Taraneh at OpenVillage Festival (19th October, 2017):
OpenVillage: How I came to it
[quote=Taraneh]A bunch of folks from Woodbine (an anarchist space with a health autonomy group) in New York City. Woodbine came out of occupy and mutual aid. Nadia presented in New York City last year about Edgeryders, mostly about the general background but also about gathering support to collectively apply for the McArthur “100&Change” grant. Nadia’s presentation was loosely about technologists creating flexible insfrastructure for community needs.
Points of connections were visualized in the maps but what are the actual qualities of connections in these webs … a lot of problems and we are united … Edgeryders is a way of doing auto-ethnography via online platforms and mapping points of data.[/quote]
I am curious to know more about …
I can bring …
She says she needs to understand what OpenVillage is better first. She is coming from another temporary community trying to solve problems about redistribution of resources and how care figures into it, and, as chronically ill person, only has so much energy.
She has been working with artists and groups organized around care on re-envisioning infrastructures for care and how to find relief under systems that extract from rather than add to wellbeing.
Projects and Actvities
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“Sick time, Sleepy time, Crip time: Against capitalism’s temporal bullying” was a project that thinks about the body’s states of illness and rest and disability and how time gets organized in capitalism. How to re-imagine, how to be together through how we allocate time during day.
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“Canaries”: She is a member of “Canaries”. Canaries as in “canary in the coal mine”. It is a collective of women, trans people and gender non-conforming folks with auto-immune conditions.
(Three quarters of auto-immune patients are women.) It is an informal support group and art collective. Bio-medicine doesn’t know much about these diseases, so diagnosis and relief is hard. Bio-medicine can be very narrow minded, not spending much time thinking about what is creating the issues. The idea behind autoimmune diseases is that they may be genetic or may be caused by what we, as human actors, are doing to our environment. So, while Canaries are particularly
affected / sensitive, they are a litmus test of what is happening more broadly. Also the group is trying to understand their own bodies by using lateral knowledge (working around hierarchy and the expertise of bio-medicine, rethinking what expertise is). Art is a useful space for understanding abstract systems and and re-envisioning it.