# OUR COLLABORATION

## Institute for Collective Recomposition: Reimagining divisions of labour, tools of care and property regimes within organizations

## Intro

The focus of the institute would be the investigation into care and maintenance labour in organizations, using the documentation of situated practices and knowledges within organizations and exploring what innovative and different ways of thinking about roles, workflows and tools could be invented and brough into play. In short, we want to ask how the recomposition of the distinctive and interdependent elements that make up our organizational life (tools, techniques, workflows, psychological factors, skills, health conditions, etc.) can intervene to transform the organizations in which we live and develop our practices, which we travers and make as much as they make and travers us? What are the roles and tasks within organizations that do not necessarily lead, but create capacity for other things to happen in the ways they need to?

Reflecting on the past and activating it plays a significant role in this context. This is why we situate our interventions at the intersection of tactical archiving and institutional analysis.

The advent of the digital brough about a renewed attention to the challenges of archival practices, that in the postdigital era and amidst interlocking systemic failures are being increasingly questioned and have to be rethought. Institutions that really commit to the activation of their archives as a resource for facing multiple epochal crisis remain few and far between. We believe that the key trope of the ened to ‘activate’ archives remains a lost opportunity if organizations do not also simultaneously deeply confront the question of how archives might activate us, our processes and communities, to bring about organizational change.

What we mean by this is that archives are also often a patrimony or asset, a property of institutions dedicated to heritage preservation, memory, research and learning.
As such, “activation” initiatives risk to be interpreted narrowly as an attempt to produce social and cultural value out of the archival assets, quantifiable by audience numbers or online visibility for instance.

With our collaborations, we want instead to sustain and contribute to archival processes (both existing one and ones in the making) in such a way so that they become part of a reflexive practice of institutional analysis.

We are interested in deploying and adapting methods stemming from radical popular education traditions and radical media, as well as feminist organizing and critical management. These include mapping and naming exercises, roleplays, collective research and writing and other processes that allow for the critical analysis of existing conditions and the experimentations with new, speculative and playful alternatives.

Through workshops, schools, and other long-term processes, we wish to invite others to become directly involved as custodians, librarians and maintainers, in a word, as protagonists of the archives that allow our collective life to happen in specific ways.

In this spirit, the technical infrastructures that we created for our processes is set up to embrace a polycentric approach to archives, one that wants them proliferating, continuously forking, easily accessible in and offline (or in situations of limited connectivity), constantly escaping claims of single authorship and private property.

Our approach to the challenges posited by the activation of archives paradoxically begins by de-centering them to give a more prominent role to the communities of practice that they can serve to activate. We understand engagement with archival materials to be but one of the many ingredients that can concur to activate change in organizational settings that need positive change in implementing greater equality and justice in their formal procedures and workflows, fostering more satisfaction and care both by their members/workers and the constituencies they bring together, and effectiveness in reaching their political aims.

We live in a time of multiple systemic failure: accelerated climate collapse and mass extinction, energy crisis, food crisis, wars, new fascisms and fundamentalisms, a generalised crisis of care. In such scenario, and in the constant withering away of left organizations such as political parties and unions, we believe that archive building and activation will be even more crucial nodes of continuity in fast-paced movements’ dynamics that have to contend with continuous dispersion of their participants and frequent disruptions due to repressive legislative environments.

We understand an archive in an expanded sense to correspond to a repository of knowledge resources of various nature that might or might not be systematized, organized and recognized as such. As partisans, our commitment lies explicitly in fostering missing archives and protecting marginalized ones. We understand that such shared repositories of “useful knowledge” are a key tool for processes of political organizing and bottom-up struggles. They offer shared vocabularies and framework for developing an analysis of what is happening; provide a vital site for passing on the memory of what has been before; constitute a terrain of debate and disagreement over possible interpretations and future courses of action.

In focusing on archival and self-documentation practices, we are interested not only in documenting situated knwoledges, but into over-code them with a collectively shared power-sensitive analysis that can open up organizations to the possibility of deep change – inspired by Illich, we could call ours a quest for convivial tools that can work in our post-digital era.

Mainly, we think that tactical archives are the best place to make available and accessible:

1) The tools we use to think together in struggles: Books, articles, documents, videos, images, photos, audio interviews, songs, flyers, artworks, letter, etc. etc. These are the texts that we use to analyse our conditions, formulate hypothesis of what is wrong and what can be done, and imagine alternatives for ourselves and the planet.

2) The techniques we use to act together in struggles: These include reflexive practices, techniques to structure our workflows, to facilitate our meetings, to take decisions, to inhabit and negotiate the contradictions of capitalism, to confront our group unconscious, to enjoy life together, to take care of our bodily needs (food, shelter, rest, etc.), to avoid exhaustion, to care for some cause and for each other through time.

In both these aspects, software tools and other digital technologies are playing an important role and need to be addressed as living actors that shape our organizational life.

## MAIN ACTIVITIES WE COULD OFFER:

1. Co-creation of curated online libraries, archives and collections (including audio, image-based and video materials) documenting the activities and knowledges of marginalized or otherwise neglected groups/collectives/organizations.

2. In-situ process of digitization of documents, books, journals, and other ephemera previously unavailable online with professional scanners. Accompanying of the first phase of the process and set up of tools and workflows; peer-to-peer mentoring (in presence and online) and technical troubleshooting.

3. Creation of collaborative syllabi (aka curricula or readers) based on the references in a dedicated library or archive. Devised as an intensive workshop or longer process of co-creation.

4. Creation of quick-process journals, fanzines and other experimental publications (aka “instant books”) that include / are based on the references in the dedicated library or archive.

5. Training in digital skills for tactical archiving and shadow librarianship – from beginner to advanced level users - of tools such as Markdown language, Git, Zotero, ScanTailor, Sandpoints and more. This can include a critical introduction to media theories, to be tailored to the interests and level of the group.

6. Training in collective research methodologies for non-academic contexts – including collective writing, shared referencing systems and editing processes. Devised as an intensive workshop or longer process of co-creation.

7. Facilitation of self-documentation processes for collectives and other informal groups. This can include support for starting a reflexive process of self-archiving or revisiting pre-existing organizational archives and using them as a tool for institutional transformation.

8. Printing and designing of instant publications (possible collaboration with Rizograph machine in Rijeka – Ana Labudević? / Marcello in Cagliari (name of their collective??) Trieste also has a ryzo…etc.) with ISBN available (check with Sanja if we could get to develop an imprint with the UNIRI isbns for our publications beyond CAS Fellowship booklets? Alternatively, thinking of developing an imprint through Mama perhaps?).

## PILOT FORMAT: Academy for Reflexive Organizational Practices (placeholder title) – 1 year

An initiative aimed at creating a permanent club or society of mutual support for increasing justice, pleasure and effectiveness in the organizations that host our practices (even when we might not control them). The ARP will be using self-documentation and archiving techniques, as well as collective writing and research, to support organizational change. This school would be based on micropolitical techniques first developed in the context of French institutional analysis (Tosquelles, Oury, Guattari, Rolnik, etc.), popular pedagogy (Freire, Fals Borda, hooks, Cabral, Freinet, Illich, Marx, etc.), as well as introducing elements from critical management studies (platform cooperativism, participatory budgeting, commons, basic income initiatives, organizational democratization processes, permaculture principles, emergent strategy principles, etc.) and tactical media strategies (XXX).

The course would be open to collectives, organizations and specific working groups within broader institutions, as well as individuals who want to provoke organizational change in the organizations where their practices are embedded.

**STRUCTURE**:

**X2 In-person meetings on Cres** (one-week each) – Intensive working retreats hosted at Moise Palace. In the first intensive, participants will be accompanied in a process of reflection on the dynamics and conditions shaping the organization / group of their choice, allowing them to leave the group with a blueprint for action, ideas for interventions and further research questions. The second retreat will be used to collectively reflect and give feedback on the process of each participant and on our own group dynamic during the year.

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**X10 Monthly online group check-ins sessions** – sharing of institutional diary, mutual support, feedback on experiences. During the remaining 10 months, participants will remain connected through a number of digital processes. Each will be invited to maintain and share an ’institutional diary’, documenting the processes and dynamic at play in their organizations and their own agency within them. A monthly video-conference gathering will also take place, each focusing on a different aspect of institutional analysis. A library of useful references will also be exchanged and preserved as a common resource for the group.

FROM MEETING 27 Jan:

Matters of wealth and wellness
Organizational care work & its tacit knowledge
Docuemnting and playing with it
Tactical Archiving: Redistributing social care in collective settings
Care support and maintainance can challenge the limiting frameworks of property regimes. Builing and supporting tactical archives can be
Tools for Democratization

Reclaim the tools for social reproduction
redistributing labour

Questioning divisions of labour in knowledge production

what are the roles that do not necessarely lead but create capacity for others to happen in the ways they need to

roles to be understood differently

practical, pragmatic knowledges of working in a setting

not only documeintgn situated knwoledgde but over code it withpower-sensitive analsysi and open up organizations to the possibiltiy of organization - convivial tools