museum of care

The main goal of the Museum of Care is to produce and maintain social relationships.

new site: https://museum.care/

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david graeber, nika dubrovsky, simona ferlini, et al

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image from https://www.diaphanes.com/news/gedenkkarneval-fuer-david-graeber-6707

https://davidgraeber.industries/future-plans:

The Museum of Care will be a series of residences distributed worldwide (one of which will be located in Fire Island – the home of David Graeber). We understand the Museum of Care not as a place to archive and preserve things but to create and nurture social relationships. An international network of physical spaces where people can connect, think, write, create and organise

david on care and freedom (from 2019 talk at ccc)

david on boredom

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nika mentioned this early on (on david dying):

Nika Dubrovsky (@nikadubrovsky) tweeted at 1:02 AM on Sat, Sep 05, 2020:
Dear friends,
I have been overwhelmed by the many condolence messages and offers of help. Thank you!
In the weeks before his untimely passing, David and I had started making plans to turn his childhood home on Fire Island, New York, 1/
(https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1302139958807924737?s=03)
or intellectuals, activists, artists to meet and imagine new futures together. With your help, I would like to pursue this project to honor his memory. 2/
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Rest in Power David Graeber
David & his wife @nikadubrovsky started making plans to turn his childhood home in NY into a place for intellectuals, activists & artists to gather & imagine new futures together.
In loving memory, help this become reality:
https://t.co/5TQYTDbEkC
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1303796016089571328

adding page this day:

Nika Dubrovsky (@nikadubrovsky) tweeted at 7:04 AM on Thu, Oct 15, 2020:
Our plans
https://t.co/1xDwsDUHr2
(https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1316726730569199618?s=03)
The Museum of Care will be a series of residences distributed worldwide (one of which will be located in Fire Island – the home of David Graeber). We understand the Museum of Care not as a place to archive and preserve things but to create and nurture social relationships. An international network of physical spaces where people can connect, think, write, create and organise.

site: https://davidgraeber.industries/

Nika Dubrovsky (@nikadubrovsky) tweeted at 6:40 AM on Fri, Oct 23, 2020:
Here is a short text about The Museum of Care, that we cowritten with @davidgraeber recently, that can provide a context for our project.
https://t.co/UMwo85DS9A
(https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1319619668118745089?s=03)

the museum of care – reimagining the world after the pandemic by nika and david

https://davidgraeber.industries/the-museum-of-care-reimagining-world-after-pandemic

originally appeared in “Arts Of The Working Class“ April 2020, Issue 11. PDF

imagine for a moment we are sane and don’t just go back to pretending there’s some reason to have all these people bluffing to make us think they work all day but instead got rid of the bullshit jobs..t

bullshit jobs – dg..

and kropotkin dirty jobs law.. et al

no more supposed to’s of school/work .. suffocating us from the day

Imagine that the experience of lockdown and economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what’s referred to as “an economy” is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. . t.. Say we also reject the notion of social control.

oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space

Imagine we jettison the idea of production and consumption being the sole purpose of economic life and substitute care and freedom. What would we do with the buildings then?
In a world built around care and solidarity, much of this vast and absurd office space would indeed be blown up, but others could be turned into free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter. We could call them ‘Museums of Care’ — precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations. t

spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove

ie: (our experimentation w that) be you house – interview ness.. year 2 – the be you house .. in the city.. as the day.. ness

and our findings:

1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen

2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b free people

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imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness.. we might just get to a more antifragile, healthy, thriving world.. the ecosystem we keep longing for..

what the world needs most is the energy of 8b alive people

museum of care.. across the board

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Whoever want to join us on ZOOM tonight, here is info how to do it and the notes from the last Friday
https://t.co/ePJ3ZCh0MA
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1319619355127283712

so fridays at 1 pm denver time

site for visual city assembly: https://v-a.city/

A Visual Assembly is a democratic form of creative collaboration – used to reimagine and visualise new ways in which to organise the city or the social systems as a whole.

sounds like city sketchup ness et al

and 2 min video of david describing the child like ness of it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqoulrutRSk]

liberation for kids is when they get taken seriously
liberation for adults .. can be goofy..
first have to throw off shackles on imagination reverting to child like state..

1 yr to be 5 ness et al

using their own structure of participation as the contents of the city itself

yeah that.. ie: 2 convers as infra

wish we could talk.. wish you could see/hear

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notes/quotes from ..

museum of care meetings

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We already have eight residences! Now it’s all about rules: how to escape an Airbnb-scenario? How to develop a solidarity network that can guarantee safety, care, inclusion and openness. 1/ https://t.co/5mJpnCiZot
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1320107816808480774

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Whether the Visual Assembly (https://t.co/XmCQqHuLGA) in a year’s time will be as alive and broadly supported project as #Carnival4David or the “ExR message” is not clear, but it is an exciting task to think about.5/ https://t.co/cZTcU2uJFx
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1320325329454583808

ExR almost created a language in which we can talk about human feelings. It has nothing to do with political parties, art groups, institutions,
And this is why it worked.
4/
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1320321213135310848

global idiosyncratic jargon

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Nika Dubrovsky (@nikadubrovsky) tweeted at 9:12 AM on Fri, Nov 13, 2020:
Our reading group tonight: we will be discussing David Graeber’s essay “Dead Zones of the Imagination.”
https://t.co/irGpJfQj2A
with Vassily Pigounides
(https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1327283295609040896?s=03)

To care about someone is to imagine the perspectives of that person.

dead zones of imagination

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mission statement shared in moc meeting – nov 13 https://pad.riseup.net/p/MoC_Residencies_Mission_Statement

holy cow.. so resonate w year 2 – the be you house – ie: diff rooms.. always changing..

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from art world – p3:

Museums Are to the Art World as Prisons Are to the Police State.. t

Virtually all museums today operate in a way that produces and maintains hierarchy. By archiving, cataloging, and reorganizing the museum’s space, they draw a line between “museum” quality and “non-museum” quality objects. .t But there is no ultimate contradiction between commoditized art and art considered inalienable and not to be sold, because they are simply two variations of the sacred as radical exclusion.
There is a great deal of discussion today about the possibility of removing public monuments and relegating them to museums, but at the same time, and in a rather contradictory fashion, of turning museums themselves into places of care, love, and social transformation.

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via kevin and m of care fb shares – dec 2020 – freeing space – building worlds outside of state and capital by Dennis Schep – dennis from museum of care meetings: https://roarmag.org/essays/freeing-space-building-worlds-outside-of-state-and-capital/

By securing land and building infrastructure that increases our collective self-sufficiency, we can create worlds on the periphery of the capitalist order.
While precarity is experienced as an individual struggle or even a personal failure, it is a systemic problem..t
There was a time when we did not need to pay any bills. Until the rise of industrial capitalism most land was held in common. .. no eden.. work was hard
Many get by on jobs that only exist because we are trapped in an economy that does not tolerate idleness, positions David Graeber called “bullshit jobs.”

bullshit jobs – dg et al

This financialization of the economy has reduced the state to an empty husk whose main aim is to placate the stock exchange.

graeber f & b same law

Yet pockets of *freedom do exist, and expanding and connecting them seems a fundamental part of any radical politics worthy of its name.

what we need is a means to leap to the connection/creation of them.. because as if already free ness isn’t really *free (has to be all of us)

Many of these might be called artist residencies or eco-villages, but some share a sensibility that goes beyond the conventional meaning of those terms.. Roughly put, they abide by the following criteria:
1\ There is no application procedure, and while they are spaces of work rather than leisure, there is no narrow focus on the production of works of art.
2\ They are self-organized and generally do not have staff. The direction these spaces take is largely determined by the community that makes use of them.
3\ They are non-profit. Since no one is able to take money out of the project, accommodation fees (if applicable) lie far below the market value of comparable housing.
4\ They do not exclude anyone on the basis of identity, except when this is deemed necessary to guarantee the safety and comfort of other participants (i.e. cis-men may be excluded from certain feminist gatherings).
Within these criteria, there is plenty of variation. Most projects function without government funding, perhaps because of an anarchist ethos, or perhaps because of a general dislike of paperwork and assessments. Many do not have permanent inhabitants: these projects are not communes, and most are open to short visits. Some, like Kerminy or Massia, emphasize gardening and agricultural production. Others, like PAF, Konvent, Bidston Observatory orCalafou, have a focus on art and research. The Foundry in Galicia does a bit of both, and has recently developed a focus on self-sufficiency.

dennis is builder at the foundry

All of them build infrastructure to sustain a form-of-life that does not feed the systems that destroy us.

While the location of these projects has a lot to do with the relative accessibility of rural real estate, city and countryside also offer different political potentials. It goes without saying that many important struggles take place in cities, but to live in a city also means to be inserted in and dependent on a system of exchanges that uses your life to secure its reproduction. This severely limits any effort to increase autonomy.. While radical organization should aim to transcend the division between city and countryside, the position of rural spaces in capital’s hinterland makes them a privileged site for the construction of another kind of world.

unless we try ie: cure ios city

These residency projects are limited in scope and scalability, but they are part of a wider effort to free space.
Different conditions and legal systems demand different strategies, but these projects converge in their attempt to redirect money and energy from the reproduction of capital to the production of more sustainable and egalitarian forms of living.

let’s try letting go of money (any form of measuring/accounting).. to get to legit free\dom

One important element of this effort is constructing networks to share knowledge, people and resources and to expand our shared capacities. While most networking efforts are informal, there are new websites for those who would like to get involved. The Museum of Care, part of the legacy work for David Graeber, will begin to operate as a global network of residencies in October 2021. Another is freeingspace.com, which will soon be released as a strategic global map marking areas freed from state and capital.

Today, .. dual power has a different meaning. In our context it refers to the building of liberated spaces and self-governed institutions and expanding networks between them until they can challenge the hegemony of state and capital.

A protest is the opening of a space of possibility, and the mere fact of being on the streets together gives one the sense that another world is possible — but to ask the government for change is to validate an entity that is structurally inegalitarian. Writing will not save us either..t: as long as discourse does not affect the material conditions of existence, the public sphere is not a threat to power. As Friedrich II purportedly once said, “You are allowed to think as much as you want and on whatever topic you wish, *as long as you obey!”

While protest and debate are essential to democracy, the strategy of dual power goes further, aiming to gestate a freer and truly democratic world.

i think part of our problem *(as long as you obey ness) is that we keep thinking democracy ness is outside the walls .. when it’s really part of the ie: people telling other people what to do ness

decision making is unmooring us law.. we need to let go

As part of this process, we may once again learn to *provide for our needs without relying on capital, by collectively managing the land on which we live, producing our own food and energy, or even just acquiring the skills to do so.

a deeper problem/focus would be to facil *deeper needs ie: maté basic needs.. let’s org/infra around that ie: 2 conversations

In keeping with the etymology of radical, which derives from the Latin word for root, today’s radical politics must take a botanical approach: our task is to stop nurturing the system that destroys us and to cultivate a form-of-life from which the incumbent order cannot draw its sustenance.

indeed.. and we keep missing that deep rad/root ness

let’s try healing as the root

To inhabit freed space is to build worlds outside of state and capital. If these autonomous zones and the alliances between them reach critical mass, leaving the metropolis will no longer imply sacrificing capitalist comforts or the cultural intensity of urban life. More importantly, “paying the bills” would no longer require self-exploitation.

if we legit did it for 100% of humanity .. paying bills would become irrelevant

Since 2018, I have spent much of my time at the Foundry, originally conceived as a heterotopia for artists, academics and artesans, but open to everyone interested in working outside of the institutional confines of state and market. The Foundry occupies a tiny village close to the Galician coast that was abandoned in the 1970s. Until now, most of the work has gone into restoring the buildings and increasing our self-sufficiency.

.. As a writer, what has struck me most about this project is that taking down eucalyptus trees, renovating an abandoned house and planting vegetables feels as political as writing texts like this.

At the Foundry, there is space for about 20 people, and monthly expenses are about 800 euros. If the place is fully occupied and garden and game would suffice to feed everyone – and if we ignore the costs of purchase and renovation – that would come down to around 40 euros per person per month. This money could be made selling planks or boar jerky. *These calculations may sound ridiculous, and of course not all our needs grow in a garden, but the point is that if the mere fact of being alive does not fill someone else’s pockets, we hardly need a steady job or government funding to survive.

imagine if we let go of money altogether.. ie: what sounds *ridiculous (to me) is that we keep assuming we have to make the calculations.. graeber violence/quantification law et al

In this way, freeing space is also freeing time: without masters to seize the value of our life and work, we inevitably have more time to develop the skills that make up a less alienated existence. Moreover, this time can be used to increase our shared capacities: by planting vegetables, brewing beer, learning to work iron, or finally writing the books we always wanted to write. *While not everyone may have the luxury of quitting his job, any energy invested in freeing space is not invested in the reproduction of capital – and the skills and democratic experience acquired in the process stay with us forever.

*we have the means for that to happen.. if we org’d differently.. ie: cure ios city

If the reserve army of artists would stop applying for grants to do projects in centers for contemporary art and start building worlds, perhaps cultural sensibility and ecological sustainability can combine in an economy organized around freedom and care rather than production and consumption. Perhaps, we could then finally overcome the Romantic legacy that grounds artistic production in individual genius and realize the avant-garde dream that dissolves the boundary between art and life, insofar as the material production of a world to come is an effort in which we are collectively invested.

graeber min\max law in action: 2 convers as infra

imagine if we

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on fb dec 25 – note from nika – i whited it out:

The end of the Year post. Dear all: Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates it. As a Soviets, I mostly celebrate the New Year, but I will be very grateful to everyone who will be with us tonight on zoom (at least for a little while, because I understand that for many, today is a family day). I am excited about a conversation with Zinaida Vasilyeva about DIY culture, but also this is our last Assembly of this year. So I wanted to summarize a little bit with this letter my thoughts about MoC and thank you to everyone who was with us. In two months of its existence, the Museum of Care has amazingly grown and evolved. We have almost 400 people on the mailing list, eight residencies (and would have had more if we had opened subscriptions to those who wanted them), and we have several living and growing projects at once. In fact, the Museum began as an invitation to visit my private space: my zoom, my youtube, and my dropbox. It grew out of texts that David and I wrote together. Now it’s evident that it has become crowded in a private person’s living room (especially since my current house has only one room and no one but me fits in there). My dropbox was blocked for a couple of days since someone started to download lots of data at once, and I could not use it for my other projects. Some people started to complain (correctly) that the Museum of Care is a collective project. Still, whole collective resources created in the Museum (like our project of Living Sculpture) or video recording of our Assemblies are accumulated on my private accounts. We have so many things going on at once that it is impossible to keep track of them: what is going on in our advertisement campaign, in our web development, in our fundraising? Can almost 400 people become involved in all of it? If they are not, would it mean that we are recreating structures of “representative democracy”? The relationship between the Core Group and the Decision-making group, and the General Assembly is not clear. We have a lot of questions. In fact, they are the result of success and rapid growth.As the person who started this project, I would like to end this year as follows: 1) The MoC will make it’s own, separate (from me) accounts for email, youtube, zoom, twitter. We already have a separate Facebook account (thanks for this!) 2) In the new year, we will elect a new Core group. We will need to define the roles and responsibilities of the Core Group people.3) We will need to separate the private from the collective. I am happy to share ideas, free work, some money, but something I would like to keep for myself, I don’t plan to share or share it with anyone, just some people, and in case I leave, I would like to take it with me. This model, while developed, could be handy for a residences/rooms part of the MoC. Even though we’re a network, we’ve made it clear from the beginning that each off-line residence remains within its present owner’s responsibility and powers. The network cannot impose any rules of behavior on partners. We are a federation, not an empire. Then there is a question: what is the Museum of Care if all its parts are independent of each other? I imagine it as a hub or an aggregator, in which very different projects and initiatives can co-exist, be connected and disconnect from each other. Each project is created and cared for by a group of people or individuals who are taken full responsibility for it. It was a model of Carnival4David. I think it worked well. Nika

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