Unmanageable Relations: Intimacy, Access, Care and the Refusal of Administrative Logic

Intimacy is messy, risky, and dangerous. It reminds us how permeable we are to others and how others are permeable to us. It forces us to accept that even when caring for each other, we are always hurting each other and being hurt. Intimacy is a refusal of clarity and forms of visibility that can be standardised and transformed into data or policy. It is always already negotiated between subjects, at a bodily scale, and thus it is illegible, unmanageable, and unsurveyable.

This colloquium proposes intimacy as a radical refusal of reformist ideas which incorporate practices such as care, access and decolonisation into administrative structures, while reifying top-down ideas of power, objectivity and knowledge practice. Guest speaker Andrea Francke (Lima, London) will draw on concepts such as access intimacy, group intimacy and the logic of care to explore the productive ways in which intimacy can allow us to critically re-engage with practices of access, intellectual property and care.

This colloquium builds on Francke’s prompt Intimacy vs. Property, which is published in Ecologies of Dissemination, PARSE Journal (2025). It was commissioned for the working session Revisit Reuse (2024), a collective revisit of the licence experiment Collective Conditions for Reuse (cc4r, 2020). From this gathering, the Collective Commitment to Reuse (cc2r, 2025) emerged, which proposes a shift from condition to commitment.