Entropie 12 (WT) is an experimental field in which 12 artists develop a new social space in 12 months. We will produce images of a departure into a new future. Throughout 2019 we will establish the concrete social space and stage it with performative actions. Each of the artists will receive a basic income to provide the security and freedom to produce the space. Entropie 12 (WT) is a concrete different space and a movement that will assert the political outcomes resulting from the experiment of the lived social space.
I am beautiful, I am good
Since December, the tugboat, Archipel Lore, has been docked to the pontoons of the Archipel on the Veringkanal in Hamburg Wilhelmsburg. I am on the boat often, and on one of the beautiful wintery days where the sunshine meets temperature dipping below zero, I was returning after a long day of work, hungry and not in the mood to to cook. However, upon returning home, three friendly people greeted me as I climbed onto the pontoons. They sat without jackets in front of a little barbecue on which they grilled fish. The wind had died down. Making my way across Das Archipel, they turned to me showing their homemade salads and bread their mother had baked that morning, and invited me to join them. In spite of the freezing temperatures I opened my jacked and sat down besides them. In the sun it was warm. The three, now four of us, laughed a lot. Though we were interested in one another, we didn't question the other. I praised their delicacies and offered them an espresso for dessert. They offered duty-free cigarettes, I offered Kretek cigarettes I brought back from Indonesia. We smoked. The three were originally from Syria. Two are still quite young. They shared insights into their eventful lives. Especially Jomaas's experiences brought my imagination to its limits—What must it be like as a freedom-fighter in Syria? How does a back feel that has been patched together with titanium screws in a small village bordering Turkey? How did it feel to be rescued by a best friend after laying under the ruins of a destroyed house for two days? How did you get from the south of Syria to the north with this broken back? How does it feel now to live marginalized and stigmatized in containers, in a district in which most people live in brick houses?
An other space
We want to test out other forms of collective life. A life, which is disentangled from the pressures of our current social order. To make a space in which free exchange is possible. A space in which we can start from zero to think about what we want to do together and how we’ll do it. Evidently we can’t start at zero immediately. We all carry the current forms of social order, namely, representative democracy as codified by a neoliberal world-order, inside each of us. They put pressure on all of us. They determine our everyday lives, the way we act, how we exchange with others, how we perceive ourselves and others, how we feel– they cause isolation, depressions, anxiety disorders, exploitation, and the death of people.
We first need to free ourselves from the pressures of the current social order. Once we have freed ourselves, we can build a world together, in which we feel truly at ease, in which we can all really concentrate together on the things that concern all of us. We want to test the process of coming to zero in a space. It is a physical space, a space, which is designed to send a message. The message is an invitation for everybody to become part of the experiment. The message is of a world in which we all take part in decision making about things that concern us all. Earnestly, not like it is now: a lie.
To construct the experimental space Entropie 12 (WT) we need financial freedoms. We cannot start at zero and construct this space when we have to go to another job to sufficiently provide for ourselves. We will never come to this point of zero, because we’d continue to be entangled in organizational forms, which inscribe values and instructions to act into us. We need a basic income to practically have the time to collectively build a space of otherness.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN TO PLOW BY READING BOOKS
Concrete
Heterotopia2 w
Every group that wants to make an impact in society needs a physical place, a social space. For our experiment we want to claim decentralized spaces in Hamburg. We are doing this already.
Over the last few years, Das Archipel, an island on the waters of Hamburg, has been attempting to found a collective space of otherness. Floating islands are ideal locations for projecting other futures—detached from land, they are spaces of otherness. The floating platforms are in the commons, belonging to everybody. Anyone interested can decide what happens in the space and how it happens. The island is mobile and has interacted with different parts of the city over the last years. In each occurrence, a collective has been shaped and grown parallel to the each location.
Our collective occupies other spaces besides the island. On the water, so far Das Archipel consists of three islands. Four modular pontoons, a non-motorized barge with an interior space, and a motorized barge, with which we can tug the other islands. The three mobile islands are currently moored in the Veringkanal in Wilhelmsburg.
Who is we? (we are all of us)
Who exactly the 12 artists participating in the Entropie 12 (WT) collective is not yet fixed. So far our group is still in flux. It is clear that we are utilizing an open concept of art. The collective needs to be as diverse as possible, in order to appeal to as many different people as possible. Possible artists might include Jomaa from the neighboring refugee home, or the dockworker that stops by the barge Lore for coffee to discuss his plans for a new raft, a s well as documentary filmmakers, theater directors, costume designers, among others…
The Space
Das Archipel has worked on envisioning an other space for years. To expand this space, we will build more floating islands and organizing a boat building workshop at the neighboring Honigfabrik in January 2019. Entropie 12 (WT) owns means of production.
First, we want to build a canteen and residency raft. Together with people from the neighboring refugee home we want to run a canteen. Canteens are spaces in which people come together around lunchtime to eat cheaply. A public canteen is a space in which people with diverse backgrounds can meet. In summer 2018 we will try out this concept on Das Archipel.
The canteen raft will have two small sleeping rooms, to host residency guests. We want to invite international artists that work on self-organization, alternative uses for water surfaces, architecture on water, alternative forms of production, the commons etc. During our own international-based projects, we’ve had the privilege of learning many artists and activists abroad who share such practices.
Throughout 2019 we will continue to build more rafts. Their form and content are not yet been decided. We have the dream, that soon many people will live and work on the canal. The project is never finished.
DIE ERDE WIRD DER SCHÖNSTE PLATZ IM ALL
From the space to a movement / Wishes
We are many. And we are strong. And we want to find out how we want to live together. We want to create conditions for a world in which we all have a say about our surroundings. That’s a process, that doesn’t happen overnight. This process has already begun. So many of us already make films, images, concerts, readings, performances, theatre, cook and raise children … but often we are separated. Of course we know each other and we like each other. But those in powerful positions don’t see us, and they don’t hear us, so often we are marginalized and laughed at.
So we have to stage images that speak to everybody, also for those that hold formal power today. And we need to talk to those that who make decisions that concern all of us today. We will act first, first we will build an other space and stage images, then we will make demands. From our heterotopia, we are in a powerful position. We already created something. We have proof that, on a small scale, a different world is possible. When we go to the places of formal power, and talk, then we need to be as honest as possible to say what it is we want. We can voice concrete critiques of the current system but we don’t need to do this. We have a concrete model, this works, and this can work everywhere now.
We, who are already working on building a new world, are coming together. We will produce images that concern all of us to broaden the space of possibilities to include everyone. First we need spaces in which we can exchange freely, without constraints. Our space needs to grow, so that everyone has space.
The images of our experiment are pluralistic as we all are. But they each tell the same story. They are not images of frustration or hatred, but images of exchange. They are images of the beginning of something new, something big. Images of self-organization, of a new disorder, of new possibilities. These images are also lived realities. They are lives of people that fight for a common goal. We will stage these images. We communicate towards the outside through this theatrical examination of newly created lived realities. This is how we can make an impact and change things. We want to communicate and live in such a way that everybody feels invited to join. We need everybody, otherwise we cannot make systemic changes. We all want to decide about everything that concerns all of us! And we decide for ourselves how we organize, how we live together, how, where, when and why we work. The starting point is an experiment on a small scale. A group of 12 that builds an other space in 12 months. We will produce images with our lives, form a movement, we will multiply step by step, and we will connect with others until our space is big enough for everybody. As a movement we will make demands.
YOURS, IN CONCRETE FRIENDSHIP
It is summer 2020. I am cooking Königsberger meatballs with my good friend Nick in the canteen. Jomaa’s mother is baking a cake, she is doing that almost every day. We are enjoying ourselves, we laugh, we ask ourselves how this world on the water came into being:
I am sure that there was no one decisive moment. We are living and working here now for almost 500 days. There were so many situations, they were all significant. It is hard to say which was more important: This conversation I had with Phillip, who was homeless until a while ago, in which we realized that the relation we have with our fathers is quite similar. Or the situation with the mayor of Hamburg, who invited us for dinner to Landhaus Scherrer. We rejected the invitation and he realized that he needs to come to us. He enjoyed himself and was amazed. He quit his post, not only his personal role, but the institution altogether. Him and his colleagues just refrained from going to work from then on and started engaging directly the city in such wonderful ways.
The play Entropie 12 (WT) was playing now, just like the whole project, for 500 days, daily. Many theatre professionals from around the world have joined the staging by now. The spectacle on the floating islands, that lasted for a couple of days and went through all of the harbor and all canals of Hamburg and went viral in a video online. That was a milestone. This theatre has changed all our lives. And there is still so much to do.
1. Second law of thermodynamics: Entropy in the universe tents to infinity. Processes, in which entropy is produced, are irreversible. Colloquially, entropy is described as a measure for disorder. People also talk about possibilities that tent towards infinity with increasing entropy. ↩
2. Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has […] been the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up […]. (M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces) ↩