“How can we be here free and secure?”

In preparation for the series of discussion circles with Jack Bratich
Three Thursdays, April 10th, 17th and 24th – 5:30pm to 7:30pm
at the Emily Harvey Foundation, NYC, for the "ABC No Rio 45 Years" exposition
#ABCNoRio45

THE ANNOUNCEMENT As institutional structures sway and melt, the autonomous “monster” institutions assume a more important role. How can ABC No Rio step into those new shoes which are growing larger every day?
How can the network of resistant solidarity centers around the country and around the world understand itself as the ganglia of a new world brain? How can our will to freedom and bright living spread across borders as deftly as big capital? As for ABC No Rio, ruins, rebuilding, resistance, resilience -- What does it mean to return with a review/remembrance to re-establish something in these times, after a decade in exile?
Jack Bratich is an ABC No Rio Zine Library volunteer and professor of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University Texts, prompts and links will be posted here at
https://abcnoriosummerschool.blogspot.com/

To add to this string, please send to awm13579 [at] yahoo.com with subject line
"How Can We Be Here?


COMMUNICATIONS
2 FEB 25
Dear Jack,
This is the question I awoke with today,
“How can we be here free and secure?”
which immediately struck me as a 16 Beaver assembly kind of question.
Maybe we could invite Ayreen and Rene to convene one, at the end of your sessions?
Besides just having “another idea” for structuring a program,
I’d like to start a process of considering what is necessary to discuss at this exposition of the radical and aesthetic pasts of ABC No Rio.
As institutional structures sway and melt, the autonomous “monster” institutions assume a more important role. How can ABC No Rio step into those new shoes which are growing larger every day?
And how can the network of resistant solidarity centers around the country and around the world understand itself as the ganglia of a new world brain? How can our will to freedom and bright living spread across borders as deftly as big capital?

Jack replies,
Some keywords I’m gathering from your emails:
Ruins, rebuilding, resistance, resilience (but not neoliberalism’s version—more about security and solidarity that can weather storms). What does it mean to return with a review/remembrance?
I really like the question about how ABC No Rio returns from the ruins to re-establish something in these times, after a decade in exile (it shuttered during the last months of the Obama administration, e.g.). Being here free and secure has a different inflection in times when we need shelter from far right rains/reigns, which include a reactionary capture of culture. …
*You know that Ayreen and Rene are also part of the exodus from NYC, now primarily in Armenia? They could set up a virtual 16B convening around these questions, which in itself would address the question of networks (centers, digital, physical).
*The closing of some key spaces in the mid to late 2010s (16B, Not an Alternative, No Rio) and the relocation and struggles of others like Bluestockings have changed the landscape. The Base was a good attempt to keep things going in Bushwick but it too ended (pandemic times I think).
I say this from a distance, as I left the LES for Philadelphia in 2018, in part after seeing these places wane.
Others who are still in NY can fill in the gaps, but from what I’ve seen and heard, places like The PIT and Mil Mundos have become nodes in the Brooklyn political intellectual scene, as well as the stalwart Woodbine in Ridgewood.
*Addressing the networks of care, solidarity, resistance through physical and digital connectivity is at least 15 years old, but there’s likely some new experiments that we could invite and look for. The Pal-Sol encampments were one example, though university based. How is it the most vibrant public actions in NYC over the past year were at NYU and Columbia?
*Meanwhile, how did the Right take hold as countercultural force in Manhattan (I’m thinking here of Dimes Square). How is this related to the rise of hyper-gentrification below Delancey in the decade of No Rio’s ruins and rebuilding? Is Dimes Square the reactionary autonomous monster institution? Or a mutant simulation since it seems to swim in Peter Thiel money sometimes.
Older question: how does any city (but here NYC) still generate communities in affective connection when disaggregation, disconnection, and alienation are endemic.
Hope this spurs some things. I’m also thinking about ways to include a wider range of voices (communities, ages, identities) into the April series, so will send a separate message about that. …


From Marc Herbst in Leipzig, Germany
Dear Alan and Jack, 
I spent some realy meaningful time at ABC, having lived directly across the street in 1997/1998….
I’ve been telling Alan about social centers in Leipzig I’m involved in… zoro being the big one. You won’t be able to google for it, although they are really an amazing and vibrant space> They purposely have no web presence. On paper, their block of house, concert venue, free store, bike shop, metal and wood shops and press and cheap punk housing are meant as a youth project which covers a lot for a network of projects. 
I’ve strangely been doing a lot of institutional work lately- working on an independent non-profit figuring out how to fund left cultural ecosystems to very limited results, and also progressive cultural curating in Italy in an “autonomous" region living about 7 years ago in some weird euro-cultural haze. 
Also, been working at the margins of electoral left movements in Germany as friends have been structurally working with the Linke - and while everyone in germany is freaking out about tomorrow’s election, one bright spot is the surge the left expects to see (fingers crossed) based on smart organizing, position change (they opened to  demands for  human rights in gaza) and also have been organizing both door-to-door campaigns (strangely not common here) and also having open hours to look at people’s rental contracts. 
This in a city (Leipzig) where the fascists have been running riot in the rest of the state of saxony since 2012. 
But/and to be honest, my work and interests are on relational aspects of solidarity and landscapes for care and relationality at a variety of levels. 
I think my recent trend is to think around matrixes of institutions and scales of touch- from the intimate social to the institution to the party and beyond.
As ahistorical and disjuncted practices buffeted by legal and extra-legal challenges by the right…. NOT only on an ideological level but in the streets (which means rent at this point) and in the law.
I’ve no idea about NYC or LA or Berlin for that matter- I have no fucking idea how anyone under 30 manages to pay the sky-high rent, eat and have a joyful life without reproducing a version of militant heteropatriarchy or rent-scam hyperindividualistic flophouse which is decidedly not a utopia though it might pose as one.
Margins and marginal practice, care and calmness, anger and collective action. 
With something like a sense of levity ‘cause were only human. 
with interest, 
Marc