WINTER UPDATE MEETING 2017: Imagining PAF future * 27/12/2017 - 02/01/2018 *
Submitted by Valentina Desideri on Thu, 2017-10-19 19:40
**!*!*!* A google drive is available as a collective and remote working space for the preparation of WUM and thinking about the future of PAF **!*!*!*
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6sqD5LkUOz7LThEd2NtUHV3aXM?usp=...
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PAF warmly invites you to the 12th Winter Update Meeting (WUM), for a time of fundamental questioning of PAF and a collective imagination of its future. We invite people to propose situations, modes of being together, meeting and imaging together.
We would like to especially dedicate this 12th Winter Update Meeting to collectively question the ways in which PAF is functioning and further imagine its future possibilities. In the WUM number 0, the meeting that Bojana Cvejic and Jan Ritsema organised in 2005 with about 30 colleagues, we addressed the question: what to do with the building?
After 12 years we feel the need to reflect on the experience and experiments done, to see what kinds of changes and further experimentation PAF may be able to host. PAF always wanted to be under permanent reconstruction. Questioning, reinventing and adapting itself constantly according to the given opportunities and its shifting context, in permanent discussion with its users. PAF, as an ongoing experiment with self-organisation and liquid property, has opened up positive spaces of freedom and cooperation, while also showing the limits of such experimentation if the systemic violence implicit in its structure stays invisible and unaddressed. If we want to further experiment with the possibility of self-organised non-hierarchical cooperation, we have to address the implicit misogyny, chauvinism, racism, class prejudice and ableism already in place.
In recent years, PAF has been involved in a process of working on these crucial impasses. Yet they are, as we know, all too resistant. With this WUM, we would like to more formally initiate a critical and creative process of self-reflection on the hidden (and not so hidden) structures of power within the building. In particular, we would like to focus on the question of gendered violence, and to renew our commitment to combating this, with all the difficulties that this entails. We imagine that this could also be a way of opening conversation, and a place from which the rules, practices, and organisational modalities of PAF can be discussed and re-imagined.
To this end, a group of PAF users has already been working on a proposal for new rules, which will be discussed during the meeting. Alongside these, we invite you to share any further reflections, resources, available practices, possible organisational models and related work, as well as to create situations and experiments that might enable this conversation.
We want to imagine PAF as a place that acknowledges and welcomes a heterogeneous group of very different people, who think and do things differently while maintaining an almost absence of management and policing behavior, towards the collective creation of a platform, a forum, that easily and lightly offers and maintains a mentally healthy and safe place for each individual while encouraging radical and collective experimentation.
The WUM will be from 27/12/2017- 02/01/2018, to come earlier or stay longer is of course possible. We intend to dedicate a daily meeting to the future of PAF, which it is of course not obligatory to take part in. For those who want to take part intensively in this process or will propose situations and working methods to experiment with, we can offer a free stay. For others who want to work and exchange, update and create their work and interests, we count on the normal prices (18 euro per night for a stay longer than 4 nights otherwise 20 euro per night).
We plan not to have a cooking team, but instead to continue the successful experiments with collective self-cooking as we tried it out during other events in June and August. The prices for the food and drinks will be set at 10€ per day. Membership (12€) is obligatory due to insurance reasons, valid for one year.
For those who reserve for the last night of the year 31st Dec, we ask a reservation and payment for minimal three nights. The WUM will coincide with the yearly meeting of the 50 owners, The SCI The Building shareholders, which will be on the afternoon of the 30th of December.
Limited number of participants.
Reservations: Valentina Desideri - Jan Ritsema contactpaf@gmail.com
