The alt.SPACE Festival 2005
The alt.SPACE Free Bar: Operation: City / Urban Festival, Zagreb, Croatia (2005)
The first annual alt.SPACE festival was organized by artist collective C.CRED [ Collective CREative Dissent ] following an invitation to take part in the Operation: City exhibition and events program in Zagreb in September 2005. Having already organized a number of alt.SPACE art open mic sessions in London, C.CRED invited a number of friends and allies to collaborate and take part in setting up the first alt.SPACE festival within the framework of a makeshift bar and communal sleeping area constructed in a derelict factory in the east of the city using primarily industrial pallets and second-hand mattresses. Over a month-long period, a series of events – walks, project presentations and discussions, reading groups, communal meals and parties, screenings, and art open mics – were hosted, primarily by the Free Bar space, involving both local guests and collaborators, and invited participants from different parts of Europe and the US. The month ended with a trip to the island house of a local participant that were kindly hosting the remaining parts of the group for a weekend by the sea.
An experiment in micro-physics (through dereliction). 1. The test we set for ourselves: for a month, we are taking over a disused factory in the east of Zagreb, building a free-bar where we serve cheap Rakija bought from the farmer’s market across the road. The entire bar, comprising modifiable and moveable units, is built using industrial pallets and pieces of wood. We live in an adjacent room that we have turned into a sleeping area. There’s quite a few of us, at times ten or eleven. 2. The event: the actualization of the potential immanent to the physos of dereliction involves a turning away from the redundant and repressive politics of parties, presidents and policies - and then also a shift in speed, an alt mode of life, an alt strategy for life. A different – collective - way of eating, drinking, sleeping, talking, thinking and being.
Note on Micro-physics: All space is practiced and functional. Labour, dereliction, drinking, sleeping – these are functions and practices, and all space is grounded in their various temporalities. They can, however, be shifted, altered, modified. The task of the micro-physicist is to explore the temporal textures that constitute a given space, to create a shift, a mutation of sorts, to open up a different kind of space, a different assemblage of bodies (non-institutional forms of conviviality, friendships, alliances, collaboration, collectivity, etc.). This involves an experimentation on all kinds of levels and with all kinds of bodies, various physical bodies – tables, chairs, bars, humans and animals bodies - but also chemical bodies - drugs, alcohol, cigarettes. The notion of a micro-physics of space thus also includes a chemistry and toxicology of space, and the micro-physicist has to deal with chemicals and toxins, as much as with mutations, temporary and minor uses of space, particular kinds of movement, mobility and nomadism, different forms of residency, cohabitation and parasitism. But, all in all, the main political task of the micro-physicist is to fight the stupefying boredom of the normative physics of everyday space-time.
Contributors to the alt.SPACE Free Bar Program:
Red76 (Portland: http://www.red76.com) - project presentations, discussions & reading;
Joe Collins (Leeds: http://www.pocketuniverses.co.uk) - storytelling performances & chronicles;
Klaas van Gorkum (Rotterdam: http://www.parallelports.org) - project presentation & discussion;
C.CRED (London: http://www.ccred.org) - project presentation & walks/workshops;
The Bureau for Research into Post-Autonomy (London: http://www.postautonomy.co.uk) - material for discussion provided;
Inga Zimprich/Think Tank (Berlin: http://www.think-tank.nl) - project presentation (cancelled) & material for discussion;
UNWETTER (Berlin: http://www.un-wetter.net)- project presentation & discussion;
Pirate Cinema (Berlin: http://piratecinema.org) - project presentation & discussion;
Città dell’Arte (Biella: http://www.cittadellarte.it) - presentation & discussion.
