Re: Syndicate: SEAFair/Junction/Syndicate

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

Dear Syndicalists, dear Melentie,

first of all, I would like to thank Melentie and Nebojsa and the crew of
SCCA Skopje for organizing the Junction meeting in Skopje and, of course,
for all the energy they put into the production of the second Syndicate
reader. It was great to be there, to meet known and unknown faces
face-to-face, to listen & react to the presentations, to exchange thoughts,
experiences, books, to muse over plans for the future (BerlinBelgradeMoscow
and vice versa), and to have dinners&drinks with almost everybody!

In response to Igor's mail I posted some comments about Junction/SEAFair on
the Syndicate list. Melentie send his remarks on both our comments today,
oops, yesterday.

I would like to clarify that I am speaking for myself and for nobody else,
and that it is not my intention to impose or prescribe things to other
people or to a group of people. I am simply trying to formulate a
constructive critique, that's all.

Inke wrote:

>	Generally Syndicate
>	meetings are not supposed to be something like "official
>	conferences"; rather, they have always been "side events", or better:
>	rather informal and personal (face-to-face) get-togethers of people
>	who most of the time communicate via e-mail.

Melentie answered:

>Inke, is this a prescription? Do we have a statut where the above said is
>written or is it what you personally prefer? Please clear up this for me
>as well as for the other Syndicalists. Because if this is true and has
>been formalised so then we shouldn't have planned the Syndicate meeting
>as we did and somebody should have reacted long ago.

As I said above, I am not prescribing or imposing anything to anyone. And,
luckily, there are no written rules, regulations or formalized procedures.
I am just trying to formulate my personal thoughts concerning the Syndicate
in response to the Junction Skopje meeting.

>Where does the surprise with the structuring of the meeting as it is
>come from then? 

Beforehand it was not clear to me that the Syndicate meeting would be given
such a strong presence within the SEAFair festival. Did I miss something
even if I monitored the list quite carefully? If so, sorry about that.

Perhaps this "sudden surprise" results from my limited experience with
SEAFair; as you correctly remarked I was there only during the two days of
the actual Junction/Syndicate meeting ("she fell from the sky", to cite
Arthur Bueno). How did it go on? And what about the local audience & the
reactions to the festival? I guess that Melentie will write about this in
his report...

Igor wrote:

>	the problem also present in skopje was that the organisers had
>	to deal very much with organising the syndicate junction meeting
>	and they put the festival a little beside (as if the syndicate meeting
>	would be the main event of the festival, which was not - so the
>	meeting became public which was not the intention of the
>	syndicalists; ...) -

Melentie wrote:

>Dear Igor, (...) Are you suggesting that the meetings should not be open
for the OTHERS?

No, no, I don't think that Igor is suggesting such a thing. There seems to
be a misunderstanding. Of course the Syndicate meetings (and the list) are
open for everybody who is interested. The question is whether the Syndicate
meetings should be entirely PUBLIC events, PUBLIC in this case meaning a
conference with speakers that give/perform lectures for a general *audience*. 

I personally don't think that Syndicate meetings should be entirely devoted
to public presentations. Besides some selected public presentations the
most important thing (at least to me) is that there is enough time for
so-called "internal", rather informal workshops of people who most of the
time - due to reasons of our much-cheered translocality - cannot meet in
person and therefore are bound to communicate via e-mail.

Here, I am thinking mainly about the experiences some of the
Syndicate/Deep_Europe members made during the 10-days
workshop/participation in the Hybrid WorkSpace during documenta X last
year. The pressure of "going public" was enormous, and at the beginning it
seemed as if there would be no time left for discussions, personal
exchanges etc. Then we decided to have a very strict "time regime", which
meant that every day, there would be 2-3 hours of selected presentations
for the dX audience, and the rest of the time was devoted to these
workshop-like get-togethers behind the scenes: *internal* workshops,
dealing with developing collaborative projects and strategies, discussions,
writing papers, etc. This has nothing to do with a lack of openness; I see
it more as a kind of self-protection.

Of course, the structure of a 10-day meeting can in no way be compared to a
2-day meeting. Still, what I am trying to say is that only a minor part of
the overall time planned for a Syndicate meeting should be devoted to
public presentations and that it is very important to allocate time for
these internal discussions which are not necessarily of general interest
outside the Syndicate (i.e. for a general *audience*). I guess that I
somewhat missed this in Skopje. But OK, these are just my personal
reflections. Anyway, there was still lots of good discussions and exchange
going on around the presentations/lectures, and I am very happy that I had
the chance to participate!

Melentie wrote:

>Finally I think that the meeting was quite successful, the list of
>participants* (see below) was impressive (...) and that
>the gathered material is absolutely great. The speakers in the sessions
>and the free exchange of ideas that resulted from their lectures is
>plenty rich and we will probably print out the proceedings from it. 

Melentie, I am very much looking forward to the proceedings and to the
longer report on SEAFair & Junction... good luck for the 18 recorded tapes ;-)

I would now also be interested in the opinions and the suggestions of other
participants / Syndicalists.


Best wishes,

Inke


i n k e . a r n s __________________________ b e r l i n ___
49.(0)30.3136678 | inke@berlin.snafu.de | http://www.v2.nl/~arns/