All too often as anarchists in the U.S. we look to places like Oakland or New York for cues of how to get it done. The problem with this being that most of us don’t live in anarchist-disney world, where anything is possible and everything is flammable, and we couldn’t afford the rents in Oakland anyway.
This tour features friends from Denver, Colorado and Richmond, Virginia coming to your town to discuss what it looks like for anarchists outside those spaces with longstanding institutional left bases. We think there is a lot to learn from the less “glamorous,” towns and small cities where anarchists continue fighting in spite of it all.
Sharing our experiences of building, failing, rebuilding, fucking it up and sometimes winning, we hope to strike up conversations in your towns with your friends. Let’s talk community defense work, anti-police struggles, combating gentrification warfare, how not to let the liberals get us down and more.
The Spaces Between project and tour kicks off in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on February 18th and will be continuing on to eight other towns in the so-called United States.
Also, the first installment of a series of interviews is complete and available for download here. The zine features interviews with people who are currently living in or once have lived in those places where nothing feels flammable and everything feels impossible. These kids aren’t living in anarchist Disney land. Instead, they’re living in the places where anarchists are struggling along in what can best be described as the project of anarchy. It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t meme ready. It can feel isolated. It is tireless and unrelenting nevertheless.
As this project continues there will be further interviews with anarchists in both the U.S. and Canada as well as essays. You can keep updated with release dates and future tour dates at spacesbetweentour.wordpress.com.
We are still accepting both interview participants and essay submissions through June 2016. You can hit us up at thespacesbetween@riseup.net for more information.
This Winter tour will be in the following cities, so check the website or email us for exact details:
February 18th, Chapel Hill, NC
February 21st, Richmond, VA
February 22nd, Philadelphia, PA
February 24th, Pittsburgh, PA
February 27th, Brooklyn, New York
February 29th, Bloomington, IN
March 2nd, Chicago, IL
March 3rd, Milwaukee, WI
March 5th, Minneapolis, MN
EDITORIAL from zine:
What you will find tucked in these pages is not a completion, but a beginning. This project, The Spaces Between, was born out of conversations that have happened on porches, in bedrooms, on long bus rides, in meetings, through the intermediaries of glowing screens or telephones. It was born out of watching our far away friends burn it down and wonder when we might get that taste of residual accelerant on our own hands as they touched our lips at the end of a long night in the streets. But, we don’t live in anarchist disney world. We live in those places where nothing feels flammable and everything can feel impossible. We live in the those places where we are truly engaged in what can best be described as the project of anarchy. Often there is no Left to fall back on in these places. Or maybe there is a Left, acting as the thorn in the proverbial side and the wet blanket on the flames. For so many of us there is no radical lawyer on the other end of your jail call. There are just your friends who answer the call and the first words are an earnest and heartfelt “are you fucking okay?” We’ve got us. We’ve got us in goddamn spades.
All the poetry of it aside, we exist and struggle in places that are far too often left out of the larger conversation. Every now and then our stories make it out, but we work to make that happen. Our stories aren’t often asked after. What does the project of anarchy look like in the rural places, the borderlands, the small cities, or the isolated regions? The truth that we all know, all of us out here in between, is that is looks pretty damn different.
If we had to state goals for The Spaces Between project, one major one would be to center the rest of us, even if just for a moment, in the larger conversation. To carve out a place where our stories are at the center, however un-spectacular that they may be. That our tales would be just as cherished as the meme-ready images that flood out of the so-called anarchist strongholds on May Day or when some rupture of the social order occurs. That our tirelessness (or tired-ness) would be seen, duly noted.
Another major goal of this project is to facilitate connection between these places. In reading the following interviews there are common threads as much as there are stark differences. There arethings that connect us to one another’s contexts as much as there are the things that might serve to disconnect us. Consider this first installment (because there are more coming!) an invitation to converse, to strategize, to network, to build alongside and to share in both our joys and miseries. Come commiserate with us! Because, if your front porch is anything like our front porch, after the commiseration comes the “how do we do this better? together.” After the sharing of the fuck up’s come the magical sparks that keep us
continuing on in the project of anarchy. Here are some tales of fucking it up, trying again, failing, losing
and sometimes winning. We’re humbled to share them.
– the kids who never fucking left
Read the rest here:
https://spacesbetweentour.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/downloadable-pdf-of-t…