COLLECTIVE WRITING (started on 21st Jan 2021 and goes on and on and on)
Please copy and paste your responses here (including the prompt you were responding to):
How do we enter the village, or traverse between them?
You enter my village via a road. The road has fields on either side. To traverse to the next village inland, there are footpaths over the hills but also particular other routes, not always based on the quickest or cleanest way. The animals have their own ways. When I enter the next door village, I keep an invisible alliance with the village i have left. I enter a third village, maybe a town actually, with the remembrance of the place before, and with a yearning to return to the warmth of the first village which holds my dwelling.
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Pick any object, from your pocket, bag, drawer… Explain how can is it a metaphor for an assembly?
There’s a ceramic bowl on my shelf that contains a bit of everything. It’s not clear why things end up here, most of them are small enough to be contained by it, most of them don’t have another obvious space where they should be instead. So it collects things, not useful enough to get their own space, but not un-useful enough to be thrown away.
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What is invisible about / in the village?
What is invisible about the village is that everyone there is watching you in some way, wondering where you came from, who you are. Once I parked my car on an unmarked road and the farmer came out and told me my road tax had expired, he had looked up my number plate because he didn't recognise the vehicle, even though i know him personally. He said he owned that road… is that even possible, to own a road, I remember thinking. Familiarity is everything, and sometimes it is possible to feel as if you are within that circle but most of the time you are aware of it because of how you are, bluntly, not.
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What do the villages produce, or reproduce?
The village produces cider. The village produces stones for carving. The people in the village reproduce people, but not very often. The village used to produce milk, and male calves sold off to be eaten when young. The village produces smells, gallons of mud, loose rocks from worn down makeshift roads. The village produces weeds and an endless wind.
The village reproduces quiet, and routine, and enforces a focus on bodily functions: an acute hunger that arrives at dinner, a tiredness that comes as soon as the stars come out.
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Is there anything that must be sourced from outside the Villages?
Medicine? (Synthetic) Electronics? Machines? Paper? (All paper, everything from paper to write on to toilet paper) Musical instruments?
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How does cheese feel in the farmer’s cupboard?
The time is long and heavy. Time is at the interface. In active and slow transformation. There is density. I am my own moisture. I dry. It's contaminating, it spreads. It attracts. They put me a towel. A cloth weighed down with water from here. I am from generations. Around is already what I am.
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What are your personal associations with the rural?
This is some summer. We go to the farm. The village does not count. There is only one locality. Two old farmers, the children are gone. And the neighbors. In 1990. The neighbors have cows. Lands. We talk to them little. The yard is large. The courtyard is made of beautiful stone slabs, the whole is sloping. The well to the stables. It is said that the walls of the barns hid guns during the war. Between two buildings, behind the well, there is a small path to other neighbors. They say they arrived not long ago. That they come from the city. That they are infrequent. The path goes down, towards the river. A snake has passed.
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What are your personal associations with the rural?
For me this is about walking. To be able to leave my house and leave people behind in a moment. To see a deer in the woods, in another world to your own, within a moment of your living place. For your relation to your everyday existence to be transformed by a simple encounter with another way of existing steps away from your door. To forgot and to remember.
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What are your personal associations with the rural?
It’s an early morning. The sun is just rising. The forest is deep green with lightly gleaming tree tops. The air is brisk, filled with interspecies choir greeting the new day. Away from human techno-urban self-referencial imaginations my senses reawake. I feel free to land, to live more simply, to reconnect with what feels true but can be hardly articulated. That which asks for another language, a new language of aliveness.
My romantic tune crashes as I enter the village. Deserted. Just an eldery man slowly traversing the street. Somewhere a dog is barking. Houses are well fenced from all sides. Slowly I sense the air around me filling with dreary dullness. I want to run away. This sensation grows stronger, as I meet a noble lady from the area, from whom I’m renting a room for a few days. She goes on and on about her baron-grandfather who used to own the territories here, and how it changed in the GDR times, and how now their family is back here, and how this is their forest, and how she needs to put up some traps for the sneaky animals who come to eat from their garden,... I’m bored and exhausted by this all-too-familiar language of conquest. And the lack of love.
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What kind of village would you like to live in? Can you imagine and describe it in a form of your choice? Who else lives in your village?
I’d like to live in a village that is close to other villages. That cares about the other neighbouring villages. I’d like to live in a village where queerness and anti-colonial and anti-racism and feminism are encouraged and expressed in action. I’d like to live in a village where activities are based on shared practices and mutual support. I’d like to live in a village based on collective living and shared co-parenting.
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What rituals does a Confederacy of Villages produce / encourage?
A confederacy would encourage political engagement towards liberation, strengthen the potentialities of the village. It would encourage seasonal events and reflections on the pastoral year, the times before and ahead, and the relationship with the Cities. Maybe it would provide work, provide new routes through the landscape. It could produce food, it could be a shop, a pottery, a place for production, a trade route. Would the Confederacy document what the Villagers already do, whether they do it for or against the village – swimming, picking sloes, apples, damsons, mulberries, walking, fermenting, cooking, climbing caves, starting fires....
What are your personal associations with the rural?
The layers of associations are double, or triple, or more.
One layer is about the opposition between rural and city, periphery and center. The relationships of power and resource extraction and distribution. The rural areas being exploited by the big cities.
One layer is about conservative values. That some people need to leave their home village because their identity can not be accommodated there.
One layer is about diversity. That within certain frames you are allowed to be different from each other and still be acknowledged as important to the community. Because if the community is quite small everyone is important, you are not replacable.
And then there is the romanticisation of “nature” and “simple life” which I think are very banal associations but I still have them…
So these were my very personal associations.
What are your personal associations with the rural?
The parents of my former partner lived in the countryside, I went there very often during 10 years.
My mother comes from an Italien family of farmworkers.
I lived in a squatt in the countryside for 2 years.
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Three villages meet in a room to discuss contemporary art. Write the dialogue between them.
Not sure they are discussing contemporary art. They discuss about experimentations going on in the village.
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How do villages in the confederation communicate with each other? Is it in goods / paths / verbal / non-verbal
Once a month, one member of one village go to another village. He/she/they spend time there, exchange goods, discuss various topics, contribute to the work.
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Make visible the ecosystems that sustain the villages.
Money : selling products (including things identified as works of art), selling services (hosting events for universities for example), grants by public and private funding
Food : produce its own vegetables, meat, cheese (not sure for the wine)
Knowledge :
Materials for construction,clothing:
Animals:
Ghosts:
Trees, rivers, …:
What is the confederacy of villages working towards? What can it do that individual villages cannot? Why do the individual villages want to be part of it?
Some of the confederates have the urge to liberate the villages from the yoke of the catholic church, and all the other churches and organised religions that perpetuate the system of hierarchies, serfdom and stopped actualising themselves to continue (if they ever strived for that) as a mean for better social relations, mutualism, commons, trust, improvement of the living conditions. Aside from that, the present opinion that villages have as “sheriffs” of moral purity, because of the tightness of social relations and the devotion to strict rules imposed by catholic church, makes them particularly unsexy for young people who want to live a different life. The confederacy I am thinking about is a secular movement for liberation of the villages and their mores, for naked assemblies and more open families, for a new way of seeing communal living as a spring for communal futures, where we know how to nourish ourselves, and each other.
CoV WRITING EXERCISE
What are your personal associations with the rural?
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Three villages meet in a room to discuss contemporary art. Write the dialogue between them.
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How do villages in the confederation communicate with each other? Is it in goods / paths / verbal / non-verbal
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Make visible the ecosystems that sustain the villages.
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Explain the village’s rural dynamism techniques
Draw a rural dynamism technique…
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You are a sheep. Describe the shepherd.
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What is the confederacy of villages working towards? What can it do that individual villages cannot? Why do the individual villages want to be part of it?
The confederacy of villages functions with an alternative economy - describe this system of currency, production, remuneration,....
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What do you owe to the village?
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What kind of village would you like to live in? Can you imagine and describe it in a form of your choice? Who else lives in your village?
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Where does the coordination of the confederacy happen? Is it different in every village?
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What does the centre of the confederacy look like? What are its margins?
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What rituals does a Confederacy of Villages produce / encourage?
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Does the Confederacy exist? What does it rally for/against?
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Who lives in the Villages and how do they spend their days?
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Who owns the land? Who walks the land?
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What buildings / structures are there? How are they used? Are they the property of people inhabiting them?
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Describe a landscape within the Confederacy.
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How does cheese feel in the farmer’s cupboard? How does a cheese feel in a gallery gift shop?
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Is there anything that must be sourced from outside the Villages?
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How do we enter the village, or traverse between them?
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What do the villages produce, or reproduce?
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What is invisible about/in the village?
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How would you represent your village at an Assembly?
Would you have a representative? Who would this be? How did you decide who or what this representative is?
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Pick any object, from your pocket, bag, drawer… Explain how can is it a metaphor for an assembly?
March 4th
Water Assembly
Wetlanders
we become ocean
We achieve mastery of energies. I am under hypnosis, I capture the flows and I can give back. I am lying down and there are people around me. They feed off the laying on of hands. It's in a special place, like a temple. It is enough to master a state. Time passes and we can take turns. It's each their turn. We recharge in contact with others. Time passes and it is thus for everyone to know how to recharge. We go to the street and then we stop for this state for a while. So the inhabitants stop. We no longer eat out of necessity. We enjoy it from time to time. The control of the energies allows us to pass into the machines after having passed energies into the machines. We transpose. And then water. Steam water and drops. We can be those waters. Time passes when we choose, as a collective agreement without words and without debate, to get water. The waters are rising rapidly. We innocence the world from ourselves. We can dialogue in harmony with the environment. We are all here and we are one while pursuing individualities. But there is that Noah said no. Noah remained in his body unchanged, building his raft and putting the animals in it. Animals are beautiful beasts. Intrigued by the resistance, I take my body, the same? , to go up to the raft and question the animals. In front of them all looking at me, I ask why. The forehead against that of the white goat, the animals all together answer me with an interior voice, soft and peremptory. "There is that this must be that without our being in the no of this because there is nothing to fear ...". This is how they convinced me to stay in this body. Others then all followed. Each repopulating the water and then the land as it pleases. It will be possible to change it. And we now keep our voices of dialogue assured.
NC - JL - 2011-2021
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— I love having a bath.
— I was thinking about floating. There is a place… it’s like your body is not there.
— A kind of euphoria…
— A dolphin rush?
— Yeah, like endorphins.
— …
— You know, all water is one. This is a pervasive consciousness. Water knows. Something knows. Water saved the world. I asked a friend, Louisa: “I go to a trip, what sould I bring to you?”, “Water”, she said. I decided to bring her some water… Then, friends of mine began to bring waters to me. I then was drinking waters of the world each day. Waters as a sign of gratitude from the land.
— So now, we should all bring water when we meet.
— We will meet at the bodies of water, at the ancient gathering spaces. The molecules in our bodies will recognize having been there before. But this time we will not do the same mistakes. We will open up re-sacralisation process. Becoming bodies of water.
— Is there a flotation reading group too?
— When I was at the university, there was a course about the sea… maybe it was about Bachelard.
— …
— Do you know Tidal Zones? Growing kelp. A climavore station… there is a table which appears and disappear with the sea.
— And did you already saw a kappa?
— A kind of cucumber creature?
— Yeah, taking energy from the anus…
— MMM… Outland ? Inland ? Island ?
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In embodied affinities with Water, we are the flood.
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May 6th
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Nat -
Redistribution
Alternative modes of thinking and strategically work together…
Organisational aspects…
Villages … understanding the dependances… Can I play alternative roles… healthy connections with food and nature, transportation systems…
I lived in a village more than a year… great and boring … I had to leave at a point…
It’s not enough for me…
In cities : the diverse communities … and the access … time to travel…
Easier to make a family you choose…
Rural values … xenophobic…
Few positive… > experiences in the cities… mutualism…
Part of a network and then see what happens…
< Resonances: Sabina >
How to organise the village entities, how to work together.
Dependencies of the urban on the rural. Understanding complexities.
Apple orchards. Nuts.
Villages can be boring (xenophobic, ….).
City is exciting. Diverse communities that live there. Easier to make a family of choice. Trust. Support. Mutualism.
Robertas:
Childhood in the forest.
I used to spend childhood in deep countryside — lonely house… empty kind of space… random Random people walking through the forest/village.
Everything is so boring but so rich, full.
Tribality cannot happen in the non-tribal situation.
Primitive sky… how can a sky be primitive…
Mystery in the very “simple’ forest setting. Tactile. Smells. Stones. Experience reality differently. Beyond the television folk.
Songs! They have meaning. They are disappearing. I’m disappearing with them.
Villages become efficient farms. Squeezing out. Attracting tourists.
No real love for nature.
Artist-run SPA, selfish exploration, to keep relationship to the rural.
Internal conflict. How to be there? With new eyes… As a guest (people are forgiving to the guests, caring for the guests, more than for those who surround them “forever”)
Conservativeness sides but also acceptance… curiosity and helpfullness… mutual experiences…
Network and economical aspect of these…
Artist-run restaurant… Being part of a territory…
Economic models. Barter. Gift economy.
Margo
I didn’t really planned to join but it sounded like it connected things…
A lot about the idea of confederacy as a political form…
Alternative network that doesn’t rely on the city. Across borders of countries. Self-sufficiency. Wildness. Connectedness to nature. Interested but never making that decision.
As for london… not a lot of place for “nature… ”
Every summer, in the countryside in Dorset — we have a small land, with a shed on it… no internet, no phone, water, no electricity… Stone-age people for the summer.
Having connection to a place… swimming in the see… I know people in the village quite well…
I met a young blacksmith… “wow young can live here…”
How to be a part of the life there ? More than a month in summer… ?
In sweden… inversion of values urban/rural … cities as conservative places…
Rebuy to rewild the place ?
Collectively buying the land.