Capacities for Togetherness
Pandemics, wars, and other extreme events reactivate the reflection of the relationship between the individual and society, individual and collective responsibility, power and governance. This pandemic also opened many wounds, deepening the feelings of loneliness, powerlessness and disposability of life and work. In the form of a huge fire, historical, cultural, transgenerational and personal traumas are networked, which irreversibly change our neurological make-up, and therefore our capacities for togetherness. And we need this capacity as an antidote to the atomization and alienation in which we are more easily exploited. For this reason, we need to celebrate and deepen healthy interdependence in order to equip ourselves to act in paradox, where disagreements and contradictions are inevitable and welcome.
That's why we decide to crochet, knit, connect forces, revolutionary imagination, to be brave, to make mistakes, resisting to be perfect and the smartest. We ask questions, politicize friendships and learn as we go. We are guided by the multiplicity and similarities of our experiences and positions, as those whose beings, homes, communities, cities and countries are occupied by corruption and violence, being in the homelands and in diasporas, in the centers, on the peripheries, and at the border crossings. Our goal is to hold greater capacity for community building, understanding their possible trajectories and forms of emergence.
Looking at the etymology of the word camaraderie or friendship in all language groups, their meaning goes back to freedom, community, companionship, trust, extending oneself through others, witnessing and commitment to the truth. The common root (*fri, *pri) brings love and freedom into an interdependent relationship - my freedom depends on your freedom, a system of care relationships that go beyond the framework of the nuclear family. Since the 17th century, European political philosophy has defined man as a subject who, above all, acts out of his own interest, whose freedom implies the security and protection of property that he or the sovereign implements. Thus, the definition of freedom is placed and practiced in legal, state and national frameworks.
As we slowly learn for whom and for what many of the laws were designed, we witness more and more clearly our constant systemic humiliation, of the people who built the world we live in, enslaved and dehumanized, whose exploited work and traumas are woven into the infrastructure that enables the flow of everyday life. We wonder where we find the strength to fight, for dignity, for deep listening, for imagination, scarred by injustice, pain, emerged in the market that commodifies those wounds. We turn to forms of intimate and collective resistance that teach us co-liberation and alliance, radically standing up for joy and helping each other to stop reproducing dehumanizing relationships. With this, careful cultivation of critical thinking, validation of our experiences and analysis of the material realities that shape us, we easily see that political struggles for dignity are fought in kitchens, classrooms, fields, factories, behind counters, in trenches and basements, hospital rooms, refugee camps, correctional facilities, borders, and prisons. And in order to draw attention to them, we liberate physical and digital spaces, making repressive apparatuses visible, being forever changed by powerful bonds of collective vulnerability, witnessing and memorializing the experience of violence that are systematically minimized and erased.
Structures whose survival depends on the abuse of power control the narratives that we adopt as our own and collective, while through the media and the educational system they prevent the understanding of sociality, the visual and material patterns that make up our contexts. We see this most clearly in the arts: at the same time a place of ever-coming dignity and cruel capitalist overregulation. The pandemic has helped weakining of the construct of a self-sufficient individual who conquers life (and the market) along a linear path, the one who accomplished everything "by him/herself". The reality is that success in capitalist frameworks implies submissiveness to hierarchies of power and the normalization of the principle of domination. In the process of maintaining the "art world", workers are often left without compensation, social and health protection. What is common to the so-called centers and peripheries is the exploitation of artistic work and all other types of work that make its production, distribution and archiving possible. Erasing and discrediting the entire network of people, who, nameless and faceless, create, drag and archive these "artifacts", from one warehouse to another, from one cemetery of artworks to another, allows the myth of artistic genius to continue. The public mostly follows these movements unconsciously, and the artists choose not to see them because they often do not consider themselves workers. These practices enable continuous mobilization of our attention, political, and aesthetic potentials and exploitation of our collective liberating capacities. Institutional guardians have convinced us that artistic existence is unsustainable without their support or, more accurately, submission to their policies, even when those policies claim to be progressive. When the individual artist is called upon to "question the dominant policies" within an institution, the desired result is indeed the aestheticization of politics and unhindered symbolic representation. The ecosystem of the art world needs to be demystified and its connection with many industries, including the military industrial complex, whose capital largely determines the direction of institutional policies. Thus, the answers are not found only in association, but in changing established patterns of behavior and relationships. We can do this by questioning the values and policies within it, practicing healthy boundaries in collective work and poetic forms of social contracts.
Poetry expands and liberates in relationships. Glitches are necessary in all systems, seeds of resistance in tiniest cracks. We write the charter of an emerging dignity, which emerges when we refuse to reproduce the principles of domination, violence and extraction. Perhaps this is where the key lies, but also the central task of our struggle, the release of the transformative, revolutionary potential of art, not only as a tool that makes revolution attractive, but as a brave, non-linear process of working out collective metaphors that create and open social bonds, camaraderie where there was none. Asking seemingly simple questions: what is community, public space, conflict, what are we afraid of, what causes us anxiety, shame, where have we experienced punishment, have we punished someone, why don't we ask for help, how does the collective move, look and sound like we want to be a part of. We are establishing new connections, meanings and trajectories that we can navigate together cultivating social values that foster change.
The portal and the interregnum in which we find ourselves resemble an artistic process, passing from invisibility to visibility, signaling the direction, slowly revealing the rhythm. Indeed, everything begins with a barely visible movement, a gaze, a touch, no matter how much they might suffocate in overcompensatory mechanisms, in the fear of death. Everything starts from love, anger, sadness, fear, loneliness and missing. The need to break out of silence and to have allies in that, and there is no breakthrough without conflict. In it, society stops, time stops, all the times we have ever constructed and believed in. How to deal with the onslaught of expectations, fears, criticisms, unconscious and unfulfilled dreams? Thus we must embrace conflict as closely intertwined with radical hospitality. There lies a huge well of capacity for community, where external and internalized oppressive knots reveal complex individual and social injuries, but also vital ways to heal them.
Avoiding conflict is erasing power relations, further normalizing the silencing of the voices of those whose dignity has been systematically suppressed. We don't want control of our tone, gaslighting, reactionary defenses of comfort! Fear is a collective good, so is conflict. Radical hospitality opens space for the transformation of conflict and fear, creating capacities for co-grieving and self-acceptance. For the collective healing on which that better world depends, we need to create the conditions for alliances of testimony, reception and acknowledgment of trauma, spaces of expanded intimacy, based on empathy and ethics. The compass we are looking for is always in the making, in radical openness, vulnerability and solidarity, and the life normatively marked as the weakest and worthless hides the true direction of the struggle for freedom. Many futures are reflected in it.
In addition to destructive mechanisms, the pandemic has also exposed deep infrastructures of care and resistance, reminding us that despite centuries of the most brutal white supremacy, colonizing, imperialist, religious, and heteropatriarchal violence, it is impossible to extinguish a commitment to justice, joy, and rebellious hope. The present needs the flourishing of the intersection of experiences, which at the same time fosters a critical and experimental attitude towards collective knowledge. We need spaces where we strengthen each other's capacity for authentic expression, listening to the body as a fracture of politics, non-linear, violently discontinuous histories, overcoming the imposed frameworks that limit our imagination with the parameters of fear.
Feminist struggles are led by joyful militancy, the defense of the autonomy of all bodies, water, air, land, their material and subjective world, and the relations that shape them. That joy is not always happiness, but it is made of emotions that emerge from the silence, emotions suppressed long before we came into this world. Undesirable as unproductive, but more than desirable for exploitation. Let's focus our attention on the emerging forms of life and community, on the relationships that support them. We have the right and duty to defend life. With each other, we can codesign a world outside the repressive framework, armed with knowledge, joy, sharing the burden in this historical portal, ready to fight for it more easily and more readily.
Nataša Prljević
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Originally written in Serbian for Feministika, Crvena Association for Arts and Culture, Sarajevo.
Published on October 5, 2022 https://feministika.ba/kapacitetizazajednistvo/
This text was created as a result of a collective study, direct participation and mediated witnessing in movements against state violence and repression led by women from our region (Former Yugoslavia & Balkans), Iran, Kurdistan, Iraq, Palestine and the USA. Dedicated to all people who hold the world together with dignity, joy and love.
We invite you to download the HEKLER Assembly publication Infrastructures of Care 2021, with a detailed bibliography at the end, which resulted from our months of gatherings, reflections and experiments that also informed this text. It was designed by Jelena Prljević.