After Mataroa Summer Meeting
2013, Ikaria
Islands are not simply physical
entities that constitute themselves as geographical forms or communities. Islands
are the place in our imagination of cross-narratives, a common rhizomatic
practice of archipelago that invites infinitive multiplicities. Borders
disappears, representation multiplies and historical process of geographical
transformations becomes a metaphor. Also, Islands are the metaphors of escape
from meta-texts, a place for trans-local thinking and their maps are the
failures of representation. As Deleuze writes on islands: "Islands are
either from before human or for after human".
Mataroa Summer Meeting: Against Crisis, For The Commons: Towards a
New Mediterranean (14-18 July 2013) took place in the island of Ikaria in
Aegean Sea. Mataroa Initiative, which
takes its reference title from The Mataroa Ship (that took some radical
thinkers from Greece to Italy, France in 1945 before Greek Civil War); is seeking
for a common political imagination and research of solidarity practices in
Mediterranean. The meeting was contributed by several social sciences
researchers from different backgrounds and experiences along the Mediterranean
in the island of Ikaria.
Why Mediterranean geographies,
cities, societies and communities provides over hundreds years common life and
interaction? How nation-state structures and border conflict affected the
Mediterranean communities and cultures? What has been last nowadays from our
common practice and where we are leading to within political uprising? How
recent forensic analysis reveals new formats of controls of territories in
Mediterranean? Except my own understanding of these questions regarding this
meeting; the meeting was aiming to discuss solidarity formats against crisis,
meaning and practices of the commons and future possibilities of
trans-localities.
In my opinion, the question of
how spaces under exceptional conditions in Mediterranean geographies function
as a "common knowledge" and a practice of commoning is important
to consider? I think the meaning of “commons” is not what we own or
share or produce as property, ownership, economic means and accumulation but
‘ways of common-ing’, a shared practice of everyday life in pursing social
justice. Furthermore, according to De Angelis’s clarification: “Commons are a
means of establishing a new political discourse that builds on and helps to
articulate the many existing, often minor struggles, and recognizes their power
to overcome capitalist society”. He defines three notions of commons in order
to explain that the commons are not simply the resources that we share but a
way of commoning: common pool/non-commodified means, communities and the act of
it “to common” (the social process of commoning). Also today, food
sociologist/activist Raj Patel focuses on how we define commons: “Commons is
about how we manage resources together”. His argument is not only about
managing and sustaining the food share but also about how food movements should
be in solidarity with other movements. “Commons” is not a simple concept about
collective share or ownership. It has a difficult relation within a defined
community and public. Negotiation and the conflict of values are basic in such
practices. Claiming the commons based on the idea of collective use of property
would not be the practice of collective claim of commons. As Stavros Stravrides
argues rather than affirmation of a share, a ground of negotiation is more
important: “Conceptualizing commons on the basis of the public, however, does
not focus on similarities or commonalities but on the very differences between
people that can possibly meet on a purposefully instituted common ground. We
have to establish a ground of negotiation rather than a ground of affirmation
of what is shared’. In claiming commons, the ethics of
hospitality/encounter/face is immanent. Therefore, the unconditionality based
on the diverse narratives of communities and memories, that are in becoming in
such territories, which are actually inhabited by heterogeneous identities. This
shifting uncanny process in in-between territories along Mediterranean commoning
could be a practice of a collective gesture, of an archive.
Civil war, military control,
cross-migration, social conflict, water/food control and urban uprising are
also leads to forensic base analysis, which is called forensic research pursued
basically by Eyal Weizman in his recent books (The Least of All Possible Evils
and Forensic Architecture) and studies. This methodology is vital in this
research process. Could Mataroa as a research initiative be function itself as
a site of an alternative methodology? An event-based, research-based archiving
practice of archeology of current? A knowledge production of a performative
site? In conclusion, is it possible to imagine the Mataroa trans-local research
towards and on a new archipelago of narratives and actions?
Experiencing the island of Ikaria
was a total metaphor for discussing common topics and issues for further action
on the new Mediterranean as a metaphor of archipelagos of political
imaginations. Going back to Deleuze on islands: “Some islands drifted away from
the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other
islands originated in the ocean, but the
island is also the origin, radical and absolute.”
Further info of Mataroa 2013
Ikaria summer meeting papers and presentations could be found here: http://mataroa2013.wordpress.com/videos-photos-publications/book-of-abstracts
Pelin Tan, August 2013 - Chios/İzmir