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LUDIC NOMAD ENCAMPMENTS

by Sasha K.

It's scrambled codes with toast for breakfast again. You put on your neck-tie, your lingerie and your Alf mask and jump in the public fountain, barking with obscene glee. Your friends are playing two trumpets and a saxaphone all around the university square in total cacophany. Others are blending into the crowds of passersby only to break off into enticingley strange and silly movements frolicking and squirming and speaking in tongues. It's a chock to the system of the socius. It's a festival of defiance against the totality of habitual reality. A perplexing awakening of wonder. You make off with a few new friends who are sick of the same old shit and are in tune with the fun behind your noise. Over to the housing co-op where you can get to know each other better over more (anti)music, flying couch cushion ruckus and group showers. After a night like this it is inconceivable that anyone would go to work in the morning, so you put on business suits and resolve to go on a Gardeners Against the Work Ethic Association canvassing mission to find someone willing to have their lawn ripped up for a free garden. It's a seductive campaign for a general strike in disguise: once there are gardens all over and free feasts become the rule, people will stop paying rent, throw out the money system and turn this into a real party town!

Now who could sustain such lunatic ideas and actions, except a being who hasn't been told what to think or do in any way - long enough to get some breathing space for their dreams. One who's managed to carve out a psychically criminal cavern in which to make a liberated zone where fears can be faced and passed through to ecstacy, where the risk and daring required for adventures in subversive looniness can be nurtured.

Let's call this liberated zone, simply, space. Spaces must be ever-uniquely improvised and are nourished by an interplay with departures and movement. The anxiety-stricken, oedipalized city, heavily policed and peopled by a self-policing populace, inevitably leads to helpless doldrums and is best left for more wild areas. A patch of woods, a small clearing for a garden, some good friends and a swimming hole could be the perfect mix. Put together a network of such places around the country or the world, and you have a recipe for a movement/space interplay with potentially explosive possibilities.

Such a network is already in the making, quietly gathering momentum in the fissures of sedentary survival. And some of us are considering creating such a space in connection with Dreamtime, an experimental micro-village in rural Wisconsin. By next spring we could be exploring the area extensively, acquiring some forested land, and generally setting up a base for warm weather creative revelry.

We want a place to practice the arts of living in delerium, of eroticizing everyday life; a life of situations created for all the intensity that life could and should have. As the Radical Faeiries cut wood in drag, we will play with what we can become, experimenting with consciousness as we play with conventional ways of approaching all activities. Toward this end, we propose to demolish any policy or attitude of "work requirements" by unseparating necessities from enjoyable passtimes. Don't do it if you don't want to! If there is some mental task that would enhance our situation, let us delight in doing it together as some strange game. Labour of love or no labour at all!

In the years to come, more trees and low-maintenance perennials could be planted, additional shelters, car art gardens out of dead police cars, etc., could make this a hospitable place year- round - feuled by different people and energies at different times. Part of this vision is to help make Dreamtime Village a vibrant place for the long-term. Located in a mostly abandoned farm town, with an old school building, post office, hotel, etc., Dreamtime has the potential to be a thriving place for cultural improvisation if it continues to be re-inhabited by cretive people. We look forward to participating in the village in our own schizo-communitarian way: meaning an anti-regimentalist transcendence of hierarchy, leadership, and traditional collectivist organisation; to help realize the ludic spirit of the Corroboree participatory arts festival there, not just in August but always.

A base to facilitate the interplay of movement and space. We could host a festival of uncontrolled movement and house a radical library with a focus on nomadics world-wide (send any materials or info to Sasha). We believe the purchase of our encampment can be made with the help of anonymous donors and intend it to be ownership-irrelevant. Collaborate. We know of a sister project in Oregon, and we have no intention to stop moving.

Contacts:

Sasha K.
41 Sutter Street, Suite 1661
San Francisco, CA 94104

UnruLEE
4743 Hiawatha Avenue #116
Minneapolis, MN 55406

reprinted from il Frenetico #2

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