LABORATORIO DE INVENCIÓN SOCIAL (O POSIBLES FORMAS DE CONSTRUCCIÓN COLECTIVA)

We are immigrants, workers, refugees, women, victims of state terrorism. I want to listen to learn, to know, to understand. How do we live, survive? What are the strategies? The means? The accounts? The fears? I want to learn the trades, the strengths, the movements. And from there, the next movement is that which leads to possibility of a different and collectively constructed way of thinking and doing.

Laboratorio de Invención Social, my work exhibited the 21st Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, is proposed as space of encounter. Of the workers and myself, initially, but fundamentally of cooperative models, of recovery, of reoccupation with other groups, communities and people.

How is it possible to resist in the face of and within this predatory model? What can we do? What are the tools? What have others done? What have we done?

Yes, the modes of production gathered in the Laboratory propose forms of resistance and struggle. We can all learn from this, to then act. Otherwise we won’t be able to survive.

From these statements emerge survival strategies, creative forms of construction. The workers featured here were not political activists before the factory was recovered, they didn’t know it was possible, they had never heard of the cooperatives.

“Everyone does everything, we all earn the same.” That was one of the first sentences I heard from them. It is indeed a revolutionary proposition at a time when the governments of our countries crush us by implementing policies of repression, hunger and annihilation of rights gained by workers, by minorities.

When I started contacting the workers of recovered factories, when I learned about the cooperatives, their modes of operation, I felt that somehow this had to be useful to other communities, that we must organize ourselves to be stronger and resist.

In a statement to the PLATFORM:VB