Read & Repair - Digital Solidarity feat. peripheral literatures

general info: http://varia.zone/en/rr-digital-solidarity-2.html

Every last Sunday of the month the Varia Library and the Rotterdam Electronica Depot hold Read & Repair events. Due to current circumstances, most of them have been in an online format. We invite you to visit our online space, make yourself comfortable, read or repair some things together, and share thoughts and ideas.

In 2021 our Read & Repair sessions will be paired, we will take two months to explore one theme. During August and September 2021, we will be exploring the theme Digital Solidarity. In a time where everything points to the further consolidation and accelerated normalization of the Big Tech industry (Zoom, Facebook groups, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc.), we need collective digital alternative practices. How can we develop mutual aid strategies and social closeness through alternative digital infrastructures in times of physical distancing, remote working or care giving?

On Sunday 26th September we have a READ with Jara Rocha followed by a REPAIR with Yoana Buzova.

READ

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Date: Sunday, 26th September 2021

Time: 11:00-13:00 CEST

Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

NOTE: This reading session will be held in English.

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The text selection and our reading choreography in September was made by Jara Rocha.

Of all the greyzones of our readwrite worldings, bibliographic self-defence constitutes a specially powerful one. Both because of the fierce gestures of erasure and silencing that certain recursive presences and absences signal at, and because of the extremely lovely evidences of community building and care thereby performed. Self-defence, resistance, counter-weighting and mutual support operations of immense technopolitical value keep taking place at what can be termed "peripheral literature areas" such as bibliographies, footnotes, indexes, acknowledgement pages, colophons, library metadata and side annotations, where trans*feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, queer, crip, antispeciest, antifa and atiageist solidarities take very tangible and specific forms.

On this Read session, we'll spend time with materials collected from such zones, to identify stories behind or below them, and to perhaps also extend them with our very situated manners to provide ourselves with the bibliographic solidarities that are urgent and precious to us as a latent "we" that exists across them.

Fragments will be read from these bodies of text:

• Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories
• Dionne Brand, Blue Clerk
• (plus a collection of scattered hegemonic bibliographies)