Draft Graduation Proposal

What do you want to make?

I'm still insecure about the nature of the grad.project / the form I want to give to my research. What I know is that I would like to work on the topic "community stories/organizations and/vs institutional narratives/civil society". Starting with looking at my personal experience with co-living, I want to choose on of these experiences, analyze its organizational and social structures and propose a work out of it. My three main experiences with three different living communities are: the small village where I was born, part of the "Autonomous Province of Trento", a small self-organized house/community in Venice, and the historical community in Rotterdam called the Poortgebouw. For my graduation project I would like to use one of these places as playground to experiment with their set of rules, values, decision-making structures and other forms of self-organized tools of living together, and contextualize them within the larger panorama of the civilized and institutional organizations they are sharing the soil of a city. I want to communicate and (maybe?) let other people experiment the methods that we use in our community in order to do things together. Which kind of emotional infrastructures people build in order to facilitate life and signify their values? Small scale communities are in my opinion simple and large non-biologically related family-organization. As families, communities works through practicing common-rituals that shapes the habits of their households. At the same time, these kind of communities are atypical and often non-socially accepted. In our society of massive privatization the space for the public encounter is starting to disappear, what if we look at those "islands of exclusions" as places for testing new parameters of "shared commons"?

How do you plan to make it?

I first want to look deeply into the three different forms of communities and analyze some selected peculiarities:

- their decision making process,

- their regulations systems,

- their infrastructures,

- their relationship with the "outside".

After that I will start looking at similarities and differences. With a special focus on their struggles, weaknesses and conflicts. In the process I would like to include interviews to some of my old flatmates, my family, my current cohabitants. (which kind of questions I want to ask?)

After that, I will have to start to invent the scenario for the experiments / performances / games I want to stage as graduation project. The idea is that those performances will be some sort of tests to "pro-test" against predefined standards and codes of "being together".

What is your timetable?

I need to first start doing things.

After that I will follow the above-mentioned pre-method. Hoping it will work, and to don't get stuck in the research.

Why do you want to make it?

To have fun together, first,

to provoke a critical reflection on how we build relationships between us and others and we signify them with meaning,

to trigger bigger discussions on how we learn habits (looking at information forming processes, G.Bateson) while sharing things with someone else,

to present a possible method of experiencing life and things through encounter,

to question the notion of "autonomy" ( & its semiotic ambiguity), predefined categories and

to celebrate the extra-categorical, the importance of contact and proximity, the non-dualistic relationship between particular and common, private and public, individual and collective.

Who can help you and how?

Our tutors, all of them, to help me reflecting on building my own media/tools to present this potential work,

The people of the community where I live in, and looking and the history of the community. Some old inhabitants of the Poortgebouw (already in contact with them),

My dad (who's the "sheriff" of the village where I was born and is a master of negotiation),

Stad in De Maak (http://www.stadindemaak.nl/),

My yoga teacher (who's teaching me practices of body-awareness),

Varinia Canto Vila (choreographer and dancer, who works a lot on the body as place of mediation between super-imposed regulations and personal will) we did a workshop together last year, I would like to ask her some help if possible in finding methods for my practice, or just as inspiration,

Femke Snelting, our tutor, especially for the project we did together "Interfacing the Law".

Relation to previous practice

There's an important relation with the recent work I've done, the Autonomous Archive, which consist in an archival machine built to collaboratively collect materials from the historical archive of the Poortgebouw. The archive is an attempt to write alternative codes of archiving the stories of our community. I say "alternative" because the settings we designed for our machine are not shared with the archive of the city (the archive works on a local server) and are built upon a media-wiki page: a non hierarchical form of database and collective platform that allows multiple users to implement or modify the collection. In my work I find important to problematize the struggles of collectivity: I think there's a necessity to start looking again at the way we assume the law and we make it ours.

Relation to a larger context

References

People:

Varinia Canto Vila http://www.workspacebrussels.be/nl/artists/varinia_canto_vila-102.html

Koiné Teatro: http://www.database.it/koine/koine.htm

Vereniging Poortgebouw: https://poortgebouw.org/

Parasite 2.0 :http://www.parasiteparasite.com/

Friction Atlas: http://frictionatlas.net/

The struggle site: http://www.struggle.ws/

Texts:

"Who Told You So?! The Collective Story vs. the Individual Narrative", edited and curated by Freek Lomme,

"Community and Civil Society", Ferdinand Tonnies,

"Communitas", Roberto Esposito,

"Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life", Roberto Esposito,