate in Tate Britain, London 2011 (Image: Liberate Tate)

Participatory pedagogy

The fact that the degrowth conferences of 2014 included an art thread together with scientific, economic and social threads is encouraging. More of these initiatives should be developed so as to break the ‘academic’ conference mould and include more creative forms of knowledge sharing as well as a more holistic approach. Artivists’ teaching practices tend to be more horizontal and based on participatory popular education models that seek to develop the shared critical knowledge already present, rather than a ‘top down’ knowledge transfer (via PowerPoint or a conference) from the knower to the students. Artivists tend to go beyond mere talking and listening —working and playing with the body and materials; engaging head, heart and hand equally. This should be a key pedagogic strategy —perhaps a return to the pedagogic idea of the ‘polytechnic’, where learning philosophy was no different from learning how to make a chair.

The process of making things together can be a good mobilising tool for developing strong affinity groups and bringing people into movements for the first time. After all, it may be a lot less frightening for first-time activists to attend a workshop to learn —as in the case of Tools For Action — how to make giant inflatable silver cobblestones for an action, rather than taking part in a big assembly discussing a campaign against a new fracking license.

Setting up transdisciplinary solutions workshops/laboratories around particular topics, where artists/designers would be brought in not as the ‘aesthetic communicators’ of the ideas, but as creative participants trying to find solutions in collaboration with other disciplines, would be an important step towards merging the degrowth movement with the spirit of artivism.

Creating spaces that nurture such creative thinking and playing as part and parcel of a movement process is key. The degrowth movement, despite its at times overly academic tone, could have the capacity and sensibility to embody this spirit, because at its heart are notions of a change in our culture towards qualitative rather than quantitative ways of being. Degrowth has been called ‘an example of an activist-led science‘. Perhaps one day we will be able to say that it was an activist-led art as well.

4. Which proposals do they have for each other?

Making degrowth irresistible: the role of desire and fantasy in creating a new culture

I write as someone living in a wood-heated yurt in a small commune on an organic farm in France, where degrowth is at the centre of our collective’s values. For us, degrowth is coupled with good living. As the French slogan goes: Moins De Biens, Plus de Liens —Fewer Things, More Relationships. But in popular mainstream culture degrowth is often misperceived as an activity that involves self-control (stop shopping, stop driving, stop flying, etc.) and privation (don’t want or buy new things, etc.), that calls for a return to the past (stop using fossil fuels/new technologies, etc.) where life was hard (grow your own vegetables, make your own bread, stay local, etc.) and happiness rare. In addition, degrowth is usually framed within an apocalyptic timeline of a planetary life support system collapse —not exactly making it the most desirable of movement imaginaries. Such caricatures of degrowth are a far cry from notions of abundance, pleasure and play that are often present in artistic processes and that are concepts that capitalism has taken away from us.

As with most traditional progressive politics, degrowth has a tendency to work in a scientific, ‘reality’-based manner. Much of the work seems to be passing on information, statistics, facts, economic analyses, etc. It often feels overly academic and heady and ignores emotions —Where is the dreaming and fantasy? While there have been spaces for other forms of intuitive learning, celebrating, etc. at the recent degrowth conferences, this is often seen as merely an addition to the ‘rational’ lectures and workshops.

Stealing fantasy back from capitalism

Capitalism has captured our fantasies with the spectacle of consumerism; its celebrities have become our mythological heroes, its video games our wild adventures. It promises us the fantasy of a better life that can always be even better. Fantasy itself is the fuel of the entertainment business, popular culture and most religions, and yet we fear it as a tool of politics. We distrust anything that might seem irrational and relegate it to the ‘arts programme’.

Artivism, however, recognises that politics has always been about fantasy, because at its heart is imagining what kind of future world we want. We have been able to use such tools, steal them back from popular culture and create what Stephen Duncombe, author and founder of the Centre for Artistic Activism, calls ‘ethical spectacles‘. There, we collectively perform our dreams via imaginative participatory actions, creating new realities via symbols and stories that construct a truth together rather than waiting for it to set us free. The degrowth movement could learn from this and acknowledge that successful politics are as much an affair of desire and fantasy as of reason and rationality. To leave all these powerful tools in the hands of capitalism is a mistake. As long as capitalism’s lures are perceived to be more fun and more able to speak to our desires than degrowth, we will fail to make the radical cultural changes that are so necessary, and buying an iPad will still be way cooler than riding a donkey.

Instead of artists flocking to apply their creativity to the movement, they continue to work in the advertising industries and other machines that reproduce capitalism’s desire traps. Without their creativity degrowth will remain a beautiful set of ideas rather than a new culture. The questions we must ask are: How do we learn to educate each other to desire differently? How can degrowth become as sexy as capitalism? And how can small really become beautiful? And, last but not least, how can we begin to sense the inherent violence of industrial civilisation, to really, deeply feel the crimes against life that it perpetuates, to shake off the anaesthesia, the numbness, and return to aesthesia, the senses?

More coherence is needed

What degrowth can bring to artivism and especially to the art world is the drive for coherence between thinking and living. Separating what we believe in from how we act in the world inevitably leads to suffering, and confusing role models. With many in the cultural field there is a chasm between their politics, aesthetics, ethics and everyday life. Many artists and cultural producers fly from conference to biennale, to carry out work about climate change, while others exhibit anti-systemic work in museums sponsored by banks. Not considering their life as a material to work on, a concept Foucault articulates as ‘a technique of life, an art of living’, they reproduce separations of capitalism. Instead of applying their creativity to questions of how we could travel without causing climate breakdown, how we could organise without domination, how we could grow our food without destroying our soil systems, how we might build new communes, they continue to live in constant contradiction between what they believe in and how they behave. Degrowth’s focus on holistic practices could change this.

5. Outlook: Space for visions, suggestions or wishes

Building a culture of resistance where art and activism are no longer separate from everyday life

One of the most urgent tasks is to build a culture of resistance. I don’t believe that we will be able to put in place solutions to the ongoing social and ecological catastrophe without acts of resistance. Those who profit from the present economic system will not relinquish their power. We need movements that are able to show desirable alternatives while being prepared to resist the current system. Without a shared set of values and behaviours, without a culture where acts of resistance (from protest to sabotage) are supported by a wider population than that which is actually ready to take part in them, we will not have the systemic change necessary to achieve justice and avoid the collapse of our life support systems on this planet.

That is why things like bringing degrowth and a climate camp together are key, because not everyone is going to be suited for the front line of resistance. But all these people need to feel part of a shared culture. Yet movements so often forget this and don’t see the importance of creating the material infrastructures and affective sensibilities that support resistance in the long term. Unfortunately, many in the transition town networks — or in other cultures of ecological alternatives such as permaculture et al. — while thinking long term solutions and material infrastructures, seem to think that our culture will be able to magically transition from capitalism to ‘something nicer, greener, etc.’ without resistance. I don’t believe this culture will somehow undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane, equitable and sustainable way of living. I think we have to undo much of this culture and rebuild entirely different ways of being and sharing our worlds and that this is what resistance is: confronting and dismantling unjust structures of power to make way for other cultures to flourish.

This is what a culture of resistance looks like
A culture of resistance is one based on sharing our material and emotional support with those involved in a movement of resistance.

A culture of resistance is when in winter 2015 in France citizens opened up their homes and farms to the 200 people in the tractor and bike convoy that rolled up from the zad occupation (an autonomous resistance zone against a planned airport in western France) to the COP21 in Paris, despite the state of emergency and bans on their movements. A culture of resistance is not the so-called ‘ecological’ philosopher Bruno Latour refusing to sign a letter against the building of the same airport because he fears his name being associated with radical ecologists.

Routes of the Underground Railroad, 1830-1865. (Image: public domain)

A beautiful example of a culture of resistance was the underground railroad that enabled slaves to escape the southern United States. It’s not the French government evicting refugees from their self-made Calais camps to force them into a prison-like set-up with no communal space. At the heart of a culture of resistance is refusing a culture of domination in favour of a definition of love that enables the other to be free.

Breaking down the separations

In the end I think that in the new culture that will come after the culture of capitalism and domination, the role of art and activism will change radically. Art as a thing separate from everyday life, a thing for the rich to collect and profit from, a thing to watch or to own, done by others, will be over. It will be seen as a verb rather than a noun; a way of doing, a certain quality of paying attention that anyone can practice in everyday life, not just the ‘artists’.

Perhaps the notion of the activist as someone who is a specialist in transforming society, will disappear too, as in a society of the commons, run with local assemblies and a confederation of commons rather than the hierarchical state, everyone will feel part of a process of social transformation, part of a practice of politics. In this society, politics will not be separate from ethics anymore. Aristotle saw the pursuit of the good of the political community as a branch of ethics, the pursuit of human good as a whole. This pursuit he called Eudaimonia, meaning ‘the good life’, and he believed it was the ultimate goal of all human beings. 2300 years later, perhaps the degrowth movement will bring us closer to this dream than ever before.

Links

The Centre for Creative Activism, based in New York
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii) brings artists and activists together to co-design new forms of creative resistance
Interview with its co-founders of Labofii John Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux

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Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned scepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

Lead image, Clown Army – Polizei Gorleben Demo 2010 Dannenberg, by Simon Engel (Flickr)

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Lambert is a founder and director of the Center for Artistic Activism where he hosts resources and workshops to help aspiring activists innovate new means of social transformation.

Visit Steve’s website visitsteve.com to learn more about his many interactive art projects.

More links to creative and playful means of engagement can also be found at the Team Human resources page under the heading “Protest and Resistance”

The post Team Human 11: Steve Lambert on Public Displays of Collaboration appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human today: Andy Bichlbaum of the infamous Yes Men, the world’s most accomplished working culture hackers, responsible for devastating satirical attacks on Dow Chemical, Halliburton, Exxon, the US Chamber of Commerce, Dupont, and others.

Bichlbaum is going to share with us the secret to fighting against even violent oppression with playful resistance.

After listening to the show, check out the Yes Lab, a resource for playful resisters everywhere. http://yeslab.org/

And check out our resources page for an expanding list of ways to get involved in the actions featured on the show. This week we’ve added links to activist toolkits, instruction, and useful strategies for creative protest under the section “Protest and Resistance”.

Cross-posted from TeamHuman.fm

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“The offline networks or ‘off.networks’ community has started as an attempt to bring together researchers, activists and artists that work on the idea of an offline network, operating outside the Internet. Such networks could range from artistic projects (eg. deadrops or wifitagger) and “personal networks” (eg. PirateBox.cc or subnod.es), to community networks (eg. commotionwireless.net) and large city-scale mesh networks (eg. guifi.net, freifunk.net, awmn.net). In their second scheduled meeting during transmediale Festival, the members of this network wish to make their first effort to build a diverse and dynamic community around the design, implementation and deployment of offline networks in different contexts. They wish to reflect critically on the role of such local networks in shaping the evolving hybrid urban space and in addressing the threats which are posed by internet corporations and surveillance states on citizens’ privacy and freedom of speech.”

The post Movement of the Day: Off Networks Community International appeared first on P2P Foundation.