Welcome to the latest edition of Territories, the monthly newsletter from Inhabit. This time around, we’ve got a brand new article for you and a handful of updates.
Gatherers
On shared presence and new traditions
When summer rolls around, you know the high latitude comrades are going to take advantage of it. Last year we first heard about the annual gathering in Sweden, where friends come together for a week of "applied communism." This year we look at the most recent gathering through multiple perspectives, drawn from participants from seven different countries. Centered around contrasting themes of isolation/community, hopelessness/hope, and impasse/breakthrough, this collective text portrays building a life in common despite the challenges we face individually and culturally. With a moving introduction from Ocean, this is essential reading about the interwoven layers of transformation we call "revolution."
In Scandinavia our sense of collectivity is so bound to the state. Those of us trying to build structures of life outside the frameworks offered meet a lot of social challenges. At the gathering, we try to recognize that deepening our relations is one of our most powerful forces. We are people who were not supposed to meet. The state would rather see us isolated in each of our individual communities. Our commitment to meeting becomes our dynamite.
Ella Fassler recently wrote up the #1400challenge for Vice. Features great interviews with New World Growers and Lobelia Commons, and some quotes from yours truly. For more wild ideas and DIY blueprints, make sure to check out last month’s newsletter.
Seems like everyone’s been reading There Is No Unhappy Revolution by Marcello Tarì, just out from Common Notions. It's a brilliant and beautiful account of our revolutionary era, a fierce argument for the “destituent potential” of today's global uprisings. Beyond a dive deep into the concept of destitution, Tarì offers some remarkable interludes on the meaning of territory, architecture, and even love. For more on the book, check this conversation on the Acid Horizons podcast.
Monthly Reading
"Starlight is subversive because it provides conditions for our mourning and our militancy." Keno Evol on nights of fire and protest.
"We are loyal to the spirit of last summer, not only because of memory, but also because proletarians are still being murdered by police, and because the entire world is in revolt." Shemon & Arturo on the latest wave of American revolt.
"An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center." Judith Butler on pandemic, inequality, and our shared world.
"Climate change portends the destruction of both awesome and quotidian infrastructures, without many of which our lives would be diminished." Laleh Khalili on reworking the basis of planetary life.
"The stories we’re telling about our future all seem to end with apocalypse." Annalee Newitz on the afterlife of civilization.
"The perfect place to grow pawpaw is next to a stripmall parking lot. The asphalt provides additional warmth, while the dumpster attracts the flies which pollinate its flowers." Listen to Partisan Gardens on the exceptional pawpaw.
"Antagonism begins first with a mode of dwelling, occupation, or crossing in which subjects are situated in relation to the Earth." Frédéric Neyrat on cosmological communism.
"Will there ever be a greater work of capitalist art than the total destruction of the climate that made it possible?" Vicky Osterweil on the NFT nonsense.
You’re on Path B,
Inhabit