Osfa talks about knowledge, how the workshop can be connected to what’s happening on the streets and more….

1. Why did you choose this week to do the workshop?

[It wasn't really our choice but Daphne Dragona's, the workshop curator. But] indeed we thought it was very pertinent because of the political tension in the city these days, that makes more relevant the issues we are trying to think about during the workshop.

The connection is direct, concerning the topics that we are addressing here, such as privatization, gentrification, and in general the conflicts of enclosure and the expropriation of the commons, that is, the resoruces and the products of social cooperation… At the same time, some participants in the workshop have been attending the demonstrations, and we have been producing and uploading videos of the current events.

This is, of course, a very interesting question, and we believe we are conscious, to some extent, of the power-knowledge relationships that are at play. On one hand we think that there is no more “outside”. Bringing the conflict inside an hegemonic institution such as a museum is for us a relevant opportunity. We also think about the issue of symbolic capture. We understand that the autonomous, multitudinar, biopolitical production of these days, exceeds the possibility of capture, in the sense that we believe us to be building on a line of fugue that taken to the limit, would radically transform the museum as it is now, rather than strenghten its position.
We understand that in fact the production of these days is mainly a commons production… But one should never underestimate the potential of semio-capitalism… And of course, today, the commons, the networks, and the disocurses around them, are central loci of political, economic and subjective struggle.

We hope it will go on in the city, with different activist and autonomous research groups who have been participating in the workshops, and others that we wish could join the process. We think it could also take a global dimension of networked research and self-organzation, as the issues we are dealing with here, are obviously and foremost connected to biopolitical production which constitute, in our opinion, the form of contemporary global capitalism.

I am very interested my self, in developing a more detailed, more scientific research and mapping of the commons as the key to production in the networked society, and on the so called metropolis factory.

[I am also thinking of starting a research on a “zoology” of predators of the metropolitan commons: real-estate wolfs, gentrification eagles, temporary worker jackals, migrant coyotes, ip wild-dogs, public-services sharks, cultural producers lions, biopolitical vampires...]

Jose PL / osfa



A QR Code is a matrix barcode which is readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera and smart phones. This specific one has encoded the Student Protest Video which was uploaded yesterday.