With Shania Anand, we imagined our archive not as a dusty folder, but with the idea “to actually use and consume things, to keep them in, or bring them into, circulation, and to literally throw them forth (Latin: proicere), into a shared and distributed process that operates based on diffusion, not consolidation, through imagination, not memory, and towards creation, not preservation.“

„If commoning has a meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject” — Federici, 2019

‘No medicinal herbs can grow in the dirt of capitalist society which can help cure capitalist anarchy.’ — Rosa Luxemburg

“There is no such thing as a structureless group” states Jo Freeman in her article ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, “the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others”.

In the economy of letters anything is possible. Better still, one who is endowed with sufficient letters can do anything. Long words, love letters, songs, poetry, a deep conversation or simply calling the insurance company to demand a refund for a faulty debit.

No common is possible unless we refuse to base our life and our reproduction on the suffering of others, unless we refuse to see ourselves as separate from them. 

Deepening the practice of and research conducted within our Who Are We initiative, over the course of two weeks we had the possibility to stretch our tentacles in many directions; confronting the neo-liberal system based on scarcity with an activism of abundance (Valeria Graziano and Giulia Palladini); staging a Common Wallet – imagining how to unlearn negative associations between money, precarity and taboos, and replace them with practices of radical trust…

In autumn 2021 Who Are We participated in a series of events convened by the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam entitled ‘Approaches to Decolonial Work During a Pandemic’ that deals with a postcolonial approach to ecologies, inequalities, bodies, indigeneities and alternative genealogies.

To trigger a discussion on sustainable, healthy and fair working conditions Who Are We spoke to Magdalena Ziomek, managing director of the cooperative for freelancers – SMartDE eG, and Anna Mareike Holtz from Kulturbüro ehrliche Arbeit. We would like to pragmatically shed light on cooperative and solidary working principles and legal forms, but also on how to organise and discuss collaborative work more politically.

Cultivating the small seed that we planted, a seed of a different working culture, based on non-violent communication and solidarity, on joyful self-criticism, on care for (our) bodies and minds…

With a nod to artist Mierle Ukeles Laederman’s 1969 Maintenance Manifesto with the much quoted question of “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”, the following questions can be asked: Who writes e-mails over the weekend? Who is active on twitter? Who keeps the facebook account alive? Who cleans the space for the next meeting? Who organizes timelines and resources? Who writes the grant applications?