Intimacy vs Property

I’m annoyed by radical structures that reify the idea of property as THE way to think about our relations to each other and the world.

Property is such an infectious concept. In my practice, from looking at motherhood to book piracy to how we evaluate social art practice, it seems that the first thing I encounter is always a taken-for-granted, a postulate: that the path to change and thence liberation is just a matter of redistributing property rights to the RIGHT people and the enabling of “our" sovereignty.

I see this as a trap. One that makes it almost impossible to imagine a different way to think about ourselves and the world. We are terrified of what would happen if we didn’t own the things we care for.

But I think that it is the ‘we care for’ that matters. That there is a different form of relationality that can only exist once we refuse to play the property and sovereignty game and pay attention to the actual ways in which we exist with each other. I call this the intimacy of interdependency.

In this prompt, I propose that the Collective Conditions for Re-Use falls into the same trap. That in its attempts to solve the ‘problem’ of intersectionality and power imbalances in systems like copy-left or creative commons, it reifies the all too well established (mis)conception that property is the only way in which we can think ourselves and the world, expanding the market into every sphere of our lives — particularly those spheres which specifically sought to separate themselves of the market. That it attempts to improve what needs to be dismantled.

This is a prompt to imagine that we already have a much more sophisticated and interesting way to relate to what we all bring into being in the world. We do. We just need to stop making

• Organisation