[Porn screenplay writing workshop by Gabriel Menotti] It has to be said, nevertheless, ‘tis better to have self-organised and lost than never to have self-organised at all, as the fantastic experience of the closing night has shown. The physical site for the event was not constructed or overseen by an infraCrew, nor was it the collective’s tree-house. We took a short-cut through the market. It was run cooperatively and it was a good deal in a good part of town. The guys had built it, we were told, by the sweat of their brow. We signed the lease, moved in, and did our thing. Everything was fine and dandy except for the last night, when some live-sex would take place. They found out that morning. It was nothing too intense, we explained. Kosher in every way in terms of local mores and legislation. But, due to their particular form of licensing, they got cold feet and drew the line. We were like kids that had built intergalactic spaceships out of sofa cushions; a world of extraterrestrial hermaphrodites was interrupted by the repo men.
[Group discussion on the last night of TURN*ON] But although the tears were real, perhaps some of our bereavement was histrionic, and, in great part, a release from exhaustion. An intense conversation ensued. Our “ethos of collaboration” seemed to pay off. Participants were moving faster than us. We could hardly follow the conversation. It was sad, angry, excited, exuberant, united, divisive, destructive, constructive, at every turn. A sort of train of collective thought had started on a mad course, come hell or high water. And the whole of it in simultaneous translation, something we could previously not ensure. There is no question that, as a response to the problem of not having a space developed, consensus did not form. Actually, there was communication breakdown, bad politics started happening and how we managed to resolve that is crucial. For instance, when we tried to step in and mediate between managers of the space and participants, themselves not in agreement on how to address the issue of censorship, we took shit from both sides. It could have gotten ugly. Luckily, we were able to relay as collective members, support each other both practically and emotionally and in the end work things out. And did things ever work out. The conversation was so engaging that those who disagreed with what to do felt exhilarated by the energy being generated at the outset of censorship. We could write a book about that day, truly. The show was moved and a solid day’s set-up was carried-out successfully by unlikely collaborators in a spirit of euphoria and autonomy in under two hours.
[Autonomy is sexy: Setting-up the TURN*ON closing show at another venue] It just goes to show how much TRUST is incredibly sexy. It is obvious how it enables intimacy, but, even more so it forms the basis for mutual imaginings. During TURN*ON, we managed to create an environment of trust and safety for many diverse types of peoples, from school kids, to punk anarchists, to casual guests that were passing by. To the point where, for instance, that a bunch of strangers got naked together, during a workshop by Maria Llopis, and there was nothing weird about it. How we created that sense of trust and comfort begs further investigation, but illustrates something about our experiments with collaboration.
[Strap-on dildoS performance by the UrbanPorn collective on the closing night] Despite our various failures and small successes, our desires were and remained true. The kind of politics we wanted to have at Artivistic was perhaps a less traditional one of social movements, mass gatherings and lobbying publics and politicians. It was more a politics of daily life, a biopolitics that starts with where our bodies are now and what our bodies want. It is a politics concerned less with the static defence of oppositional positions than with creating and opening possibilities, connections, spaces. Our hope was to find a magical configuration of energies that could unleash an overflow of fluid genders and sexualities into the city, turning on an insurrection, joining with bodies in rebellion throughout the galaxy. The world to come is so sexy. |
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