Making Kin - A conversation with Amanda Vincelli

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 the ways of being and working together.

Today I am in conversation with Amanda Vincelli, a cultural organizer based in Montreal. Using art as a tool for personal, social and economic transformation, Amanda has been developing accessible public programing and collaborative learning initiatives through a practice of commoning and making kin. Amanda is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VII with a collective research focus on the notion of community economies. In this conversation, we draw from her experience in community organizing and in non-monetary exchange initiatives to discuss about systems of cooperation and care.

Amanda, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you.

It is great to have you here today and thanks for joining me. I would like to start this conversation by discussing a little bit about your practice. Over the past decade you have developed a rather multivalent practice, I would say. Starting off with health science, you then moved to strategic design, media and photography and started to pursue your own artistic practice along with your active engagement with cultural organizations and community programing more broadly. When did you see yourself moving towards a more community based practice?

Well, first, I would say that I have always been a very, like you say, a people person. So I have always loved collaborating and that is because I think that throughout collaborations, whether it is a positive or less positive experience, they always truly change me and my perspective. I have also always been fascinated by representations of the body and also health, more specifically —what we consider as healthy and unhealthy and how we go about taking care of ourselves and each other. These questions still form the basis of all my work and practice. Also, all of these tendencies, I think, have an origin in the fact that my mom works in medicine, but also from being a dancer growing up and being part of a dance team and later a cheerleading team.

In general, I think that it is really this deep fascination with people that also drew me to photography from a very young age. I am also an introvert. So I think that photography has been a way for me to connect with different people in an intimate, but also in a sort of safe way. I think I really saw photography as a means to create a sort of container for building relationships, new relationships. At least that is really how I tried to approach every shoot —photography shoot. I was always very concerned with creating an environment where the subject, but also myself, would feel as comfortable as possible to be ourselves, to be vulnerable with each other, and to be fully present in the space together. I always put a lot of time and care in creating a space. I think that was really the most important aspect of doing photography for me. Weirdly, I also found that it was the only way I could create good images —not just good images, but to create a representation that also felt right. So when I reflect back on my time working in photography, I would say that it is really during this period that I developed organizing skills. Because to me, organizing is a similar experience in the sense that it has everything to do with putting a lot of care in creating a container to foster connection, to make people feel safe, to be vulnerable with each other and to fully express themselves.

I think organizing is really about facilitating, holding and reflecting all the complexity that emerged in that space of connection. So during my last year living in New York, I also started organizing a film club with a couple of friends. It was an experiment in decentralizing curation, in the sense that people who attended the screenings volunteered to create the following screenings. So there were only a few guidelines and no overarching themes. At the beginning of each screening, the curator was asked to propose two films and express their emotional connection to them —why they believe they were important for people to watch these films. And then, the guests were invited to vote on the films that were proposed. My role was to coordinate the screenings, securing what was needed to make it happen, like equipment, space, etc., and for communicating about the events. So getting people to come. So here too, I was responsible for the container and the content was really generated through a collaborative process with everyone that was participating.

So it is this developing art practice that brought me to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in Photo and Media and it was there that I was introduced to a few European men who designed a beautiful space in downtown L.A. and they had the intention to create a space for collaborations and experimentation among multidisciplinary creatives. Initially, I personally used the space to organize more screenings like the ones in New York and that evolved into creating experimental dinners in collaboration with different artists. I also shot my own films there using the space. So through all these experiences of organizing the space, I noticed how it was mostly used by L.A. transplants, like me, and I became really concerned, but also interested in making it more accessible to locals and generally to make it more open and accessible. So, basically, I wanted to common the space so that it could be used by a range of cultural workers and community organizers in L.A., as well as find ways to create opportunities for these people encountering each other and for potential future collaborations. We talked to a lot of different people with relevant practices in order to understand better what was needed locally and from everything that we heard, we developed the organization and its programs. So Navel was really built through a very iterative process, talking to people, understanding what was needed. I would say that I began to devote myself more fully to community based practice through building Navel. Through my experiences organizing and collaborating at Navel I came many times face to face with my own limitations and blind spots, particularly when trying to change the structure to a more cooperative one. So I would say this was a reflection of my own lack of experience with organizing and in some moments a lack of awareness of my own positioning in this work. But I also think it was just a reflection of what happens when you push yourself outside of your comfort zone and you work in a space that is diverse, where different perspectives collide. So this is what pushed me to investigate this further by pursuing studies in community economic development in Montreal. It was a way to also learn more about the rich history of cooperatives and cooperative education in Quebec.

Thank you for walking us through your life path, which sounds very exciting, but also very organic —the way that you moved from one field to another. I think that was my intention when I asked you this question to reveal how the relationships that you build over time moved you from one place to another. But I would like to go back to Navel a little bit. You mentioned that there were a lot of challenges, your lack of organizing in the beginning, and as part of Navel, you supported and co-developed numerous community based cultural programs. What I'm thinking is that bringing a community together is one thing, but in order for us to build more equitable structures that foster community ownership and participation, we should also look into our own governance structures and the ways that we organize our work. I know that this has been a keen interest of yours, and I would like to ask you, what kind of structures and systems of sharing did you experiment with towards that direction?

Yeah. One of the main programs I created at Navel is called Assemblies and it responded to this specifically —the question you are asking around how to experiment with different governance structures. So it really emerged from that desire to engage more people in the community, beyond the team, in this process of thinking through how to cultivate a more equitable and healthier culture within the organization and within the community, essentially. So the aim was to create a space to practice facilitative and collaborative leadership as well. "Assemblies" was created as a community-led platform for peer learning, for collaborative research and creation that is also grounded in social and environmental justice. The idea was also to use "Assemblies" as a space where the Navel team would host at least one group every round to investigate how the governance of the project could be more equitable. That is not exactly what happened, because we became too busy with running "Assemblies", but in general, Navel as a project was created with the intention to be a sort of resource center for cultural workers and anyone who related, a place to share knowledge and resources and simply to be inspired to collaborate. So the goal was to create a cultural and community space that is welcoming, that invites people to use their creativity and together to imagine an attempt to actualize a more just world. So Navel is basically a project invested in commoning in the sense that its focus is on bringing diverse people together to resist oppressive systems like capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, and to do that by creating our own economy by means of sharing more, uplifting each other, deprivatizing spaces and redistributing resources. So there were other programs with similar aims than "Assemblies". For example, we created a space for skill sharing where community members were invited to host participatory workshops for specific skills development. We also created another program called WYD? —that stands for "what's you are doing?"— and that was about sharing work in progress and to receive feedback from different community members. The focus of all these programs was always on learning, sharing and experimenting together.

Before leaving Navel, I also formed a working group to look at how we could create more systems for sharing resources, a sort of time bank that isn't one-to-one, with equity as its core principle. Because of the pandemic, we weren't able to focus on developing the project at the time, but personally, I have kept collaborating with one of the members of this group. His name is Nicolas Grenier. He is an artist as well and he was part of the Navel Collective and a participant member of the "Assemblies" on the commons. Our project is called Common Pool. It is a name that comes from a book of Elinor Ostrom on governing the commons, which we read in the assembly. With "Common pool" our goal is to develop a flexible, non-monetary framework and tool to be used by a network of communities of practice for exchanging goods, services and resources. To develop this framework, we are looking at how we can combine the flexibility of the gift economy, the practicality and accountability of time banking and the civic engagement involved in the practice of commoning. So our hope is to create a sort of toolkit basically that could be used and adapted by different communities or groups of people according to their specific needs and contexts and at the same time, a system as practical as money in the sense that it would remain somewhat compatible across all participating communities. It is a really, really ambitious project and it is difficult to imagine it working on a large scale. We are also still in the research phase and looking at different governance models that would make sense. Personally, I am very interested in the governance model of indigenous solidarity funds in the US, which I studied last year. Those governance models, I refer to them as solidarity-based governance model. In the case of the indigenous solidarity funds, a group of settlers are doing the fundraising and the work following the leadership of a particular indigenous group. But in the case of "Common Pool", it is really conceived in a way that it will accommodate whichever structures make most sense for each group and their specific purposes. So there will be no one way to use it, because we really think that governance is an ever-evolving process. It is not fixed. It is really a practice that is context specific. So my whole practice is about that and all the different projects that I am involved with are just different strategies.

I am glad that you are bringing the example of the "Common Pool", because I think that in order for us to practice a different economy, a thing that we have to do is also to collectively reconceptualize the notion of value. I am wondering from your experience with non-monetary exchange initiatives and alternative currencies, how can a community generate a different conception of value?

So, I think to decenter money as the main tool and violent tool for valuing and ascribing value to things is the main goal of a project like "Common Pool". But more and more, I actually personally think that "Common Pool" needs to account for money in some way and not be strictly non-monetary. Not a strictly non-monetary framework. But through all my projects and community engagement, it is fundamentally always about shifting what values and priorities are centered —basically to move from centering profit, endless growth and individualism, to centering corporation and the welfare of all people and the planet. And as Gibson-Graham put it, it is about an ongoing process of negotiating how to survive well together. So it always starts with what values are centered. Then I think it is about how do you put these values in practice by balancing individual and group needs while accounting for nonhumans and the environment. So of course that means dealing with all the contradictions that will inevitably arise is a big part of it. Specifically because this kind of practice goes against how a majority of us have been socialized.

But I also wanted to share that during the residency we had the chance to exchange with someone living in and working with Quilombos in Brazil and I was really inspired by the principles behind the barter system that exist between the Quilombos. What is interesting is that equity is really built in their system. So exchanges are not one-to-one, but they are a need based. For example, if I have a household of three and you (have one) of seven, I will give you what you need for seven people and you will give me what I need for three. It is not about creating an equal exchange, but one that responds to the need of each party. So this is for sure something that we are striving to create with the "Common Pool" tool framework. It is really about making sure we account for the fact that we don't have all the same needs and that we live in a deeply unequal society where we don't have all the same access. In Montreal as well, I am involved with a citizen led local currency project called Îlot. It is a project that was already launched and run in 2018, but it was abandoned and the group I am a part of is trying to relaunch it this year. That project aims to engage citizens in creating and managing a currency alternative to the dollar, in our case, that will support and reward eco-responsible values and practices in specific neighborhoods and more broadly in Montreal. So the goal of the project is to relocalize the economy, to counter speculative financial systems and bring more proximity to exchanges. The project is in a sort of beta phase. So it's a bit difficult to speak about it right now, but I think overall what's really valuable about it is that it will connect different actors —citizens and local businesses—, which are all trying to build alternatives to source locally, to reduce their footprint, to run more democratically and more equitably and through the project another goal is really to foster peer learning within the structure and to help build the grounds for broader mobilization against harmful environmental and social policies.

Amanda, we have mentioned a lot the term "community" in our conversation, but what actually makes a community?

That is the ultimate question, but I actually have a very simple and short answer for that. More broadly, community to me is about kinship. It is about acknowledging our interconnectedness with all beings, sentient and non sentient and it is the process of cultivating relations with each other and the environment in a way that honor that. More simply, a community is, I think, generally understood —and as I understand it—, a group of people who has something in common. It could be cultural, it could be a neighborhood, for example, but it can also be a group who come together more intentionally around a set of values and/or a shared purpose.

That brings me to the next question, which has to do about your Movement group as part of The School of Infinite Rehearsals, where you had to create together this space of collective negotiation driven by a common theme. I would say that as a group, you indeed formed a temporary community economy by managing to address each other's needs and desires and I am curious to know, how did you build this common ground together?

I think we built common ground mainly by prioritizing getting to know each other first, putting the focus on the relationships we were building with one another over any particular outcome or project. So we had at the beginning, many brainstorm —actually throughout—, many brainstorm and mapping sessions within which we were mainly interested in better understanding what was our respective frame of reference and experiences as it pertains to community economies. So we wanted to see where do we converge? Where do we diverge? What are we each most interested in exploring together as well as the areas where we could learn from one another? We were also interested in exploring what we would do with our shared time, but also with our collective budget and try to find where we aligned and where we didn't. So our time really became about accommodating all of our interests, but within the constraints of the residency. That space of negotiating that to me has a lot to do with my own understanding of what community economies are in practice. So, as for our group, we ended up splitting our time between engaging in open ended discussions that were grounded in theory or specific experiences we had. For example, we would read texts together, watch a film, or things like that. But we also made time for discussing the different possibilities for our collective project, as well as time for exchanging knowledge and skills and really to support each other with our respective projects and needs that we had exchanged about. To give another example, we identified through our discussions that prioritizing pleasure in collaborative work was really important to all of us, but strangely or surprisingly or not, it really wasn't as easy as it sounds to put it in practice throughout our time together in the residency.

So the collective budget actually is the poisoned gift, as one could say, in every collective, in every movement group that has come to Onassis AiR so far. And it's interesting to observe the different decision making processes that each group adopts and where that leads you. I know that you were thinking a lot about something to leave back to the community of Onassis AiR, meaning something that the community could use in the future and I am thinking of it as a form of a gift. I am curious to know whether the notion of affective debt fits somehow into your collective discussion.

Actually, it permeated throughout all of our discussions —this idea of the debt, the affective dept that we experience when we are engaged in some form of gifting and that is a reason why I, at some point, proposed that we read a text I had read in the program I did on community economic development. It is a text by David Graeber. It really is a text about that, specifically about the fact that there is always some form of currency in gifting that is that affective dept. Actually it was interesting to read it towards the end of the residency because we realized that a lot of the other texts we read or a lot of the discussions we had or the film that we watched that was proposed by Felipe —it is called Whisky— really played with that notion of the debt, the affective debt when we are gifting. So the fact that there is some form of currency involved that is non-monetary, but still a currency. I chose that text because in it Graeber speaks of three different forms of organization, essentially, that permeates any group. One is communism, but what he means by communism is mutual aid, solidarity, and he speaks of exchanges and hierarchy. His premise is that in any group, there are always these three forms that exist, these three forms of relating to one another that coexist at the same time. And there isn't any main concluding arguments besides that: that there is a currency involved in gifting that is this affective debt and that it is negotiated through these three forms of organizing in groups.

Amanda we are reaching the end of our discussion, but I am wondering whether you witnessed any examples of community economies during these seven weeks.

I really like this question because it allows me to speak to, again, my understanding of community economies that is really grounded in the ideas of Gibson-Graham. Essentially what Gibson-Graham speak to is the fact that community economies are all around us all the time and that we are always constantly engaging in them and therefore it is difficult to bring up one. I mean, I guess it's not difficult, but there are endless examples of community economies and the way we organize with one another. And I think making them more visible was part of the process. But there is one example that is really dear to me because it really has left an imprint, and I think it will influence how I do projects, any project in the future. It is the solidarity kindergarten we visited in Thessaloniki, called Little Tree. Their whole idea is how to raise children as commoners. They have a beautiful space on this hill and the kids play outdoors most of the time. There are lots of art tools and the education is really based on a lot of Montessori pedagogical frameworks, but the kids really are leading and involved in the decision making processes. So that was very inspiring. I wish I went to this kindergarten or a school like that. But there was one principle that I think is really core to how they operate, and I would like to center that principle in my future project, which is that they collectivize individual problems. For example, if a parent can't pay to bring their child to the kindergarten, then the children can, of course, go without paying, but then there is, of course, a lack of funds that occur and that is for the group —all the parents that are involved— to figure out how to raise that money collectively to cover the costs of the child attending the kindergarten.

I also wish I attended that kindergarten and I wish we had more of these examples because, you know, starting from such a small or a little age and growing up with these principles could actually make this social transformation that we are looking for. But we have to close this discussion today and before we do so, I have one last question. I am curious to know now that you are going back to Montréal, what's next for you?

So one project that I am really excited to develop is a sort of residency program, although I don't like to call it that. I call it a nature retreat and it is specifically geared towards, broadly speaking, "care workers", but that includes community workers, that involves people who literally work in care work, but also includes socially engaged cultural workers and artists. So I am really hoping to develop that in the surrounding region of Montreal and to collaborate with existing spaces that would be willing to host people for a duration of time probably in the summer months, because it is much nicer in Montreal in the summer months. The idea is also that it would be a fully subsidized program and that is really important. It is really going to be about respite, about taking time to resource and to be either alone or with other people. So I want to build it in a way where people can choose to go to retreat, really, and have some sort of time for themselves or as a time to connect with other people that maybe are working towards social transformation, but in a different way and that can be inspiring to share with one another in that space.

Well, as a cultural worker, I am really looking forward for you to make this happen and I would like to visit that. It was wonderful speaking with you today, Amanda. Thank you so much for sharing.

Thank you.

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 this series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.