An/other year, an/other spring, an/other spring meeting — 10.-26. April 2020
…and continued being with modes of co-existence – living with one an/other, un/othering ‘natural others’, othering ourselves, plurifying possibilities.
This April we’d like to continue the collective conversations and activations and attend to questions and desires that arose during different gatherings and, also outside of those, in the everyday uneventful encounters at MASSIA. As before, we’ll be intersecting the theoretical with the practical, make space for thinking and researching together and be with the subjects of our inquiries IRL (in real life). In the following are some questions and proposals we’d like to address. Also bring yours and your practices, research, curiosities… let’s be a cloud, a crowd, a forest, a school with no principal*.
Languages make worlds. Do we feel the languages we have at hands adequate to represent the ‘things’ we want to communicate about? Is there a need or desire to build a vocabulary and grammar that allows for shifting realities and re/present/ing alternative futures? Can we build a language that responds to questions of how to represent more-than-human agencies and collaborations? A language that blurs lines of separation along which worlds, ideas, identities form? And which offers itself for everyday usage outside of the study room, laboratory or workshop. A spoken, thought and written practice of co-existence. In the same quest lurks the question of who is the ‘we’ from which we speak and act? Can we investigate an us/we that represents those alliances we want to make without misrepresenting those subsumed under it? Can we formulate a solidarity that binds together humans and more-than-humans in shared struggles?
In the face of clashing worlds – the realism of global economic and political forces and the activism of a plural opposition – we identify a desire to create spaces together in which we support one another – to build resilience, re/generate energies for resistance to a reality we don’t agree with, for building alternatives, for thriving despite precarity (political, ecological, etc).
MASSIA is a place of transient communities. People come to stay temporarily and continue to their next location. The place and the people who make the place are connected through hyper-mobility. MASSIA is also a place to come back to, to make possible through participation. Can we create practices for rooting for those communities in and places for motion? Practices of care for the making possible of both, the mobile community and the places they transit through.
Spring also means vegetal life overflow. There are multiple omnipresent possibilities for involving ourselves with the garden, the surroundings, with making medicine, doing herb work, foraging and sharing our knowledges of how to take and make care for one an/other. The experiment of a garden for and by a transient community is ongoing. Last year we started growing food which we want to continue and broaden. It’s time to sow seeds and care for the soil. To go out and meet spring growth. To pick, pluck, plant, pickle.
You can join and leave the meeting according to your own time. If you have questions and proposals, feel free to send them beforehand so we can share with participants. If we can help you with making things possible, let us know.
Please write an email to infomassia@gmail.com with the dates you’d like to join.
Prices in 2020 are 11 euro per night when your stay is longer than 4 nights, 12 euro when under 5 nights and 300 euro for one month. To enter the space you have to become a member for 12€. This membership is valuable for 12 months. Cooking will be collective and cost 8€ per day.
MASSIA is a residency that welcomes individuals or groups from any field – artists, activists, researchers, practitioners, scientists etc. – to follow or create their own modes of work and knowledge production. MASSIA provides living and work space and offers itself as a tool and platform to research, experiment and take risks with your work. MASSIA tries to stress the notions of self-organisation and autonomy. There is (almost) no staff, the cost for stay is low and no application is necessary.
With Massia Officinale, the ideas extend to the living surroundings and the notion of thriving in co-existence with differing others, in alliance with more-than-human worlds. The project evolves around MASSIA’s medicinal herb garden and spans a communal apothecary and a growing library of knowledges. Massia Officinale generates exchanges for people within the intersections of plant practices, artistic research, science, theory and everyday practices. Creating an alternative research site and community for cultivating ways of studying, practicing and sharing knowledges.
* Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser describing a seminar which preceded the book “A world of many worlds”