This is an interdisciplinary project: part art project, exchange and residency in selected asian countries, part theory-building and testing of the Asian Anarchist Network and the Autonomous Rhizomes Asia.Primarily, it is an art project involving collaboration with possible participants. Moving from social to the individual and back again in different parts of Asia. It is taken that Asia is an active commons which is needed to be reclaimed. It is also an autonomous methodology for activism and multi-platform art work. In reference to the different trajectories of struggles in East, South, Southeast and Asia Pacific, the oceans serves it purpose as arteries (Pairez 2009). Therefore it is an exchange and residency program in Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Australia. But there is no blueprint to be strictly followed. There are only moments in the present which needs to revolutionized.
In May 2008, Trans Asia-Pacific online and video activists gathered on the hinterlands of West Java, Indonesia, a network of autonomists was born. Since then, different groups and individuals from various parts of Southeast Asia, decided to start a network of anti-authoritarians and autonomists in Asia-Pacific. The result became the Autonomous Rhizomes Asia (ARA) patterned from the Asian Anarchist Network (AAN). ARA is supposed to be more than a mailing list for anarchists. What ARA aimed to become, during its inception is to make a difference in the way of organizing. According to the threads of the mailing list, "ideally, it wanted to emulate a living and breathing shapeless organism that multiply itself rhizomatically, thus, a rhizomatic networking of autonomists, anti-authoritarians, whatever".
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, who was also part of the ARA mailing list, proposed a bit different and more theoretical approach to resolve the birth pains of a network of Asian anarchists. In his concept of futurology of the present, "perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us."
Movement produces writing which produces movement which produces writing, and so the loop turns; a constant feedback loop between action and reflection, experience and expression. To the relationship between writing and movement, I would like to introduce the added factor of time.(Cuevas-Hewitt 2012)
Moreover, for the present futurologist, what has become familiar and linear, compartmentalised time. Everyone came to see past, present, and future as three separate things – a rigid distinction which resides at the bottom of the means-ends binary within traditional leftist tradition. It is only when present and future are treated as mutually exclusive entities that means and ends can be regarded likewise.
Therefore, having no blue prints to follow is a creative practice that would involve discovering many and multiple parallel living futures in the present. Unlike the traditional linear time, it does not refer to what is, rather more precisely, what is becoming. As Negri and Hardt would explain, it entails not simply ‘a negation of what exists, but also an affirmation of what springs forth’. Not only it is true, another world is possible. It is also true that many other worlds are possible. There is no single movement, instead there are multifarious pathways from any given moment. It begins with the novel innovations and creative resistence happening everywhere in Asia and the world, and from there builds transversal lines between which ties everything together in the same present.
The only imperative is to reclaim what is the common in and between different points of the social movement even without any blue prints.
In May 2008, Trans Asia-Pacific online and video activists gathered on the hinterlands of West Java, Indonesia, a network of autonomists was born. Since then, different groups and individuals from various parts of Southeast Asia, decided to start a network of anti-authoritarians and autonomists in Asia-Pacific. The result became the Autonomous Rhizomes Asia (ARA) patterned from the Asian Anarchist Network (AAN). ARA is supposed to be more than a mailing list for anarchists. What ARA aimed to become, during its inception is to make a difference in the way of organizing. According to the threads of the mailing list, "ideally, it wanted to emulate a living and breathing shapeless organism that multiply itself rhizomatically, thus, a rhizomatic networking of autonomists, anti-authoritarians, whatever".
Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, who was also part of the ARA mailing list, proposed a bit different and more theoretical approach to resolve the birth pains of a network of Asian anarchists. In his concept of futurology of the present, "perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us."
Movement produces writing which produces movement which produces writing, and so the loop turns; a constant feedback loop between action and reflection, experience and expression. To the relationship between writing and movement, I would like to introduce the added factor of time.(Cuevas-Hewitt 2012)
Moreover, for the present futurologist, what has become familiar and linear, compartmentalised time. Everyone came to see past, present, and future as three separate things – a rigid distinction which resides at the bottom of the means-ends binary within traditional leftist tradition. It is only when present and future are treated as mutually exclusive entities that means and ends can be regarded likewise.
Therefore, having no blue prints to follow is a creative practice that would involve discovering many and multiple parallel living futures in the present. Unlike the traditional linear time, it does not refer to what is, rather more precisely, what is becoming. As Negri and Hardt would explain, it entails not simply ‘a negation of what exists, but also an affirmation of what springs forth’. Not only it is true, another world is possible. It is also true that many other worlds are possible. There is no single movement, instead there are multifarious pathways from any given moment. It begins with the novel innovations and creative resistence happening everywhere in Asia and the world, and from there builds transversal lines between which ties everything together in the same present.
The only imperative is to reclaim what is the common in and between different points of the social movement even without any blue prints.