Notes: 20.11.2020 Assembly

Updates:

  • Website: there was a problem with the theme, we are in process of fixing that.
  • Residencies:
    • (Could they be thought of as a little like post offices?) – there is a kind of centralised structure but without power. 
    • Thinking of finalising the structure so that we can expand?
    • Some infrastructural rules allow the services to function and they are all connected. We need rules to know how to deal with each other. 
    • MoC will propose projects, we begin with some that were in progress with david. Eg A for all. 
    • Adrien Bowyer will come to visit us on Dec 4th 
    • Should we send the reprap to rojava/ chiapas? 
    • Plus mission statement update. – https://pad.riseup.net/p/MoC_Residencies_Mission_Statement 
  • Anthropology for All and how it fits with VA, books etc:
    • What is a museum – book – was conversations between David and Boris Groys. Museum as hospital, museum as prison, museum as …
  • Visual Assembly:
  • A presentation on the NHS workers planning Visual Assembly
    • Testing out the VA concept in a healthcare setting. In UK. 
    • Health workers had been told not to make any political associations. (April, 2020 UK). Thinking to make something that could also work in a school, other public structures…
    • A collaborative expression of care – to communicate and think differently. 
    • What is healthcare? Decades of these conditions of neoliberalism can result in us living in pandemics, destruction of ecosystems and the degradation of social services and healthcare services. 
    • The organisers asked themselves, can people thrive in clinical environments? So the focus began with a flower.. 
    • Can zoom offer anonymity for the worker? 
    • Online can be exposing as well.
  • Reading group:
    • what will it be about and how will it work? 
    • Looking at the museum concept, looking to establish one of the rooms as a non physical space – looking at the relationship between David’s work and activism and other types of work he inspired. What would a Graeberian institution be, or do. Would it be more like a think tank, or a do tank, or a research institution? What strategies?
    • Would we take a text and try to decode it?
    • As an academic are you only set up to create abstractions from what you look at? 
    • How the V-A and reading groups can help you to engage with reality? 

An extra note: Pauline Olivieros was mentioned – a musician who writes things that can be participated in by non musicians…  how could the residencies help us to make music? 

NEXT FRIDAY: Instead of meeting, we’ll visit London School of Economics’ reading group on David’s “Direct Action: an Ethnography”: https://www.facebook.com/events/370025947395718/  

Then our next meet will be on Dec 4th – we will have a reading group so what to read? 

We will invite other guests, beginning with Adrian Bowyer