Nonsite Collective at SF Camerawork: Call for Collaboration(s)

Please join the Nonsite Collective for a series of events, COMMON/USE, throughout the duration of SF Camerawork's show, Untitled, (running January - April, 2011). 

From the time of the Magna Carta, the "commons" has connoted all the benefits afforded by shared resources needed for subsistence: the means for food, water, firewood, grazing land, etc. Historically, the protection of the commons prevented the enclosure and the privatization of shared woodlands. Traditionally, "to common" is the practice of sharing the benefits of the land.

Under contemporary regimes of capitalist accumulation, how are we to understand the commons today? Does it exist? Has it been subject to complete privatization? What are our shared resources? How do these resources extend beyond traditional understandings of shared land to include information, architecture, patterns of exchange and production, and collective affect and action? And how might we render, nourish, and use them as a commons--commoning--in ways that are not subject to the dominant laws of economic exchange? Is there a way of imagining a practice of commoning that would offer an alternative to neoliberal enclosures?

As part of its ongoing investigation of the commons and the practice of commoning, the Nonsite Collective, together with the SF Camerawork community, will seek to enact a model "commons," with the hope of arriving at a better understanding of what this might mean in practice. In doing so, we hope to draw attention to the conflicts and contradictions that attend the idea of the commons--both historically and practically--as part of our effort to work through these problems conceptually, and in practice. Can a commons be willed or self-organized? What are its material and legal limits? How might we work against and through these limits?

The point of departure will be a table--our COMMON/SITE--and we will make use of this throughout the residency. The "table" will help us to frame/perform/stage a critical engagement with our terms and concepts. Not only will the table serve as the location where we participate in collaborative discussions and production, it will also be where material and debris, traces and documents, will accumulate for use and reuse.

Over the course of our four month residency, we will sustain an evolving process of inquiry and investigation, while taking up different aspects of the commons each month: COMMON/SITE, COMMON/WASTE, COMMON/GROUND, COMMON/MATTER. The various segments of the residency will engage with public space, archives, waste, image, information, and the idea of the nonsite itself. COMMON/TERMS as a video blog will expand and explore these segments.

Throughout this residency, we will invite Camerawork community to help us to facilitate collaborations between photographers, writers, performers, and others.

COMMON/SITE: Public libraries are perhaps one of the last manifestations of a Commons in the United States. Even so, some are being spatially reorganized in a way that requires the patron to enter the space with a level a mastery, and a definite goal; shelves are being collapsed together to save space, or obliterated altogether. Who organizes knowledge and cultural artifact, and how it is organized are key issues of the millennial era. Quite obviously, there is a push to enclose and privatize access in a multitude of ways, subtle and overt. Many times the push back only uses technology to achieve its goals. What is the implication of true, physical common space being take away, such as the common space of a public library? How does an immaterial commons change the idea of the self, of the social? Throughout the residency, Nonsite will perform a rereading of SF Camerawork's oft neglected library, working through questions and prompts developed by the Camerawork community to assemble elements of this library in the gallery space as common resources for investigation and as starting points for further group work in writing, image making, and discussion. Texts will be selected from the big back room and foregrounded in a bookshelf next to the residency table for use by Cameraworks members and non-members alike. Texts will be selected according to the words and questions posted on the wall by gallery patrons, as well as by the discussions around the table during the other residency projects. In that way, the public will inform the organization of knowledge and cultural artifact. The selections they guide will in turn guide the discourse and activities of the other activities planned during the residency. For further information, or to participate, contact commonsite@nonsitecollective.org

COMMON/GROUND: In February we will explore the implications of San Francisco's Sit/Lie ordinance, Prop L, on city sidewalks. We aim to produce cartographic and infographic artifacts in this project. Our investigations with writers and photographers will intersect with considerations of "the right to the city" and "spatial justice." We invite the SF Camerawork community to join us in fieldwork to discover the limits of our permissions in inhabiting public space; the commonalities and tensions that develop in arts installations of the stationary body in public space; and the image-text practices that might materialize the abstract flows of finance and urban-planning policy that structure the spaces we share. Our tactics for investigation include sitting for sidewalk portraits (testing Prop L), creating photographic maps of arrest sites (including erasures and anti-space), and documenting labor/picket lines.For further information, or to participate, contact commonground@nonsitecollective.org

COMMON/MATTER: In March, a Photography Response Writing Group will convene to investigate the changing place of photographs in the commons. How is an image saturated landscape a common space for us to report on from varying perspectives? Are cell phone photographs, photo sharing sites on the internet and the photos in the news changing the ownership of photographs and photographic memories? Are photographs common space? Group members will write in response to photo debris—including old cameras, empty albums, frames, batteries, chargers, and memory cards—and a tour of the common spaces in the surrounding downtown area.This will be a fusion of a workshop and a sit-in. The materials generated throughout the day—including writing by group members and photographs of the debris and tour—will be collected into a pamphlet that will be distributed in the downtown area and available at Camerawork and on the Nonsite website. Camerawork members are invited to join the writing group and contribute their own photo debris to the Nonsite residency installation throughout the month of March. For further information, or to participate, contact commonmatter@nonsitecollective.org

COMMON/WASTE: Industrial, high tech, and mass production/consumption have bequeathed to the commons a legacy of toxicity and waste. We cohabit a superfund landscape planted with forests genetically designed to remediate a history of environmental indifference. What procedures allow us negotiate with and navigate the Common/Waste? Do we resign ourselves to the dystopian rubble? What strategies of recycling, reclaiming, redesign, remediation, or reinvention will correct past industrial negligence?

Common/Waste will develop and initiate procedures to salvage the Nonsite refuse heap manufactured through the course of the exhibition. A series of interventions into Nonsite's practice of waste production will take place beginning in January and throughout  the residency.  The public is invited to participate in the creative reuse of the legacy of the Nonsite commons.  Segments of Common/Waste will develop methodologies of recycling, reclamation, redesign, remediation, and reinvention as procedures for processing excess and refuse.  The final month of the residency will be devoted to the accumulation of residue of the exhibition. For further information, or to participate, contact commonwaste@nonsitecollective.org.

COMMON/TERMS: Spanning the four month Nonsite residency at SF Camerawork visitors to the exhibit on the days of Nonsite activities will be invited to make three minute videos on their definition of the term commons or other phrases or themes that have been central to Nonsite "curricula" in the past such as commons, accessibility, somatics, and social practice. These videos can either be made in the gallery space or in the surrounding areas. The purpose of these videos is to chart a relation between thought and practice. Furthermore, this investigation hopes to encourage participation in the Camerawork residency by Nonsite members who are not local. These videos as well as videos by local and non-local Nonsite members and past presenters will be displayed on the forthcoming blog nonsitecommonterms.wordpress.com which will also document the events that occur over the course of the residency with links to relevant texts from the Nonsite website. For further information, or to participate, contact commonterms@nonsitecollective.org.

The Nonsite Collective is a collective of Bay Area visual artists, writers, activists, archivists, independent scholars, and non-traditional learners, all working together to stimulate new forms of collaboration and public participation around a range of interdisciplinary projects. The collective is not only committed to promoting new work, but to sustaining discussion about the projects it promotes. We do this through modes of self-organized pedagogy, whereby collectively proposed “curricula” become ongoing series of interrelated investigations, presentations, study groups, and events. This allows participants — artists and non-artists alike — to test new ideas, while developing shared vocabularies across disciplines, stimulating new forms of discourse around the inquiries that sustain our work. Thus Nonsite creates multiple points of leverage for ongoing cultural engagement and social action.