Vibes & Leaks goes Elastic II, Berlin Fieldtrip

2nd FIELDTRIP of the Vibes & Leaks Goes Elastic process.

Berlin, 14-24 July, 2022.

In collaboration with: Kollektiv Bibliotheck New Yorck Bethanien, Ren Britton and Maeve Devine

Vibes & Leaks elasticizes towards Berlin in July to organize our attentions around a self-managed and assembly-based archive of social movements' banners of several decades, and the implications towards non/normative bodies and collectivities due to somatic difference as well as semiotic-material complexities of the genealogies of struggle.

The plan is to visit (staying there over night or not, this is to be discussed/defined!) the amazing archive of the formerly squatted space of Bethanien, which now is a house project called "New Yorck". Along the years, for decades, this archive became a key backbone for the memories of social movements, local and international, and hosts a massive amount of books, fanzines, posters and other printed materials. There is a small group (of circa 5 people?) caretaking for the archive, which contains contents of a super wide array of socio-political struggles, from kurdish and zapatista fights to transfeminisms, squatting legacies, anti-gentrification, anti-colonialism, ecologism, etc. Really, really a jewel of paper and cardboard in the middle of Kreuzberg neighborhood. But what interested us more is that they also host an archive of demonstration banners: they keep the memories of voices which once occupied public space with reclaims, affirmations and rejections of many sorts and sensibilities, but clearly intersected. Huge banners, medium banners, small banners. Banners in german and english and spanish and arabic and greek and... banners of textile and of recycled plastic, banners so big that needed to be folded and kept somewhere, together. Apparently the Kollektivbibliothek only hosts the banners, but they belong to a different collective. We love the idea of these banners and posters --along with zines, books and stickers, for sure-- being our axis for a research on what voices get to be heard, where and by whom. What claims circulate and can be read, or not. What urgencies get passed along from bodies to collectives to cityscapes. And which ones get lost in time while others still pervail on our contemporaneity, in our politicized to-do lists.

This is why we also approached Ren Britton: because their sensibility regarding what gets heard or seen, in a queer and trans*feminist fight against ableism, is super important to us and we want to learn and invent things together with Ren as well. And of course the device of the archive itself comes with its big problematics, which we need to look at together, with a queer technosciences approach.

small outcome of the session: some Prototypes for Archival Redundance

+ info on the project: http://ttttoolbox.net/VibesnLeaks::index.xhtml