Woodbine: Communion
Communion, An Introduction
By Woodbine
This spring a series of wildfires spread throughout Canada, working its way through all of the country’s provinces. By June smoke from the fires had reached us here in New York City, and for a few days the city’s air quality was measured as being the worst in the world. A haze of dark orange skies created a new toxic horizon, giving New York its worst air since the 60s. Flights in and out of the city were canceled, schools were closed, performances and sporting events were postponed. It was designated as hazardous to leave your house, and we were once again asked to wear masks and stay indoors. As the summer continued, smoke spread throughout the country, just the latest disaster we’ve had to learn to understand, adapt to, and endure.
Over the last three years, since Covid arrived in New York – in our bodies, and in the air we breathe – many of our friends and neighbors have become ever more lonely, isolated, shut-in, and online. The city has become even more expensive, competitive, and uncaring. Yet on the other side of this physical and psychic deterioration, there are histories: of immigrant self-organization and mutual aid, of ecstatic religious separatists, of conspiratorial criminality, of the Catholic Worker, of artists against work, of the Black Panthers’ survival programs, of worker-owned housing developments, of the Beats and hippies, of women’s consciousness raising and childcare cooperatives, of the Motherfuckers, of punk squatters and hacker ecologists, and of Woodbine.
We have to constantly repeat ourselves, to explain, to justify – how we think, how we compose ourselves, how we relate to our histories, and how we develop and share the sensible common of living together. Either we submit to the dissociative logic of the web, or we turn to forms of defending embodied life. The now-crises are the communal context within which we try to communicate, to feel, to come together. Woodbine is approaching its 10th anniversary, and our publisher Autonomedia is celebrating its 40th. We’ve lived through many autonomies in New York, weaving threads of experimentation from around the world. We’ve tried to build the infrastructure and relationships to sustain ourselves and others, through sharing a space, food, ideas, art, skills, and tools. To share and defend a dwelling together.
As Ursula Le Guin reminds us in her “Carrier Bag Theory” of human evolution, the satchel which collected wild oats was just as important to human survival as the spear which hunters brought on their hunt. Defending the earth, a community, beliefs, means also carrying with us memories, skills, and strategies. As Donna Harraway says, “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.”
The theme for this issue, Belief and the Communal, was a question to ourselves – not just a documentation of who and what we are, but a critical consideration of who we would like to be. To speak of belief carries with it the sense not just of logic but of faith. History tells us that successful experiments in communal life often have an organizing belief. They have a shared faith. But when our structures of life are oriented around the instrumental and utilitarian, the non-religious and secular, how can we re-enchant the world, the city, each other? How can we mobilize networks of newly binding enchantments for the next epoch of societal re-organization? For us this question touches on the old anarchist framework of free association, of the voluntary assembly of individuals. Needed ever-more in a metropolis like New York, but ever more rare and fleeting. It touches on the question of desire, to gather outside of work, outside of the market, to cultivate a generosity of thought and spirit, of time and attention.
In this second issue of The Reservoir we present original art, comics, essays, fiction, illustrations, interviews, letters, photography, poetry, transcripts, and translations from more than 30 contributors. Kazembe Balagun revisits George Jackson’s theorization of the commune in light of the contemporary Black urban periphery; Joscelyn Jurich looks back at the Llano Del Rio communes of California and Louisiana; Virgil Addison gives an anarchist history of the geodesic domes of the Back to the Land Movement; and Assia Turquier-Zauberman re-thinks the historical memory of the Lebanese Civil War through Druze reincarnation and archival invention. We publish a new translation of a 1977 interview between Felix Guattari and Jean Oury on the La Borde clinic; a conversation with Geert Lovink; and a transcript from Elizabeth Povinelli’s 2015 visit to Woodbine.
We’ve also decided to publish a handful of archival materials representing historic attempts at putting life in common. We’ve included a platform document from the Shakers, one of the first attempts at communism in colonial America, and one that inspired many who followed. There’s Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall’s bulletin “The Ganienkeh Indian Project”, which follows an armed group from the Mohawk Warrior Society re-occupying a piece of land in upstate New York in 1974, where they remain today. There’s a 1973 letter from Murray Bookchin, offering his view of the rise and fall of communal life on the Lower East Side. And the issue concludes with M.C. Richards’ 1964 reflection on the first decade of life at Gate Hill in Rockland County, where a group of artists relocated in the aftermath of their experiments at Black Mountain College.
As Woodbine approaches its own first decade, this wide-ranging survey is not meant to be a definitive statement, but offers a gathering of possibilities.
–Editors
Order The Reservoir: Communion from Autonomedia: https://autonomedia.org/product/reservoir-communion/
