The Parasitic Reading Room (How) do we (want to) work (together) as (socially engaged) designers (students and neighbours) (in neoliberal times)?
Guided meditation in the courtyard of Palazzo Abatellis during Making Future’s mobile workshop in Palermo, Image: Ignacio Fanti, October 2019.
“Everything starts from this intuition: that what I define as support structures can release potential, and that support is not to be reduced to a reactive, symptomatic, and redeeming gesture, but that through its uttering we may be able to hear the unspoken, unsatisfied, the late and the latent, the in-process, the pre-thought, the not-yet-manifest, the undeveloped, unrecognised, the delayed, the unanswered, the unavailable, the notdeliverable, the discarded, the overlooked, the neglected, the hidden, the forgotten, the unnamed, the un-paid, the missing, the longing, the invisible, the unseen, the behind-the-scene, the disappeared, the concealed, the unwanted, the dormant.”
—Céline Condorelli Support Structures, 2009
How to work-live/ A Parasitic Reading Room A Parasitic Reading Room is an open format gathering a multitude of voices. It is a spontaneous set of reading spaces. It is also a traveling school. Conformed by a group of people reading aloud a selection of texts, they require proximity, empathy and willingness to be affected by other voices and ideas. A Parasitic Reading Room intends to ‘parasite’ readers, passers-by, contents and places, and to provoke a contagion of knowledge. 4 | Books as spaces of encounters
The first Parasitic Reading Room on the streest of Istanbul.an urban dĂŠrive across the irregular streets of the city in companion of a mobile radio (radioee.net), through a live broadcast of the public readings. September 2018
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By reading aloud we share a space of intimacy, a time and place of learning not only from the contents, but from the nuances, the accents, the cadence of the reading. Abigail Williams called this ‘the social life of books,’ “How books are read is as important as what’s in them,” she pointed—we call it ‘the book as a space of encounters.’ This means spaces where different books coexist and enrich each other; books as the necessary space where the author can have a dialogue with the reader, where different readers can read between the lines and find a place of exchange, where to debate, and discuss ideas. Books and encounters as an open school. Within the framework of a three-week virtual research festival in cooperation with the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts, the Studio Experimental Design of the Hamburg University of Fine Arts propel us to think about (How) do we (want to) work (together) (as (socially engaged) designers (students and neighbours) (in neoliberal times)? The research festival is concerned with academic self-organisation, artistic collectivism, life-long (un)learning, care work, self-exploitation, network structures, the dilemma of project logic, involuntary personal responsibility, alternative economies, informality, immaterial labour, art strike, precariousness, alienation and new subjectivities.
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This edition of the Parasitic Reading Room will explore issues of collaborative work and exploitation by re-enacting words, phrases, fragments, incomplete texts and occasional sentences selected by the participants of the reading room. This selection outlines what resonated with the group’s understanding of interdisciplinary cooperation, collectivity, excessive discourses, student self-organisation, blending of theory and practice, or how the diverse involvement of non-university initiatives and actors are characteristics of the current search for alternative forms of (collaboration -) work. How do collective and interdisciplinary working relationships function? How are alternative practices and subjectivities located in the context of the radical social changes in labour and learning conditions in neoliberalism? How can we build new solidary forms of cooperation?
— The Parasitic Reading Room is an on-going project by Ethel Baraona Pohl and Cesar Reyes Najera (dpr-Barcelona) and Rosario Talevi (s-o-f-t.agency, Making Futures). It was initiated as a contribution to the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (September 2018). It has continued with installments all over the world.
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AG Arbeit
We imagine a Persona !
If she speaks up she speaks for many of us She speaks openly about precarity She points out unequal payment and unpaid care work without hesitation
Her work is political. She knows that the roles and positions she takes, whether she compromises or not, will affect the whole field
When she feels exploited, unseen, under pressure to compete, or burned out, she’s aware she feels just like the majority of artists
She starts to reflect on the exclusions she performs within the art field
Revolt, she says
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She works in small groups, which encourage her to stand up for her political demands
In negotiations with curators, colleagues and institutions she proposes agreements which guarantee fair and respectful working conditions g1
Tatjana Fell, Alice MĂźnch, Inga Zimprich, Moira Zoitl. Source: The AG Arbeit (Labor Group) was initiated as part of To Have and To Need (Haben und Brauchen) in February 2014. .
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Precarity Pilot Brave New Alps and Caterina Giuliani. Source: https://precaritypilot.net
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles Source: Maintenance Art Manifesto Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 1969.
Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance — Outside and Inside. Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 1973. 12 | Books as spaces of encounters
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Arturo Escobar Critiques of Development Source: Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgio Kallis. Degrowth. A Vocabulary for a New Era. Routledge 2015.
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Johanna Hedva Sick Woman Theory Source: http://www.maskmagazine. com/not-again/struggle/sick-womantheory
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AndrĂŠ Gorz Reclaiming Work. Beyond the Wage-Based Society by AndrĂŠ Gorz Source: Polity; 1 edition (November 22, 1999)
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Ivan Illich The Post-Professional Ethos Source: The Right to Useful Unemployment and its professional enemies. Marion Boyards (1978).
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Rosi Braidotti Post-Anthropocentrism: Life beyond the Species (2013) Source: „The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistance. Reader“ Manifesta 12 Palermo, 2017. Images: Lena Giovanazzi, Making Futures Mobile Workshop, Parasitic Reading Room, Istanbul, 2019.
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Precarious Workers Brigade Teaching Tools Source: Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability And Reclaiming Education. Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2017.
of the Commons
T
E — a small village two hours west of Hyderabad, India — spread a blanket onto the dusty ground and carefully poured sacks of brightly colored, pungent-smelling seeds into thirty piles: their treasure. For these women — all of them dalit, members of the poorest and lowest social caste in India — seeds are not just seeds. They are symbols of their emancipation and the recovery of their local ecosystem. The homegrown seeds have enabled thousands of women in small villages in the Andhra Pradesh region of India to escape their fate as low-paid, bonded laborers, and to remake themselves as self-reliant, proud farmers. In , when I visited Erakulapally under the auspices of the Deccan Development Society, Indian food prices were soaring by percent a year, bringing social unrest and hunger to many parts of the country. But five thousand women and their families in seventy-five Andhra Pradesh villages not only had enough food for their needs — two meals a day instead of one, as previously — they had achieved food security without having to rely upon genetically modified seeds, monoculture crops, pesti10 T L C cides, outside experts, government subsidies or fickle markets. Their achievement of food sovereignty, as it is called, has been 9 remarkable because they are outcasts many times over: they are women, shunned poor, villagers. This ebook sold socially by New Society Publishers.“untouchables,” All Rights reserved. No part of thisrural ebook may be copied or sold. During the Green Revolution of the s and s, governments and foundations in the West made a big push to introduce large-scale commercial rice and wheat production in so-called developing countries. This helped mitigate hunger in the short term, but it also introduced crops that are alien to many Indian ecosystems and that require harmful and expensive pesticides. The new crops are also more vulnerable to drought and volatile market prices. Tragically, the Green Revolution displaced the traditional millet-based grains that generations of villages had once grown. The expense and unpredictability of market-based monoculture crops — and the agricultural and financial failures that often resulted — are widely blamed for an epidemic of two hundred thousand farmer suicides over the past decade. The women of Erakulapally discovered that traditional crops are far more ecologically suited to the semi-arid landscape of Andhra Pradesh and its rain patterns and soil types than proprietary seeds from the West. But to recover the old biodiverse ways of farming, the women had to ask their mothers and 28 | Books as spaces of encounters grandmothers to search for dozens of old nearly forgotten seeds. Eventually, in attics and family safe boxes, they found enough seeds to do a planting, and finally, after many additional rounds of cultivation, revived their traditional “mixed crop” agriculture.
ernments and foundations in the West made a big push to introduce large-scale commercial rice and wheat production in so-called developing countries. This helped mitigate hunger David Bollier in the short term, but it also introduced crops that are alien to many Indian ecosystems and that require harmful and expensive pesticides. The new crops are also more vulnerable to drought Think like a Commoner and volatile market prices. Tragically, the Green Revolution displaced the traditional millet-based grains that generations Source: The Rediscovery of the of villages had once grown. The expense and unpredictability Commons. New Society, 2014. of market-based monoculture crops — and the agricultural and financial failures that often resulted — are widely blamed for an epidemic of two hundred thousand farmer suicides over the past decade. The women of Erakulapally discovered that traditional crops are far more ecologically suited to the semi-arid landscape of Andhra Pradesh and its rain patterns and soil types than proprietary seeds from the West. But to recover the old biodiverse ways of farming, the women had to ask their mothers and grandmothers to search for dozens of old nearly forgotten seeds. Eventually, in attics and family safe boxes, they found enough seeds to do a planting, and finally, after many additional rounds of cultivation, revived their traditional “mixed crop” agriculture. The practice consists of planting six or seven different seeds in the same field, which acts as a kind of “eco-insurance.” No matter if there is too much or too little rain, or if the rain comes too early or too late — some of the seeds will grow. Families will have enough to eat no matter the weather — and there will be no need to buy expensive genetically modified seeds or synthetic pestiThe Rediscovery of the Commons 11 cides and fertilizers.
The recovery of traditional agriculture did not come through “technology transfer” or government-sponsored agricultural reItNew came do-it-yourself ofberecovering Thissearch. ebook sold by Societythrough Publishers. AllaRights reserved. No part ofprocess this ebook may copied or sold. the “people’s knowledge” and deliberately encouraging social collaboration and seed sharing. In seed-sharing villages, every farmer now has a complete knowledge of all the seeds used, and every household has its own “gene bank,” or collection of seeds, at home. “Our seeds, our knowledge” is how the women put it: every seed is a capsule of their knowledge. No one is allowed to buy or sell seeds; they can only be shared, borrowed or traded. The seeds are not regarded as an “economic input.” Villagers have a “social,” almost mystical relationship with the seeds, which is a subtle but important reason that the women were able to emancipate themselves. “Every crop has a meaning in a women’s life,” said P. V. Satheesh of the Deccan Development Society. “The seeds are a source of dignity.” T - of Andhra PradeshEverywhere illustrate is a learning environment | 29 an important feature of commons: they can arise almost anywhere and be highly generative in unlikely circumstances. There
“Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps. Apply yourself. Take your time. Note down the place: the time: the weather: Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless. The street: try to describe the street, what it’s made of, what it’s used for. The people in the street. The cars. What sort of cars? The buildings: note that they’re on the comfortable, well-heeled side. Distinguish residential from official buildings. The shops. What do they sell in the shops? There are no food shops. Oh yes, there’s a baker's. Ask yourself where the locals do their shopping. The cafes. How many cafes are there? One, two, three, four. Why did you choose this one? Because you know it, because it’s in the sun, because it sells cigarettes. The other shops: antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don’t say, don’t write ‘etc.’.
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Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out. Force yourself to see more flatly. Detect a rhythm: the passing of cars. The cars arrive in clumps because they’ve been stopped by a red light further up or down the street. Count the cars. Look at the number plates. Note the absence of taxis precisely when there seem to be a lot of people waiting for them. Read what’s written in the street: Morris columns,* newspaper kiosks, posters, traffic signs, graffiti, discarded handouts, shop signs.
Georges Perec Source: Spices of Spaces and Other Pieces. Penguin Classics, 1974
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Paolo Plotegher How to turn a Career into a Commons Source: https://precaritypilot.net/ paolo-plotegher-how-to-turn-acareer-into-a-commons/9
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Mawena Yehouessi Afrofuturistic Politics: Less Power, More Commitment Source: The Funambulist #10: arhcitecture and colonialism. 2017.
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Adrianne Rich Source: An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. W.W. Norton & Co. 1991 Image: The Nap Ministry
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she taught me how to clean to get down on my hands and knees and scrub, not beg she taught me how to clean, not live in this body
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my reflection has always been once removed.
e-flux journal #100 — may 2019 Françoise Vergès Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender
– Cherrie Moraga, “Half-Breed”1 Race, Gender, and Exhaustion as a Condition of Existence Every day, in every urban center of the world, thousands of black and brown women, invisible, are “opening” the city. They clean the spaces necessary for neo-patriarchy, and neoliberal and finance capitalism to function. They are doing dangerous work: they inhale toxic chemical products and push or carry heavy loads. They have usually travelled long hours in the early morning or late at night, and their work is underpaid and considered to be unskilled. They are usually in their forties or fifties. A second group, which shares with the first an intersection of class, race, and gender, go to middle class homes to cook, clean, and take care of children and the elderly, so that those who employ them can go to work in the places that the former group of women have cleaned. Meanwhile, in the same early hours of the morning, in the same big metropoles of the world, we can see women and men running through the streets, rushing to the nearest gym or yoga center. They follow the mandate to maintain healthy and clean bodies of late capitalism; they usually follow their run or workout with a shower, an avocado toast, and a detox drink before heading to their clean offices. Meanwhile, women of color try to find a seat for their exhausted bodies as they return on public transit from cleaning those gyms, banks, insurance offices, newspaper offices, investment companies, or restaurants and preparing meeting rooms for business breakfasts. They doze off as soon as they sit, their fatigue visible to those who care to see it. The working body
Françoise Vergès
Capitalocene, Waster, Race, and Gender.
Image: Touch Sanitation Performance,Mierle Laderman Everywhere is a learning environment | 39 Ukeles, photo: Robin Holland
06.10.19 / 15:32:25 EDT
03/13 e-flux journal #100 — may 2019 Françoise Vergès Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender
01/13
the difference between you and me is as I bent over strangers’ toilet bowls, the face that glared back at me in those sedentary waters was not my own, but my mother’s brown head floating in a pool of crystalline whiteness
that is made visible is the concern of an ever growing industry dedicated to the cleanliness and healthiness of body and mind, the better to serve racial capitalism. The other working body is made invisible even though it performs a necessary function for the first: to clean spaces in which the “clean” ones circulate, work, eat, sleep, have sex, and perform parenting. But the cleaners’ invisibility is required and naturalized. This has been happening for at least five hundred years, but I want to argue that looking at invisible/visible racialized cleaning/caring labor today, which is driven by the needs of finance capital and new forms of middle class living, brings together multiple intersecting issues that go beyond the division of chores within a couple or the calculation of what domestic labor adds to general growth. What I want to explore here is the dialectical relation between the white male performing body and the racialized female exhausted body; between the visibility of the final product of the cleaning/caring and the invisibility, along with the feminization and racialization (both going hand in hand), of the workers who do this cleaning/caring; between the growing industry of cleaning/caring and conceptions of clean/dirty, the gentrification of cities, and racialized environmental politics. To do so, I will discuss cleaning/caring through a different framework than that of labor (i.e., housework or domestic work). Without the work of women of color, which is necessary but must remain invisible – literally and in valuative terms – neoliberal and patriarchal capitalism would not function. Upper class, white, neoliberal, and even liberal people must enter these spaces without having to acknowledge, to think of, to imagine, the work of cleaning/caring. It is a global situation and it is primarily white women who act as supervisors and regulators of this labor done by black and migrant/refugee women. The contradiction and dialectic between the neoliberal bourgeoisie and these exhausted bodies illustrate the connections between neoliberalism, race, and heteropatriarchy. It also uncovers new borders that have been drawn between cleanliness and dirtiness in an age in which concerns are growing for clean air, clean water, clean houses, clean bodies, clean minds, and green spaces. The growing concern for a healthy/powerful body and mind is built on the New Age ideology of the 1970s, which appropriated Eastern and indigenous conceptions and practices, or esoteric Western e-flux #100 ones. ItSource: has developed intoJournal a major and lucrative market, offeringMay meditation and herbal teas, e-flux, 2019. yoga and exotic whole grains, gyms and massages for every age, founded on class privilege and that very cultural appropriation. Its
Gloria E. AnzaldĂşa Now Let us Shift Source: Light in the Dark. Luz en 4.4 | Nos/Otras Disrupts lo Oscuro. Edited by Analouise Keating. Duke University Press (2015).
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Spirit embodying yourself as rock, tree, bird, human, past, present, and future, you of many names, diosas antiguas, ancestors, we embrace you as we would a lover. You face east, feel the wind comb your hair, stretch your hands toward the rising sun and its orange filaments, breathe its rays into your body, on the outbreath send your soul up to el sol,28 say: Aire, with each breath may we remember our interrelatedness see fibers of spirit extend out from our bodies creating us, creating sky, seaweed, serpent, y toda la gente. “El alma prende fuego,”29 burns holes in the walls separating us renders them porous and passable, pierces through posturing and pretenses, may we seek and attain wisdom. Moving sunwise you turn to the south: Fuego, inspire and energize us to do the necessary work, and to honor it as we walk through the flames of transformation. May we seize the arrogance to create outrageously soñar wildly—for the world becomes as we dream it. Facing west you send your consciousness skimming over the waves toward the horizon, seamless sea and sky. Slipping your hands into el ojo del agua you speak to the spirit dwelling here en éste mar: Agua, may we honor other people’s feelings, respect their anger, sadness, grief, joy as we do our own. Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death, and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears. You pivot toward the north, squat, scoop sand into your hands: Madre tierra, you who are our body, who bear us into life, swallow us in death now let us shift | 157 Everywhere is a learning environment | 41
Stefano Harney Hapticality in the Undercommons (...) Source: Cumma Papers #9. Edited by Nora Sternfeld and Henna Harri. Helsinki, 2014. When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. But what is this European model, what is at the heart of this model, why the negations, the unending blood-soaked dawns? Here is Fanon’s answer: But let us be clear: what matters is to stop talking about output, and intensification, and the rhythm of work. The coming post-colonial nations must break not only with the negations of history, culture, and personality wrought by colonialism but with the ‘rhythm of work’ imposed by the European model. And he clarifies: No, there is no question of a return to Nature. It is simply a very concrete question of not dragging men towards mutilation, of not imposing upon the brain rhythms that very quickly obliterate it and wreck it. The pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or from his privacy, to break and kill him. Here is that word ‘rhythm’ again. ‘Rhythms imposed on the brain’ this time, imposed by a drive to ‘catch up.’ Catching up was a phrase much circulated in the takeoff theories of capitalist development pushed by the United States in the Cold War. But, Fanon points out, this catching up institutes a rhythm that ‘breaks’ and ‘kills’ man. This is a rhythm that ‘tears man away from himself,’ that ‘obliterates’ and ‘wrecks’ his brain. Fanon uses the metaphor of the ‘caravan’ for a system that tears man away from himself. 42 | Books as spaces of encounters
No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and day, in the company of Man, in the company of
Disclaimer: A parasite does not ask permission to interact, it nourishes itself from its host, and causes changes for good and for bad... it depends on who tells the story. The parasitized texts in these readers are reproduced without asking permission, the only reason is its nutritional value for the survival of a non-mercantilized form of school. As if a genetic trail the source is cited the result is uncertain and it only depends on who reads it. Contributors to this edition: Ahmad Borham, Juan Chacรณn, Marlene Gennet, Dennis Nedbal, Charlotte Perka, Gรถzde Sarlak.
Studio Experimental Design HFBK Hamburg Since 2011, Studio Experimental Design of the University of Fine Arts Hamburg has been practicing a politically and socially engaged design approach with the Public Design Support St. Pauli. It is an attempt to use design resources to work with and for those who are usually excluded from design. This critical attitude towards design enables and requires new work practices. howtowork.live @howtowork.festival
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Rosario Talevi is a Berlin-based architect interested in critical spatial practice, transformative pedagogies and feminist futures, which she explores through various spatial, editorial and curatorial formats. Her work advances architecture as a form of agency -in its transformative sense and in its capacity of acting otherwise and as a form of care - one that provides the political stakes to repair our broken world. Currently, she is acting as research curator at the Berlin University of the Arts for the practicebased research project Making Futures Bauhaus+. She is executive board of the Floating University Berlin and a founding member of s-o-f-t.agency. rosariotalevi.com s-o-f-t.agency
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The Parasitic Reading Room On Collaborative Work and Exploitation Studio Experimental Design, HFBK Hamburg Online Research Festival June-July 2020