The first event in a series designed to frame and encourage a discussion around autonomous organisation and solidarity networks. Two films will be screened alongside a series of questions to prompt discussions in working groups. We hope that from these discussions the working groups will begin to make links; conceptual tools to think with, leading to the actualisation of how we imagine broad issues such as solidarity, education, the political, and community…
Our timing for these events co-insides with and is born out of support for the UCU lecturers strike, motivated by the gambling away of their pensions to market fluctuations. As such, we feel these are good conditions to launch a radical pedagogy, which comprises of mutual learning through working groups, teach ins, and discussions.
However our aim for this first event is to position our discussion in the broader process of the marketization of everyday life, seen in every continent around the world. To frame this discussion in the global context of alternative exchange and solidarity, is to situate us within a localised space of reimagining global processes.
We wish to offer an invitation for those who seek an alternative, to come together and discuss how a collective and collaborative endeavour to offer and receive solidarity can construct new forms of exchange, and new forms of social relations. The films demonstrate clear examples of the ways in which the social life can form and be reimagined outside dominant ideologies of consumption and capital exchange. There are countless examples of human communities, which form themselves in contra to these paradigms.
The two films we wish to show are: Skoros a promotional video for a free shop in Exarchia, an autonomous zone in downtown Athens known as historically central to left wing political struggle; and Vio.me, a documentary from participants of a factory occupation in Thessaloniki, Greece;
Threats to wage security and security of wellbeing are directly affecting all of us; The privatisation and commodification of the education system disrupts rights to access education for all, reproducing elitism and specific kinds of knowledges which are majoritively not intersectional; The gentrification in communities surrounding university campuses proves a detriment to well being of residents (lack of social housing, learning spaces, fragmentation of the family and community life, racial geographies); The space for LBTQI+ and BAME leadership is not something that can be waited for; we are all fed up of asking for what is already ours.
(For the imperative of inclusivity we insist on a dry space, one that recognises the liberatory necessity of intersectional politics, and one that is committed to the elevation of underrepresented voices.)
(Due to the size and nature of the space, we can only have max 30 people in for the films, and won’t be able to accept anymore)