Curating is an organizing practice - A conversation with Zoey Lubitz

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

In this conversation, I'll be speaking with Zoey Lubitz. Zoey is a curator and arts worker living and working in New York. Through her independent writing and curatorial projects Zoey explores how material and immaterial infrastructures relate to the reproduction and resistances of precarious forms of life. They are also the co-director of the Center for Experimental Lectures, where they explore the various ways that knowledge is embodied, given form, communicated and administered. Zoey is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement V, which focuses on a collective study of governance by delving deeper into the notion of self-organization. Together, we will discuss about her involvement in independent collective organizing in the arts, as well as her research interest in the ways that infrastructures assert and represent authority. Zoey, welcome to Pali-Room!

Hi, Myrto! Thank you.

Thanks for joining me today. I am interested to hear about your path and I wanted to ask you, how did you start engaging with collective organizing in the arts?

I had the fortune to attend Oberlin College in the U.S., where I did my undergraduate and that was where I first learned the kind of self-aware practices of cooperation, where it was defined. I was a member and eventually took on more leadership positions in a cooperative of bicycle mechanics as well as in Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, which was a low-cost cooperative housing and dining organization made up of students that continues to thrive despite the neoliberalization of that institution. Residential dining and dormitories are obviously a primary area of privatization in American universities. So, it was in that setting that I first learned the challenges of being a facilitator, the practices of consensus-based decision making, the Rochdale Principles of Cooperation, and how whiteness and anti-Blackness specifically must be addressed and continuously articulated as the ground on which all forms of contemporary sociality are instantiated in order to have trust and build multiracial coalitions. I can also say that I am a member of Coop Fund. Since living in New York, I have become a member of Coop Fund, which is a kind of transnational experiment in cooperative finance, where each member pays a set amount into a shared bank account and then members can make proposals on how to use those funds. I am also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and with many others, my peers in the US, my uneasy faith in doing mass politics was reinvigorated in some sense in the past five years. I have to go back in time to remember that reinvigoration, but by the prospect of building a mass movement on the left in the US. Last year was obviously the apotheosis of something in the States and I think I can only speak for that. There is a piece by Tobi Haslett in n+1 from earlier this year called Magic Actions that really resonates with my memories of the affective intensity of last year and also the comedown, I feel, as the political horizons somewhat dissolve or get wiped away as I go back into regular arts work. He wrote that "and the riots burst mere months after Sanders bowed out of the primary, so the two strands of struggle fell into an enlightening juxtaposition from Occupy to Bernie and from BLM to the Floyd rebellion. One rocketed up the ranks of the state, while the other fought its power far more fiercely this time around. One pinned its hopes on the universal programs to be beamed down from the Oval Office, while the others fled the streets under the sign of a single group." And so it is in the wake of this particularly bifurcated moment that I began to attend a series of meetings being organized mostly by New York and New York adjacent people from very different corners of the arts. We have taken the name Arts Union. We are trying to organize a large Democratic membership organization to build solidarity and labor power across all the multivaried or various types of labor and workplaces in the arts industry and in contemporary art. Our goal is to improve our working conditions, but we want to really feel the depth of what that means to end the addiction to philanthrocapitalism and the artwashing of racist and colonial projects that benefit from the discourse of contemporary art. Before you ask another question, I just want to say that, to quote Greg Bordowitz, who once said that "the distinction between art and activism is ideological" and that "all art is political". As I return to my role as an arts worker and curator, I want to continue to ask: How can we organize where we are? How can we change the existing institutions we are participating in to accommodate life? And more specifically, how can curatorial practice become an organizing practice that is not as much about content —although that is important to me— but about the forms that sustain us and our cooperative work.

Well, thank you for the long answer. Actually I am very lucky to have participated in one of the meetings —maybe it was one of the initial meetings of the Coop Fund— when I was in New York and I was really inspired by this idea of sharing funds. We have talked about it a lot and it is nice to be able to share with other practitioners from other parts of the world this common urge to organize. So, thank you for sharing. We've had many discussions before stemming from our active involvement in unionizing efforts and we have both made the same observation that we haven't been trained to work collectively and yet we do.

Yes, I agree. We have not been trained and not only have we not been trained, but in fact the world doesn't make it easy. I am thinking about the book by Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, where she talks about how human subjects have been remade by the neoliberal order into something that she calls homo economicus. It is a world in which self-management reigns supreme and she writes that "today [...] neoliberalization in the Euro-Atlantic world [...] is more often enacted through specific techniques of governance, through best practices and legal tweaks, in short, through 'soft power' drawing on consensus and buy-in, than through violence, dictatorial command or even overt political platforms. Neoliberalism governs as sophisticated common sense" and of course she includes many caveats "the dust-ups" to this order. I think of the crisis here in Greece, instances of political violence and innumerable violence, suppression of organizing and activism, and new forms of populism that have altered the historical trajectory, especially since her writing that in 2015. However, it is true that we have fewer resources than ever to operate non-competitively, to cooperate, to learn to trust one another and so it is for that reason that I am so grateful for the privilege to think through these ideas and have the time to do so here in the residency. Also, in relation to that concept of homo economicus, I have been revisiting Angela Mitropoulos, her book Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia, which is a bit older, from 2012, and her idea of "neocontractualism" emerged, I think it is a related idea: "Neocontractualism emerges in the late twentieth century in the reorganization of wage contracts and the expansion of precarious work. In this, there is a curious reconfiguration of the play between contingency and necessity. Neocontractualism modifies the classical relation between the unbreachable covenant and the breakable contract in the imposition of an infinite contractualism whose emphatic manifestation is the collapse of a punctual distinction between the time of work and that of life". That said, I think there is a specific point of relation in the question you asked, the question of self-organization that framed our time in Athens, which is that for most part, collective organizing goes against common sense. This common sense. Unless it is for the purposes of this neocontractual human capital version of self-command, self-regulating work, working at home. Working collectively, whether understood self-consciously as political organizing, especially in the arts, is then quite frustrating, as we both know. It can be slow, like a pedestrian crossing the street too slowly in front of your car, and time seems to be the issue, and conflict, and I think we will get into some of that more later.

I would like to go back to self-organization. From my personal experience self-organization and alternative forms of organizing are inextricably connected to our desire to work otherwise in more horizontal and less capitalistic structures that foster diversity and inclusivity. But they are also connected to the lack of infrastructure and the infrastructure that we are striving to fill in in order to survive. I know that the question of infrastructure has been recurrent in your practice and especially the way infrastructure conceals or reproduces forms of power. Yesterday, I was reading this book, that you also read as a group, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, and at some point, the writer talks about how capitalism forces us to always be productive and when we aren't being productive, for various reasons, we become disposable. In a sense, capitalism forces us to create the conditions in order to keep ourselves alive. I am thinking about that, that self-organization could also be seen as something that is related to the conditions that we are living, like a symptom of these times. I am interested to know from your work what other kind of infrastructures we can create anew.

Well, there is so much there. I think this idea of life not being valued unless it is productive speaks so much truth. I think a lot about the term disability in relationship to that framing of productivity in life, specifically Marta Russell's work, who I first encountered through two artists, Jason Hirata and Park MacArthur, who introduced me to Marta Russell's work on the social model of disability. She was a Marxist scholar of disability and a disability justice activist. Yes, I also agree that in some way, self-organization or the valorization of self-organization, especially in recent times. In this residency, we were very much interested in concept of care, care collectives, The Care Manifesto is a text that we returned to as well —and you can look at the exhibition programs of any major arts institution in the West especially and see the way in which care has come to the fore, obviously after the pandemic, but even before the pandemic, as kind of "the care turn," or something like this. I think that is incredibly important to what I am thinking about. I guess, when institutions have been so degraded —I guess I have said in neoliberalism already—, but when the institutions of civil society, when the welfare state has been so degraded to care itself has become a radical act and self-care has become a marketable product.

I also wanted to go a bit into this question of infrastructure. It is definitely related. I first started encountering or using this word as an alternative to media and especially when I was in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2018, working with several other curators just after Trump was elected in the US, this kind of the rising tide of what some people have called new forms of fascism. I am not so sure I want to use the term fascism to describe the right wing turn in populist political formations. However, the idea was to look at the kinds of more mundane or everyday forms of power that maybe are not represented in the news cycle, in the spectacle of this right wing populism. But the infrastructures, the media, the built environments, the discourses that privilege some forms of life and reproduce certain ways of living. I think your idea of productivity had a lot to do with that. So, the exhibition we ended up organizing was called Omnipresence, which in a way was a reference to the NYPD's surveillance tactics, which they have trademarked as "omnipresence", and in the text for that exhibition, I wrote that politics takes form in technology and architecture and in the most seemingly banal infrastructure. So, form must be politicized to accommodate life. The works in this exhibition were video works, were sculptures, but they all rotated around a sort of critical tactic or what I identified as a critical tactic of interruption, of taking a form from its circulation in the world and kind of hyperbolizing it or slightly modifying it within the space of a gallery as a kind of an esthetic strategy to disarticulate the normative quality of the way these things circulate in everyday life and to make them into objects that can be seen and identified and read.

In terms of the question that you also raised about what new forms of infrastructures we can create anew, this is a really hard question because it sort of starts to fall into the realm... I think it is an open question, but I am immediately frightened by the idea of design, of designing something, of thinking from a transhistorical position. One of the activities we have been doing in the residency is trying to imagine or speculate on what would be a utopian or ideal institution. And I think we do that and it is an important practice, but it also comes with a great deal of fear of reproducing liberal paradigms, of imagining not from this place of specificity or from context or from the truly limited resources that we have.

In terms of imagining infrastructures anew, I want to think through the term abolition and to abolish infrastructures which are already in place as a tactic, as a theoretical framework and as a goal. Denise Ferreira da Silva, who is a philosopher, says —I think quite earnestly, but also hyperbolically—, that abolition means "the end to the world as we know it." I think we can demand nothing less really and as a question of infrastructure, I think this relates to the ways in which the systems we have are functioning exactly as they were built. This is also something that —in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement it was on posters— was a refrain. It is not something that needs reform. It is not something that needs to be rethought, but it needs to be abolished and we need to reconceive it. So perhaps ideas of care and collectivity and cooperation are the ground for conceiving of something new. To bring it back, for me, it becomes a question of how in the arts we can do this critical work, both of the structures that are outside of the arts, but importantly of the structures that are inside the arts. How can we start with our work in arts and culture as a site for abolition?

Inspired by your reading of "The Care Manifesto", I would say that enacting practices of care I also see it as a form of a new infrastructure that can enable us to imagine or create new structures. I want to go to the next question and ask you more specifically about why did you decide to apply for this call of The School of Infinite Rehearsals, which focuses on self-organization? That is a field that you have been involved with quite a lot. We have discussed that already, so I would be interested to know more specifically what was your urge when applying?

Well, I had trouble, to be honest, deciding between proposing research for this movement of self-organization and then the next session, which is on institutions because having been working at institutions in New York, I think self-organization is always something that I see as happening in my free time. If I identify how do I get paid, how do I reproduce my life, it is through either freelance work for foundations or for museums and some of the strongest relationships I have are within these institutions. I can't help but quote the Andrea Fraser quote, "I am the institution". There is a kind of a provocation in the structure of the residency in separating self-organization and institutions. I think a lot of self-organization happens from within the institution or in relationship to the institution. If we are talking about self-organization to mean some notion of independent, alternative or underground arts scenes or other forms of collectives that exist nearby to the institution, proximity is key. At least in the context that I am working in, funding for small organizations or self-organized artistic endeavors often comes from institutions or from the state or people have jobs and then they use some of their surplus or their free time. These things are always existing in many complicated kinds of relationships. In that dialectical formation of the self-organization and the institution, I asked myself: How can these things be distinguished?, and it became sort of this thought project and ultimately, I proposed self-organization. Primarily because when I separated my research interests and the theoretical questions I am interested in around these two things and their relationship, I also realized what this space could be for was a question of practice, a question of how to practice the kinds of situations that I need to practice in order to be more effective in my work as a curator, as a facilitator, as a member, as an ally, and so on. Self-organization then became a space to ask questions about collective forms of study, care, production, to think about in this space removed from my day-to-day activities and from the regular forms of work I am involved in, my regular labor, to ask about what tires us out, why it is so hard to relate to one another and start with my co-residents practicing those kinds of things.

It was really interesting when you said that "I am self-organizing in my free time", but you actually self-organize, especially with the Arts Union, to redefine the ways that you are working with institutions, which I find really interesting. I think that we all do that in a way. Going back to your research, when you applied, you had an individual research path that you had to propose. I was wondering, where do you see that standing now in relation to your collective work as a group during these seven weeks? I think it is also important to situate this research in a way, because we proposed it as two different parallel research paths under the wider umbrella of governance —the different kinds of governing models that exist within arts and within the wider society. But also each one of you brought a different conceptualization or practice in relation to self-organization, because it is always depending on the context within which you are operating. So obviously, you were bringing a different experience than Harry, who was coming from Indonesia, or Asli, who was coming from Turkey, and so on.

Yes, I think your observation about this notion of free time and the question of my proposed research and how it has changed over the seven weeks, I can answer them together in a way. In my proposal, I quoted Robin Kelley. He said "we continue to build power through our own survival". He is a scholar of labor organizing in black communities in the US. He has written a lot about union efforts in the American South in the early 20th Century and so he is coming from a radical black Marxist tradition. He writes "we continue to build power through our own survival [...] if we think of mutual aid as not just survival pending revolution, but also making the conditions of revolutionary transformation through the formation of a new commons." So I think in there, there is a kind of latent warning in his optimism about mutual aid being a kind of way of refiguring sociality, to prepare the kind of conditions or planting the seed of revolutionary transformation in our world, preparing us, building the infrastructures, as you said, the practices, the knowledge in order to support each other, which kind of exist in this holding pattern through time until moments of radical change are possible or something of this note. I think there is also a warning, which is that mutual aid can work towards radical ends only if it is producing the conditions for radical transformation. So there is this simultaneous potential in this notion of mutual aid, which is that it can also be producing the conditions necessary for the continuation of capital's exploitation and oppression of marginalized people and all people under a system of alienated labor, wage slavery, etc. This is a question that I came to this research with. Over the seven weeks what has naturally emerged from all of our research paths, which are quite different, as you had mentioned, and we are all coming from very different contexts despite being a transnational political discourse which we are all participating in (and we all heard of this residency, for instance) these words self-organization or self-governance we have very different viewpoints and positions related to how they function, or don't, in our own communities. A huge amount of what the seven weeks of research were was a space like a laboratory, a space of collective experimentation in which we ourselves agreed, consented to work together. While some of us were really interested in specific research topics and we were able to pursue those and put them into the group and get feedback on our ways of articulating our own positions and ideas. Ultimately, for me, the most valuable element was these kinds of experiments in decision-making, facilitation, merging our focuses into a kind of project of collectivity, I guess.

Since you brought up the issue of decision-making process, which we all have to face when we work collectively and it is not always an easy task, especially when a group is consisted of different individuals that don't know each other very well, do you want to talk a little bit about that? How did that work for you as a group? How did you end up making decisions and were there any tools that you brought through your own work or that you learned from others?

We had no specific need to be productive and in fact, we set out with the idea that we did not have to produce anything and that is part of the frame of the residency even. We had no specific goals other than to experiment. This was also a bit shocking for me because it is different —I think probably for you too— to how I usually begin, whether it is an exhibition or cooking dinner on a weeknight. You begin with what is there, with a set of constraints, an issue, a problem even. Instead, we just kind of started working together. I am thinking of the Tavistock group, the group relations, this kind of idea that it is just what is in the room. But then we also did, as a part of our research, reach out and had conversations with other groups in Athens to ask them really pointed questions not so much about what the work they do is but what are the forms that allow them to do that work. How do they resolve conflict? This was what we kept returning to. What is conflict? How can it be resolved? Is resolution even what we are after? How do they make decisions? What formal or informal procedures dictate their work? To more specifically answer your question, we also tried lots of experiments ourselves. This was really helpful because it is not the same as being in a tense meeting. The disagreements could be principled because sometimes it was about what restaurant we wanted to go, something stupid like this. So we tried these experiments sociocracy, modified consensus, even dictatorial rule sometimes. We took the time to know each other. We talked things through or sometimes we tried cooking meals without talking at all.

I remember that!

We practiced disagreements and sometimes became very exhausted, but basically it was about highlighting different types of procedures, different types of process and how they worked. Actually only once did we vote, early on, when I was quite frustrated with how long a conversation was going on. I said, "do we all agree to continue with this idea?", and I said, "vote". That was interesting because there were only six of us. Margarita Pita, one of the residents, is a trained legal negotiator, and so she brought a lot of expertise in different negotiation techniques, like how to get them to give you a free bottle of wine when you are buying wine. We tried time-limitation for speaking. This was one thing I brought to the table, which came out of facilitating over Zoom so much, this tendency towards monologue, which is less so in a physical room. If you only have one minute to speak, how does that change what you say and how can we be more productive with that? Just to try things out using a group as a place to make mistakes, test different structures, practice disagreement, so that when there is significant conflict with gravity, with trauma, with violence in communication, how can you have the tools and practice to change the flow of a conversation to accommodate disagreement and to allow issues to come forward in ways that strengthen a collective rather than tearing it apart?

Interesting word that you chose the collective, because I would say that you managed to build an ephemeral collective while being here and my next question is at what point does something turn into a collective instead of being a group?

One answer that comes to mind is the notion of a shared intention or a shared goal and a shared need. I know I have used the word collective here many times and I think I have also been pretty imprecise in alternating between words, like collective and cooperation, collaboration and cooperation. I don't necessarily have a specific definition that at this point I am adhering to except to say that I am much more likely to use a term like cooperation than collective. I think collectivity seems to describe a situation of reliance and mutual interests, but also membership, but a different form of membership than a cooperative. A cooperative seems to be less social. I am much more likely to use "cooperative" because I think it has an economic valence, whereas collective seems to me to have more relation to a type of sociality, a type of a club even. I find myself using words like cooperative because of my interest in sort of this question of homo economicus, on imagining structures for intentional and political structures for justice, for liberatory work that comes from a recognition of our reliance on others and a desire to work together.

We are almost at the end of our discussion today, but I have a couple of more questions for you. I was reading your exhibition text for 'Omnipresence' and I stumbled upon this part where you talk about Kafka's The Castle, "the narrator slyly indicates that K's difficulties seem 'as if' the result of some obscure intention to keep him at bay. More than a conspiracy of the aloof, often slumbering castle officials or the local rustics. It seems to be the arrangement of the road, the peculiarities of the village's map, the perspective of the castle at a distance and the snow's resistance to K's belabored steps that drive and exhausts his desire." And later on, you argue that "the instrumentality of everyday actions and events are emphasized through the interruption of their function". For some reason, when I was reading this part, I immediately thought about your trip to Pelion, the time that you got lost in the middle of the night, your mushroom picking inside the woods, and so on.

Thank you for quoting that piece. I am a huge Kafka fan and Kafka often appears in my writing. I think it is a hilarious comparison to compare our wonderfully beautiful adventure together to Pelion to poor K who can't seem to find anything at all except for misfortune in the village.

I think it was this part of the interruption of the daily practices that brought the trip to my mind.

Absolutely, and I think that for sure, to have the space... Our reason for going on this trip in Nuno's van to Pelion was to deepen our feeling of sharing time together and to work together in a different environment. To explore how a change in surroundings would change the texture of our relation in our conversations. And it did. I think getting lost —and I know this is an interest of yours, Myrto—, but getting lost is something that is incredibly important to seeing differently.

Like the day that I made you get lost in the national park.

I would like to say that I did not get lost despite my best efforts. We did have one misadventure on our adventure, which was to get lost in a small town near Larissa late into the evening, searching for a booking we had made on the internet and it is kind of an awareness that comes from the interruption of the smooth functioning of this online software booking application to realize the place that you are looking for does not actually even exist, that there is this latent potential of the scam, the paranoia. In a way, I do think it relates to Kafka and how our scenic, beautiful adventure to this part of Greece I never knew about was still part of this kind of network of relationships of everyday life today.

Zoey, before we close I would like to ask you what's next for you?

That's a good question. I will return to New York where I will continue working on the Arts Union. I am also researching in the archives of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, which is a huge part of my work. I am also co-organizer of a project called the Center for Experimental Lectures with my collaborator, Gordon Hall, and you can go to experimentallectures.org, where there is an archive of all our past events. We have a number of events upcoming in 2022 as well as I'm working on a series of screenings and events dealing with the transformation of education and the classroom. Specifically important is the return to in-person learning after the pandemic, in the wake of the pandemic, a kind of inflection point for education. Think of distance learning and the return to in-person learning, politicizing this kind of media situation of the classroom, the privatization of education, the platformization of education in terms of the terror of these kinds of things, as well as the latent potentials for radical transformation of education. I have those two things upcoming.

Zoey, thank you so much for joining me today, for sharing your thoughts and for spreading your collective spirit and energy in this room. Thank you!

Thank you so much Myrto!

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more Conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.