“Commons?!” #7
  • discussion
  • workshop
  • reading

"Working on unity": Mathilde Chénin, in discussion with people from Les Laboratoires, propose for this workshop two very different texts. Both dealing with unity in a given, intentional, community.
Text "Assembler" (in French) comes from the website http://micropolitiques.collectifs.net. The other text is entitled "Beginning a Session", and has been written by American writer and activist Starhawk.

---------------

“Commons?!” A reading and discussion workshop open to all!
“There is no common world”, wrote philosopher Bruno Latour, “we must compose it.” Yet our media, politics and intellectual environments are overrun with words like “common” “commune” “commons” or “community”, from calls for participative democracy to ecological debates, from critiques of neo-liberalism to social networks. A great many artistic practices and cultural discourses lay claim to it, often with the added urgency that the widespread crisis context creates, a crisis of resources, the environment, the economy, social relations, and on and on. Beyond the populist and instrumentalised rhetoric that would make art the source of an ability to “live together” with its soothing, therapeutic properties, or worse, a consolation for the failure of social policies – artists, intellectuals, and activists question the “tactics” that allow us to mobilise the power of what is “common”, something to be constantly (re)composed by the hands of dynamic and shifting communities.
Before le Printemps des Laboratoires (18-19 May 2013) dedicated to these questions, les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers invites you to join in a bi-monthly reading workshop that will take a selection of texts and together question the definitions and social practices related to the terms “commune”, “common”, “commons”, and “community”. How have their meanings changed through political and intellectual history and what tools can they constitute for “us” today?
 
+ dates + tuesdays 19/02, 5/03, 19/03, 2/04, 16/04, 30/04, 14/05
+ horaires + 7pm to 9pm