Session 6: 12 & 13 April 2019

“With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow in multi-species muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.”

Thus said Donna Harraway, in her seminal essay Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chtulucene published some years ago in e-flux. Our collective thinking processes for this last workshop round, before we depart on our ship to Sardinia, is to wear the hats and the parts, to think through the water, to discuss with the deafening silence, to swim amongst our ideas and to come forth via the waves of resistance. 

Session 5: 8 & 9 March 2019

This session will further explore the concept of the radio station and will further unfold the infrastructural details of building up a discursive event.

We will be discussing the content, directing and aesthetics of the Roaming Assembly and we will look into texts from the following recent contemporary art publications : 

1. Comradeship by Zdenka Badovinac and 

2. Curatorial activism by Maura Reilly

These readings will help us to explore further into collective ways of organising that inform our practices.

Session 4: 8 & 9 February 2019

How can we discuss silence if we do not practice it ourselves? This workshop will further the discussions from our previous meeting, looking on the work of M. Fricker and her concept on epistemic injustice and the who, how and when of enforced silences. We will look into the binary of voice/silence: the ones that are heard vs the ones that are unheard. This first workshop will hone in the writings of F. Fanon so that they operate as the core backbone of our theoretical direction as well as in general inform our practices and next steps. We will perform the act of active listening by scaling down, slowing down and focusing on learning and discussing one voice. 

We will further explore the concepts of PPAB through references on film: with the italian film Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), but also music and the example of the group Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution. We will then discuss the role of radio as a form of propaganda and revolt during the 20th century, key examples BBC Radio during the 2nd world war, but also through key appearances of radio in film: Radio as a practice of regression through the documentary “Radio Unnameable” but also as a symbol of political otherness, with popular film and hollywood classic Goodmorning Vietnam, or films such as Tokyo Rose, or 1987 Woody Allen’s Radio Days. 

Should time allows it the seminar will also explore the role of sound in the Italian art movement Futurism. 

Session 3: 11 & 12 January 2019

In order to approach constructively from now on the question of why do we go to Sardinia and what can we do there and since this is the beginning of a new year, and one universal attitude is strongly linked with the concept of “resolutions”, as well as the manifestation and embodied practice of this, i would like to propose we focus on very concrete ideas instead of further more rhizomatically unfolding the thematics of our so far discussions. The workshop will look into the following: 

-Power and specifically social power, the power of privilege, and its relation to knowledge. How knowledge is related to territoriality, by assuming the position of the periphery (Sardinia) as a practice of undoing normative formats of knowledge. 

-Power and knowledge vis a vis ethics and justice, and further the transmission of knowledge and experience in relation to justice, operating from the ideological platform of the “motley crew” which relates to practices that adhere with the communal. 

For the first part of our workshop: 

A. We will follow from Gramsci’s theory on cultural hegemony, and the “cultural norm” to the concept of cultural racism as a form of hegemonic imposed knowledge. (Fanon, Sivanandan)

We will then focus on the work of philosopher Miranda Fricker and her concept on epistemic injustice, what she calls the act of wronging someone "in their capacity as a knower”.

The general aim is to highlight some ethical aspects of two basic everyday epistemic practices in DAI: conveying knowledge to others and making sense of our own social experiences.

For the second part of our workshop:

We will collectively reflect on group dynamics, and what a motley crew “actively” can become, accumulate our experiences and reflections on the aforementioned themes: knowledge and social power, experiences of justice/injustice in relation to knowledge. We will transform all our testimonial material into “particals” of knowledge that can be inserted in the general “knowledge composition” from which our draft proposal for the Roaming Assembly will come forth. 

Session 2: 7 & 8 December 2018

Dear participants of Island Partisans, Anarchists, Bandits and Pirates,

Your workshop in PAF will be lead by Julia Morandeira, and she will be following up on the already covered territories with you. Following her/your input and during our meeting in Sardinia we will be able to actually decide collectively what is it that we want to focus on and then from that to work towards our roaming assembly. 

Julia is another amazing human being. Her extensive notes on what she wants to work on with you are the following: 

> Be able to approach an unknown territory in a sensible, respectful, coherent political way. Avoid extractivism, sensationalism, fetishisation. Getting to the point. What does it mean to develop a situated practice in this context? How to connect Sardinias’ corpus —of histories, knowledge, experiences, possibilities— with one’s own interests and work? Research the histories from below: how to trace long-standing solidarities, forms of collective expression and cooperation, strategies of mutiny and insurrections, carnivals and parades, amongst pirates, slaves, maroons, seafarers, stowaways, islanders, and rebels from all nations. What can and needs to be learnt?

The monstrous: cannibals, many-headed hydras and more. How can the abject be approached, and even undone? How can it speak to us? What are its potentialities? The deviant as the back alley of history and epistemology

(Viewing: Precarias a la deriva)

(Readings & discussion: Marcus Rediker, Céline Condorelli, Silvia Federici) 

(Examples: work developed with la Brigada Puerta de Tierra, Puerto Rico; Pirates and caves in Mallorca; Hydrarchies, etc)

> Forms of being and working together: the coalition, the assembly. Self-reflexive process: are you working as a group? How to conciliate the different tensions and interests? How and why start working as a group? What form to adopt, and does it stem from what? Discussion on the violence of participation and affinity

(Readings: Marcus Miessen, Donna Haraway, bell hooks)

(Radical History Workshops Strategies)

> Promiscuous methodologies: how to be affected and infected by the research. The coast and the island, the liquid infrastructures and communications. Winds and currents, rhythms and flows, tides and storms. How to be infused by what you will find in Sardinia: develop an attention, a sensibility, to other forms of relationality, other vectors of movement, other politics and logics specific to islands. 

(Readings: Kamau Braithwaite, La isla que se repite, Glissant) 

(Speculative writing exercise)

> Counter-topias of speculation: in the face of the disarming force and totalising narratives of capitalism, we need to be able to generate answers, possible answers. Against colonial imagination and histories from above, how to use speculation as a situated practice to devise and open possibilities and co-responsible futures

> minor research approaches: objects, affective currents, gestures, choreographies, counter-mappings

(Body speculative exercise: tableau vivant)

Wishing you a productive time with Julia and  very much looking forward to January, where we start the new year together! 

Warmly, 

iLiana

Session 1: 9 & 10 November 2018

Dear participants of Island Partisans, Anarchists, Bandits and Pirates,

I wish to welcome you to this atypical island cruising, which i hope will form a hybrid of a partisan-bandit-pirate artistic group. For the two upcoming workshops we will be having two guests that have engaged deeply with the issues we have merely named in the first presentation of this Factory. I hope that both of these wonderful women, Antonia Alampi (November) and Julia Morandeira (December) will provide food for thought and concrete stimuli that will crystallize the core aspects of what we would like to focus on during our next meeting in Sardinia in January.

I would love it if we can have a collective written note from all of you at the end of the workshop, that states what you found interesting and how this presentation can reflect to mine in October, so that we have an initial list of “keywords” to follow up, sent to me.

For now a few notes from Antonia Alampi.

Geographies of Imagination by Antonia Alampi

Geographies of Imagination is a 2-days workshop inspired by an exhibition Antonia Alampi co-curated at SAVVY, with the aim to engage in confabulations to build connections between the varied and conflicting uses of imagination in constructing otherness and the role of geography as a tool of power. How is power situated at the core of processes of othering, and how are these processes connected to forms of belonging that we could also relate to notions of territoriality and possession? 

The workshop is divided in three parts, each comprising presentations, (short) film screenings, collective reading sessions (of both poetry and theory) and debate.

In Part1. The Illusion of Power, we will look into a few uses of imagination, particularly in relation to the writings of Michel-Rolph Trouillot on the issue of false representations, of imaginary geographies essential to the West in the creation of its narrative empires and its reorganization of meaning used to legitimize its supremacy and through the writings on processes of othering of bell hooks and Toni Morrison.

In you who are not ourselves we will look into how Gramsci´s writings on the Southern Issue were influenced by – or had a relation to -  the racist theories developed by the School of Positivist Criminology of Cesare Lombroso, and by the simultaneous development of anthropometric research. 

In Cartographic Power we will trace a connection between the notion of the “other” in the writings and theories of Edward Said and Yves Mudimbe, technocratic geographical fantasies of the XX century and geographical specification-ism used as a curatorial tool by main-stream cultural institutions.

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