16 Beaver Group's Midwinter Retreat
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 11:35PM [NOTE: 16 Beaver conducted a forum from January 7-15. Below is an excerpt. To review the propositions, click HERE.]
WELCOME TO THE NEW PARADIGM
or THE CRISIS OF EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE
A midwinter retreat, a modular molecular seminar
with Everyone
[SAMPLE PROGRAM]
Day 3 : Monday (09.01)
__________________________________________
Body Practices : Spatial Politics
"to attack the body is to attack the right itself, since the right is precisely what is exercised by the body on the street"
The use of Bodies and (in) Space have been two critical elements of the emergent political movements of 2011 (eternal?). This day will be dedicated to thinking about the spatial practices which have emerged over the last year. We would like to invite all those interested in these issues to join us. We will begin with a walk that will enter a kind of taxonomy of the sites and practices which have emerged this last Fall. We also hope the walk will also be a way to activate and enter the conversation which will take place in the evening, oriented toward some questions about the role of space and the use of bodies in liberating spaces, reasserting a common right to the city, and potentially blocking the flow of relentless enclosure.
Pt. 1 (walk) 5:30-7:30PM
Meet at 16 Beaver at 5:00
Pt. 2 (discussion) 8PM
Bodies and Spaces Matter: On Spatial Politics, Spatial Practices and the Performativity of Reclaiming the Common(s)
Squares, parks, streets, bridges, ports, banks, factories, offices, campuses, museums, gardens, farms, forests, rivers, atmospheres, houses, apartments, community centers, neighborhoods, zoning districts, cities, towns, villages, camps... No space is ever neutral; every space is governed in some form or another by various combinations of institutional and economic power at local, national, and planetary scales. In some cases, these spatio-political relationships are brutally evident, while in others they may be obscure, illegible, or simply taken for granted in the course of everyday life. From the encampments of Tahrir Square to the foreclosed homes of East New York and beyond, the movements of the past year have brought questions of spatial politics to the forefront of theory and practice, strategy and tactics.
These movements have involved the performative appropriation and transformation of physical spaces--whether officially designated "public," "private" or something in-between-- for common occupation and use. In doing so they have also necessarily raised questions about what Judith Butler, following Hannah Arendt, has recently called "the space of public appearance": who can appear where and when, doing what, and what are the conditions for this appearance? Social media networks and the spaces they create have clearly been one of the necessary enabling conditions for recent movements; but commentators have sometimes overemphasized the latter at the expense of "real" bodies assembling in physical spaces--and the forms of violence to which these assembling bodies have been subjected by police and security forces.
Given the central role bodies in space have played in the encampments and occupation movements, we thought to begin the weeday discussions with a focused inquiry into new uses of space and our bodies in the context of political struggle inside the city.
The evening will include a performative contribution to the debate by Randy Martin.
Among the questions to be explored this Monday include:
-- Does the meaning of "occupation" necessarily involve physical encampment of the sort that took place at Zuccotti Park?
-- What forms of life are prefigured in such occupations, and how might they relate to the transformation of political and economic life at larger scales?
-- What are some emerging spatio-political possibilities for New York as we enter the new year?
-- What have the spatial practices of these last months of occupy and experiments globally brought to the fore in terms of our thinking around the use of space?
-- How do they relate to or differ from the bodily ‘repertoires’ and spatial practices of past social movements?
-- What qualities do we associate with the postures, gestures, bodily movements we see in these movements?
-- How might techniques of physical occupation – including sleeping, eating, and reproducing life in a specific space – be understood as political speech in its own right?
-- How to understand these encampments both as temporarily ‘utopian’ realized places, where new - and more horizontal - sociabilities and redistribution of labor ‘immediately’ occur and also as sites of resistance, highly mediatized and completely surounded by the police? ...........(i don´t like this formulation but... how can we say something of this kind?)
-- What techniques of resistance and participation are being rehearsed here?
-- What have these processes revealed about the role of our bodies in the space of the city, in the space of political struggle?
--How to address the struggles for and through the use of space and body in light of the force and violence employed by the police body?
-- Is the occupation and liberation of new space in the city critical for sustaining these movements?
-- What kind of small-scale spatial experiments may potentially contribute to longer term goals of the movements?
-- What does it mean to occupy a space (like this), assembling (like this), and moving - or not moving (like this)?
-- What spaces are being contested and which new spaces are being created?
-- What are people fighting for when they struggle for these spaces?
-- How can these bodies -sleeping, eating, occupying … temporarly living there- be understood as signifying or embodying?
-- How is this “being there in person” different from representing …a political party, an agenda, a group of interests?
[REPORT BACKS?]
16 Beaver, SEMINAR, WORKSHOP in WORKSHOP, discourse, discussion, interventions