The Broken Pitcher Forum: reaffecting place

The Broken Pitcher Forum: reaffecting place hosts a small gathering of interlocutors and participants, bringing in conversation practices that engage with labour, publishing, and collectivity under conditions of displacement and precarity. WORKNOT! centers ‘home’ as a site of labour, where migration, evictability, and insecurity shape everyday life. Spookstad approaches radical publishing as a form of organizing, asking how books can resist commodification and become immanent to social movements, allowing protest to speak rather than merely be represented. The Lumbung Land working group questions forms of collectivity in unstable, temporary circumstances, and how to tend to commoning within precarious contexts. Together, they reflect on how translocal and self-organised communities navigate life and place-making beyond institutional capture.

In their text Laboring for Home, WORKNOT! contextualise contemporary forms of labour and production, placing ‘home’ at the center. Processes of precarisation render insecurity a central condition of life. As evictability becomes a form of life, eviction becomes labour for the displaced body. Migration is work: the long labour of carrying one’s body across borders and negotiating relations to land and citizenship, performed over years or a lifetime in the perpetual presence of evictability.

With in search of the anti-book: on literary production beyond institutional capture, Spookstad will delve into the potential and the meaning of radical publishing. What does it mean for publishing to be immanent to social movements and radical activism? How can books not just speak about protest, but allow protest to speak? What form belongs to a book that refuses to be a commodity — an anti-book? Spookstad is a publishing collective guided by these questions and challenges. In this session we will try to outline the possibility of literary production beyond institutional capture.

Lumbung Land (working group) will enact a role play on possible alternative scenarios for their collectives and their localities. As a collective of collectives, it faces the same fundamental problem: they build collectivity in places that, when push comes to shove, they have to leave again. For many, this is not a durable way to build communal forms of life. Therefore, through their joint practice and their first time leading a collective role play, they are looking into how to common within an uncommon context.