Enclosures of New Athens [event/project]

:: concept/organization : @New Babylon Revisited> : 1411 Athens

(i): ols (using photo by
Andreas Kotokanis>)

>


Enclosures of New Athens. Sightseeing new localisations of power.
: Research workshop on the commons and their enclosures
– with Adnan Hadzi (reSync>) & Oliver Lerone Schultz (Common Media Lab>)

Enclosures of New Athens is a research workshop and a mesh net walk especially designed for Athens in collaboration with the reSync team >.

Aiming to create a glossary of concepts, terminologies and terms related to the contemporary use of the commons, their enclosure and subsumption[>] that can be experienced within the city, the workshop will attempt to collect, sort and conceptualize some material on ‘new enclosures’ and layered power formations as they crystallize in and around urban spaces. It will therefore inquire exemplary spaces of Athens, in a series of guided site-seeings in which local acteurs introduce the ‘outsiders view’ to the concrete as well as more abstract power grids and localized logics of valorization and governance structuring those urban sites.

This material, pre-collected in the days running up to the workshop, will form the core of what is worked upon collectivly to identify, index and characterize pluriform forms of power and valorization. This process will take the shape of some conceptual discussions around the idea of ’subsumption’, and go on to annotate and inter-link the material.

It will finally aim to explore what would be actually needed to turn these urban spaces into common spaces or spaces of the commons and how ’subsumption’ lying at the heart of non-trivial theorizations of re-productive and re-actualizing forms of power within capitalism, is understood as complex and liquid, adaptive and renovating formation.

The outcomes of the research will be hosted and interlinked with work-and-research structures of the the reSync Athens workshop and they will also load a research-black-box (Pirate-Box>) that can accumulate and ‘comminize’ critical material, travel and be presented at any place in any time.

In perspective we will aim at two ways to make these ‘pre-syncs’ valuable for future common use:

1 : restreet>, AWMN> and local knowledge commons production: we will collectively think about ways to network and share the material in ways useful to pre-existing local structures

2 : The ‘Glossary of Subsumption : collective edition’ will be a longer-term project creating critical collective characterizations of new forms of ‘integrative power’ and ‘value extraction’ in the post-media age. The material as well as experiences around collective knowledge assembly will enter this longer term process, shaping and feeding future instances (– one planned around next transmediale)

:: find more info + material here: