In the follow up of the august letter, we invite all the groups and people involved in the PGA process to participate in the organisation of the next european conference in August 2006.
The first european meeting will take place from the 18th to the 20th of November 2005 in the South of France.
In order to ensure that the preparation process will be as collective as possible and despite the fact that this invitation comes a bit late, we think it's important to involve groups and people who don't belong STAMP*, as early as this first meeting.
As we wrote before, we think it important to involve groups and persons from Central and Eastern Europe so do contact us as quickly as possible in order to get the visas in good time. Our finances are so far pretty low and hitchicking is always possible, but we will nevertheless take time and energy (for financing, travel coordination... ) to ensure that participants from these countries can take part in the peparation process as well as in the conference itself. We would appreciate if other groups are willing to help.
We are planning to organize another international meeting close to Central Europe. Any group or persons who cannot take part in the November meeting but is interested in that next meeting can contact us in order to be informed. If groups or persons are already interested in hosting this next meeting, we can start talking about it. As convenors; we plan to organize this conference with the following objectives:
- to have a focus on the form of organization of dailylife tasks and conference logistics. We consider the involvment of people in these tasks and their political dimension as an important aspect of the conference's contents, which deserves the same attention as debates and workshops linked with various other struggles.
- to give a space for self-construction/building: (eg: collective building of some structures that will be used for the conference) and, on a more general level, to give a focus to collective practical activities and skill-shares during the conference.
- to experiment with forms of debate, discussion and decision-making;to carry on the processes initiated on these issues during the past conferences and to question them.
- to adress the linguistic domination of english, and to work on various possible ways of translation in order to try to overcome linguistic barriers (for their contribution to power relationships).
- to think about the transmission of methods of organization in order to help other people to organize next conferences.
- To give ourselves ways to strengthen the links set with east and middle europe groups, in particular during the belgrade conference.
- To help participants to apprehend the local context correctly, and to make the preparation process and the conference itself a support for local dynamics rather than an occasion for them to be sold out.
The November meeting will take place in the Magnans, a collective structure run by people from the European cooperative Longo maï, close to the Grange neuve cooperative, about hundred kilometers North of Marseille. The nearest train station is called Oraison-la-Brillane. We will send an access map at a later stage. We suggest that people arrive on the 17th in the evening in order to start on Friday morning. It's possible to stay there until the 21st in the morning..
During the meeting, we will visit the Longo maï cooperative and will also have time for informal discussions and encounters.
We expect a lot of you to come and visit us in our magical and nuclearised Provence but do tell us in advance in order to facilitate the organisation.
Contact address: stamp
poivron.org, tel: +33 (0)4 66 30 52 81
STAMP/SANS-TITRE who's that?
Sans Titre is a network of groups and individuals committed to autonomous and alternative spaces (whether in an urban, squatted or rural environment) as well as to anti-capitalist or anti-authoritarian struggles. Sans-Titre has gathered on a two-monthly basis since the Intercontinental Caravan of 1999.
Many people have become involved in PGA through their involvement in the Sans-Titre network. The basic principles upon which these two networks are founded have been similar from day one. Sans Titre has no members and no representatives, though it does proclaim a set of hallmarks of a sort, known as a charter.
Over the years, Sans Titre, which prefers to see itself as an iconoclastic non-network, has always led a nomadic existence, moving through a variety of friendly spaces, including squats in Grenoble, Lyons, Dijon, St Etienne and Lausanne, as well as farms in the Jura region of eastern France, in the Aveyron region of central France, in the Belgian Ardennes, in a village of the French Ardennes and in Longo Mai's Provencal hills, each meeting designed to marry the festive and the subversive.
Every SansTitre meeting provides an opportunity of spending four or five days together, of meeting new people, but also of developing joint actions and planning new living-spaces; each meeting provides a time for theoretical discussion, a time for games and for collective building work and for informal exchanges on the evolution of people's everyday lives. Sans Titre also publishes a bimonthly bulletin, each edition of which is edited and printed in a different location. This bulletin contains a combination of d-i-y pages, theoretical texts and information about past or future actions.
Sans Titre meetings are attended by a highly variable 7 to 77 people, depending on the agenda, the location, the timing and individual mood.
Sans Titre has participated in many collective or shared actions, including:
- The Intercontinental Caravan (450 representatives of movements from Southern countries, travelling through Europe in protest at neo-liberal centres of power and the activities of agribusiness corporations).
- Counter-summits, such as Davos in 2001 and Prague 2000.
- Coordination of Global Days of Action within French-speaking Europe including Seattle 1999 and Mayday 2000.
- The Anti-Capitalist Caravan in 2000, involving street theatre, organised debates and actions aimed at mobilising opinion against the World Bank and the IMF.
- A caravan highlighting the situation in Colombia with the Afro-Colombian organisation, Proceso de Comunidades Negras, in 2001.
- Co-organisation of the No Border Camp in Strasbourg in 2002, including self-built infrastructure equipment, self-managed logistics and experiments in direct-democracy decision-making for 1984 people over ten days.
- Various coordinated actions connected with a range of solidarity campaigns and other themes.
- A Permanent Caravan, in which various teams relayed each other in order to maintain a permanent, nomadic presence throughout France and organise discussion meetings, workshops, building projects and coordinated actions in town and country.
Sans Titre works on an affinity principle. It is about creating exchanges and strengthening solidarity between diverse poles of resistance, islands dotted around the French-speaking archipelago; it is about coordinating local initiatives and making madcap projects happen ("Let's make a caravan that works by combusting brushwood, let's make an airship"). Sans Titre is about the exchange of subversive cultures, about everyday living, about profound thoughts on the goals of our lives and the aims of our struggles. Sans Titre is about the bad guys of capitalism with their men in uniform, about bosses, science, industry, patriarchy; it's about nature, farming, washing-up water, compost-based toilets, diversity, managing one's own everyday existence, one's own dreams, about emancipation and happiness - all of the above contained with a determinedly horizontal decision-making process, ornamented with sudden acrobatic pyramids and the whiplash of erupting controversy.
STAMP, the current convenor of European PGA, is thus composed of a group of people from a range of different places within the French-speaking area, implicated in a variety of different collectives, some of which relate to Sans Titre. We have formed on an affinity basis, because we share certain practices and a certain history of working together. We are a group specifically formed in view of the forthcoming European PGA conference. We work independently of, but also in interaction with, Sans Titre. This is to say that some people involved in Sans Titre do not wish to become involved in organising the conference, which will therefore be the result of work performed by an autonomous group connected with Sans Titre. STAMP is open to those not linked to Sans Titre. (See notes on forthcoming meetings and list of contacts).
A brief account of the activities of those involved in STAMP follows below. They are:
- The University Liberation Committee, the CUL is a group of people, not only students, who wish to go towards autonomy and to spread it through the development and sharing of theories and practices attempting to conciliate both offensive desire and building...
- Longo maï, a thirty-year-old rural-based movement consisting of a group of farm cooperatives, involved in producing food, clothes, radio programmes, printed works and actions. Some two to three hundred people live in Longo Mai connected cooperatives.
- La Friche, in Lyons, an artists' living-space housing, amongst others, political groups such as Le Reso (militants and artists) and Collectif des Resistances (an informal anticapitalist group that has for the last three years organised Lyons' Festival des Resistances).
- ACOBI, a collective producing spectacular, non-commercial video
- Espace Autogéré des Tanneries, an anarchist action and living space in Dijon, established 1998.
- a feminist group which organised a women-only, feminist and Lesbian route for the permanent caravan over a three-month period:
- CEMEA, a popular education movement and new education movement
- the people of the Grenoble, Geneva, Lyons, St Etienne and Lausanne squats, with their infokiosks, their free zones, their cyber-spaces, their experimental discussion groups, their workshops and their wide range of actions.
- CLAG, the Lyons post-Genoa Collective.
- A self-managed creche on the outskirts of Ales
- Itinerant individuals stopping wherever the requirements of building work, other activities or just friendship take them.
- Print, a hacklab, developing free-ware and encouraging popular, political access to computer systems.
Bonus track: "Sans-titre" network hallmarks
- Sans Titre is a network composed of individuals and local groups, which transfers information, shares projects and actions on a local, regional and worldwide basis.
- We are in favour of self-government and try to regain control over our lives, means and places of existence. We do our best to put our ideas into practice and feel rather fulfilled with both our ways of life and our political struggles, which are resolutely united: planting and collecting vegetables; reading newspapers, making one; learning how to make jam; making love; laughing between friends; supporting struggles and developing solidarity close to us as well as far from us; type down the summary of a sans-titre meeting which lasted for ages; opposing commercial trade?
- We are facing a set of domination and discrimination systems. States andcapitalism are nowadays indissociably linked and working hand and glove. Both, for instance, are deeply rooted in patriarchy and male domination. We reject them at large and try to understand them by tearing their mechanisms apart and spotting their participants.
- Within western societies, both historically and at present, sciences and research are profit-driven. Irrational faith in progress and scientist ideology, which are driving industrial societies, lead us all to jeopardize our lives, our organism and our means of existence through hazardous experimentation. They make us more and more dependent on industry and consumption goods. As needs induced by our consumption society become more complex and diverse, industrial societies prove to be less and less compatible with local alternatives based on a respect for humanity and environment. This derives from the basic fact that these societies imply total control over our own tools and resources.
- Lobbying, representation, as well as any form of association with the State or its institutions turn out to lead to a dead-end. They can only strengthen the latters and neutralize any real desires for change. We are in favour of active desertion and autonomization, disobedience and effective action. We intend by these means to inform as well as to induce economical and political confrontational situations. We are liable to choose direct means of pressure or opposition towards ruling powers.
- Sans-titre admits no hierachy. We make decisions collectively through debates, trying to bring them to consensus. A decision can only be individual and implies only individual responsibility. Local groups and individuals keep their autonomy. Sans-titre does not represent anybody and no one might represent Sans-Titre.
- Sans Titre is fighting. Sans Titre is thinking and proposing. Sans Titre does not take itself seriously. Sans Titre is autonomous. Sans Titre creates its own media. Sans Titre does not exist, and verything's fine till now. Oï.
Contact: stamppoivron.org
