why site based work?

Briefly recapping our last Skype with Liz this morning, she highlighted some main points, namely, the move away from drop in centres to online resources, and the gap and subsequent free space created by the loss of archives. Thinking about the invitation to work site responsively, I was wondering the ways in which site remains important.


ALL YOUR UNICORN FRIENDS ARE THERE

photo via Facebook
Visiting Lille three weeks ago we went to this bar run by Mim, Liqium, where MJS played some music. It's a LGBTI safe space and neighbourhood bar and it feeeeels really good in there amongst the unicorns and the purple walls, it feels like a centre that you want to be at.

Physical centres feel good. We can connect we can share stories in really different ways to online culture. I'd like to recall a lecture by Franco "Bifo" Beradi in relation to global captialism, the populus has lost its body and called the body to get back its language. In an interview afterwards about the talk, John Byrne summarised: 

[...]Berardi posed the reclamation of language as the ‘job of the poet’, the necessity to restore ambiguity, fluidity and metaphor to the languages we use in representing ourselves to ourselves and each other. This poetry, Berardi argued, would return an abstracted and deracinated language to a body which is both physically personal and socially contingent. 

[...] 

FB: Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological value: it depends on the continuousness of the relation between individuals in time and in space. The material foundation of solidarity is the perception of the continuity of the body in the body, of the consistency of my interest and your interest. Since the ‘80s precarity provoked a process of de-solidarization and a process of disaggregation of the social composition of work. Virtualization has been a complementary cause of de-solidarization: precarization makes the social body frail at the level of work, while virtualization makes the social body frail at the level of affection. Collectivity starts to be fragmented, submitted to the accelerating rhythms of the virtual machine, and this process is parallel and complementary to the fractalization of financial capital. Financial capitalism is deterritorialized and virtual, and acts as a constant recombination of virtual fragments of abstract ownership. 

Franco Berardi and John Byrne, 'Autonomy and Use Value: Connection and Conjunction,' in The Autonomy Project Newspaper 3: At work, Onomatopee 43.3, 2012). http://sites.google.com/site/autonomydocs/file-cabinet/AT%20WORK_PDF_Single%20Pages_web.pdf)

??

So back to street then! Kathleen Hannah speaks about political bodies or how about building the body political??? 

[aside] 

Being there gives us a physical feedback loop, and Marnie's raises an important point during the skype about about visual culture archives as being powerful stake holders. Do they also make up the memory of our political body? I'd say yes, but only if we have seen it or have access to it.

I don't want to drop the idea of electronic forms of communication and community altogether, so I'm wondering about how to work with both and online and physical site simultaneously?

How can this language be reconnected with the body (or site)?

Can our mode of fiction answer the gap between these different temporal spaces?

Do we want to reactivate those drop-in centres?

Do we want to rebuild the archives?

What would that re-building of archives look like?

Would their be [MISSING PART]s thoughout it? 

Could fiction seamlessly understudy the [MISSING PART]?

What kind of new performance could the understudy of he [MISSING PART] have?

Is that [MISSING PART] actually on at a drag workshop?