Eat Art Collective sees its food preparation as a self-organized artistic practice where “autonomy” has the concrete meaning of emancipating oneself from paradigms and constraints of commercial catering, and understanding work with food as critical research: on culture, the environment, capitalist production, among others.
During the workshop - and while fermenting food over Jitsi - , participants identified four types of autonomy to investigate in Autonomy Lab: political autonomy, bodily autonomy (such as in abortion rights), technological autonomy (such as in FLOSS infrastructures), and economic autonomy (such as in alternative systems of value and exchange)
This workshop ended up as two separate workshops, first on the political question of autonomy in Hong Kong in relation to the People’s Republic of China, and how this question is - as opposed to its framing in Western discourses - does not have a binary answer, since Hong Kong can economically, logistically and materially not sustain itself. It is dependent on the People’s Republic of China in such basic matters as food, energy and water. The Mandarin and Cantonese equivalent word for ‘autonomy’ (自治, zìzhì) has different semantics than the Western word. It includes and acknowledges dependency (even co-dependency) as part of its meaning. Elaine W. Ho further explained the history of Hong Kong as a British colonial experiment with a radically neoliberal economy. She described 展銷場 Display Distribute’s psychogeographical experiments with Hong Kong-to-Mainland China cross-border semi-smuggling trade, and its self-organized global logistics service - for transporting artists’ self-publications via a personal courier network - called Light Logistics.
This workshop focused on the intersection of artistic autonomy - with Fluxus, Situationism, punk culture, Afrofuturism, performance art, experimental electronic music as models that inform Woodbine Collective’s work - and political autonomy. Members explained how Woodbine had grown from a self-organized art project to a practical mutual aid neighborhood support project in Queens/New York during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the artistic point of departure and concept of autonomy still informs the politics of the collective and its diverse activities (that include theory reading groups and communal kitchens).
The workshop with the Copenhagen-based BananSkolen collective included both practical exercises with choreographed dance movements used in political street protest, an exemplary BananSkolen lesson on sonology by one of its members, and a discussion on how BananSkolen organizes itself as a non-institutional, non-funded, volunteer-run initiative.
Members pointed out that the origins of the BananSkolen in a music and performance collective (Goodiepal & Pals) turned out to be a problem for the outside perception of the project, because it appeared to limit its thematic scope and openness for participation.
BananSkolen made the experience that the art world is interested in autonomous initiatives. Conversely, members of the collective were interested in performing rather than teaching each other (although the latter is seen as “a really valuable way of hanging out”). All members have full deciding power about BananSkolen’s activities and program. There is no principle of seniority. Everyone is simultaneously a teacher and a student. Students define the activities, therefore BananSkolen “is very autonomous”. It is based on completely voluntary participation and involves no bureaucracy.
BananSkolen defines itself as an “autonomous school”, or autonomous art school. [Postscript: It later found that many of its students left the collective after having been accepted into a conventional, institutional art school. In 2022, BananSkolen also experienced a conflict with the curators of a Copenhagen contemporary art space (Den Frie) which first had invited the initiative to host its seminars there, but then showed disinterest in its activities and eventually found them a nuisance in the daily workings of the institution.]
This workshop focused on care practices as institutional critique within the contemporary art system. iLiana Foukianaki criticized the concept of autonomy as problematic, since in her view it was one-sidedly informed by specific paradigms of post-1960s conceptual art.
This discussion will be continued, after the official end of the ACKnowledge project, with a workshop by the Feminist Healthcare Research Collective (Berlin) on autonomy as self-determination of patients and the collective’s respective research into historical feminist practices in the 20th and 21st century.
Amigas is a cultural workers collective from Bogotá/Columbia that organizes events in vacant houses in the city. The name and practice of the collective is gender-queer. Amigas’ events and installations often have the characters of pop-cultural environments, and use the language of visual pop culture (such as Gothic). Amigas’ commercial merchandise establishes and secures autonomy of the collective (including material expenses for installations, lights, props etc.). It also creates a cottage industry for friends who can live from Amigas-related work and producing Amigas merchandise.
“What we don’t like about organized institutional spaces, is the degree of P.R. and necessity to be nice to everyone. For us, autonomy means not to have to answer to a third person, and not have someone influence what you do. No intervention of gallerists or curators into what you make and how you show it. No third party to respond to. Freedom to create, with the collective being the only partner to negotiate with”.
According to Amigas, always the same people get money in the Columbian art system. One of Amigas’ core motivations was to create a self-organized alternative to this nepotism.
CONSTANT is a multidisciplinary collective and organization from Brussels,Belgium, whose practice critically engages with media and digital technology. According to Constant, digital technology promise autonomy while in reality, we are interdependent on it. This doesn’t only include the platforms of the large Silicon Valley companies. We are also interdependent with the Open Source technology used in the workshop: Jitsi and BigBlueButton for teleconferencing, Etherpad for collaborative writing. Even Open Source can be part of techno-solutionism: “if something doesn’t work, let’s make a[n Ether]pad”. This boils down to a deep technological-human interdependency, because - among others - one needs a server in order to be able to work at all.
An issue of the pandemic times is that organizations have increasingly disinvested from infrastructure. Tools and platforms are no longer maintained by their institutional operators. There is hardly any educational institution with its own in-house infrastructure. Almost all of them buy services and licenses from Zoom, Google and Microsoft. These infrastructures include both software and hardware.
This issue could be framed as one of organizational autonomy, but CONSTANT prefers to describe it as an issue of chosen dependency; that means, the ability to choose one’s dependency, which is a feminist practice. Ownership of infrastructure is shared ownership: one is never alone with one’s (digital) tools, but there are enormous resources being used. Therefore, it is important to find a reasonable relation to these resources in terms of cost, care, environmental impact, development, of thinking with the tools and how they could be different.
Part of the workshop was a reading of Alison Kafer’s essay “The Cyborg and the Crip: Critical Encounters,” a text that proposes to rethink our perspective of what is a “proper” body function and a “prosthetic”, what is “ability” and “deficiency” both in human bodies and technologies.
Take-A-Way is a collective of artists, refugees and addicts based in Rotterdam.
From the perspective of people living precarious lives - as refugees, or as addicts, among others -, autonomy can simply be a question of survival. It centrally entails legal rights of self-determination: regarding the rights to live and stay at a place, or the right to consume drugs.
At the same time, - from an addict perspective - autonomy can be an self-chosen heroic ideology, a trap of not taking responsibility and not caring about others, with drugs seemingly symbolizing one’s individual freedom. Such ideologies of hyperindividualistic freedom and ‘rock star’ autonomy can also be found in other areas and systems: for example, in alternative schools and in the art system and in art schools. In the imagined autonomy of an addict, there is no loyalty or friendship. Instead, people learn to manipulate. The only existing loyalty is that to one’s drugs (according to Martijn).
There can be opposite positions in precarious lives regarding autonomy: the necessity to surrender and accept limitations of one’s autonomy in the case of addicts (Martijn), as well as the necessity to never surrender, and never thinking of the past, but only of the future in order to keep fighting - in situations of being trapped, held prisoner etc. as a refugee (Araby).
These seeming contradictions boil down to voluntary and necessary surrender versus forced surrender, and not being able to make one’s own decisions. Forced surrender is the most inhumane thing that can be asked from a human being (according to Rieneke).
In her presentation, Weronika Zielinska analyzed early 1970s feminist art collectives in Los Angeles. The (now famous) Womanhouse led by artist Judy Chicago turned out to be still dominated by an ideology that considered art practice fundamentally incompatible to care work. Female artists who brought up children were told, by Chicago, that their life choices excluded professional artmaking. As a reaction, the “Mother Art” collective split off Womanhouse. Its (female) artists addressed childcare and other care work in their art, not only as a subject, but also as an issue of platforms and institutions. As a radical consequence, Mother Art’s shows, events and performances included self-organized guerilla exhibitions in laundromats (a practice that anticipated those of contemporary community art collectives).
Italian autonomism emerged within the 1960s Italy radical political left, initially as an internal revision of communist party politics. Early Autonomist theoreticians gave up the Leninist idea of the communist party as leading the working class (respectively, as a revolutionary avant-garde), and classical idea of political revolution which they criticized as being historically derived from the 18th century middle class emancipation revolutions in the USA and France, and an unfit model for the working class. Instead, they deemed model of a permanent revolutionary state more appropriate for working class emancipation.
In the 1970s, Italian autonomism also gave up the idea of political parties, trade unions and other formally organized bodies for political activism, and shifted its engagement to self-organized initiatives, decentralized local initiatives (such as self-organized neighborhood, community centers and alternative media). In this course, it extended its notion of class from the industrial working class to post-1960s youth and countercultures, ethnic and sexual minorities. It therefore overlapped with the European squatter movement. For De Bloois, the question for today is to which degree its concept of autonomy wasn’t still problematic and limited, or whether social activism should still be done with “autonomy” as its leading paradigm.
According to the (Indonesian) artist and community organizer Wok the Rock, the word “autonomy” does not exist in Indonesia. Instead people use the word “Mandiri”, which means ‘independent’ or ‘self-sufficient’: not depending on government, funding, corporations. It is closely related to ‘Merdeka’ (independence), and “Gotong Rojong” which roughly means mutual aid or working together collectively. According to Wok the Rock, Indonesians love copying, especially things from the West. Decolonizing practices are therefore difficult in Indonesia, because people look up to the West too much. The collectives can be financially sustained by doing commercial projects, like web design and graphic design jobs.
Jatiwangi art Factory’s Apamart is a practical economic experiment in creating a local currency (in the medium of terracotta coins) that can used as an exchange system on a local market and give local communities economic autonomy. The artist collective practices in its home village in Indonesia. At documenta fifteen in Kassel/Germany, the economy and value and use of the currency was continuously re-negotiated. It created a community bond between the diverse participants of the market (artists, external caterers) who had to collectively organize their own economy. In this situation, the currency could even have different simultaneous values depending on the social context and site of its use.
Lumbung.space is the online platform created for the artists and general audience of documenta fifteen by the Varia collective (Rotterdam) in collaboration with other Free Open Source software developers. It effectively is a comprehensive interface for a number of pre-existing decentralized, non-corporate, Open Source, volunteer-run social networking services (such as the video sharing platform PeerTube and the microblogging service Mastodon) that are collectively known as Fediverse (“federated universe”). The immediate practical goal was to create a functional alternative for artists to network outside corporate social media platforms (such as WhatsApp), and thus live up to the radical commons (“Lumbung”) and democratic resource sharing model under which the Indonesia artist collective ruangrupa had organized documenta fifteen.