Assembling Neighbors

Abstract

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” reports on the rise of the “popular assemblies” movement that swept the streets of Madrid in the wake of the May 15, 2011, occupation of Puerta del Sol. Assemblies have since taken installation in public spaces as infrastructural with significant methodological implications. Their incorporation into the cityscape has demanded of participants an inventive deployment of techniques and tactics drawn from archival practices and practices of hospitality, as well as the development of varieties of urban hardware. The “fuzz” or mess of the assembly — the difficulties that participants have at putting together, let alone understanding, the assembly as an urban form — offers a valuable perspective on present-day discussions concerning the city as an object of political claims and rights.

Revitalising the uncanny: Challenging inertia in the struggle against forced evictions

“…Scholars have therefore theorised around grassroots movements and the fight for decent housing, autonomist movements, resistance against urban 'renewal' and displacements and around the spatialities of 'occupatio' (Corsín Jimenez and Estalella, 2013;Mayer, 2009;SqEK, 2013;van der Steen et al, 2014;Vasudevan, 2015a). In a recent set of contributions, Vasudevan has proposed (re)understanding occupations and the city together, where the latter is not seen just as the platform for organised action but it is more profoundly re-approached as 'an enduring site of political contestation' (Vasudevan, 2015b: 317).…”

Political exhaustion and the experiment of street: Boyle meets Hobbes in Occupy Madrid

“…When a call to organize popular neighbourhood assemblies was launched following the occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol on 15 May 2011, over a hundred initiatives responded across the city's barrios. Organizing the assemblies proved a relatively straightforward affair, insofar as they were all modelled after the 'assembly format' that had by then become a standard within the main Occupy encampment at Puerta del Sol (Corsín Jiménez & Estalella 2014). For instance, a week into Sol's occupation, a 'Neighbourhoods Commission' drafted a document known as the 'Quick Guide for Facilitating Assemblies' that thereafter functioned as a manual for organizing assembly work everywhere (AcampadaSol 2011).…”

What kind of documents do curators produce? Contemporary cases from Estonia

“…As knowledge‐in‐the‐making artifacts, art documents are themselves in motion and in transformation, going through different afterlives and tournaments of value (Appadurai, 1986), available for reinterpretations and reprocessings, even if (or precisely because) their accessibility and material duration might be different than the one originally planned by their producer. Hence, the act of archiving is itself one of making and inventing (Corsín Jiménez & Estallela, 2014; Estalella, 2014). Therefore, a way of altering and constructing reality.…”