Falsework, Smalltalk: Political Education, Aesthetic Archives, Recitations of a Future in Common (Common Tern Works)
By Hic Rosa Collective

Falsework, Smalltalk: Political Education, Aesthetic Archives, and Recitations of a Future in Common is an experimental and collaborative archive of autonomous and internationalist political education and communication for this historical moment. It addresses key questions about intersubjective sustenance in the subjunctive tense, community building and institutional maintenance, social action and communication, and collaborative learning and knowledge production, that have been raised anew by the “twin crises of the global pandemic and insurgent neoliberal fascism. The subject matter is addressed by scholars, artists, curators, activists, writers, educators, organizers, and students whose beautifully overlapping lifeworlds give us glimpses of a community and world to come. This relational, curatorial, and editorial project is moved by a commitment to politics as a living and not a dead labor, and also by a relationship, to knowing and to institutions, that does not find any pleasure in the reactionary force to order. The project of education instantiated here goes beyond educating people in known scripts, of political action and revolution, so that the production of knowledge is actually radical and reorients the relationship between education, knowledge, and remaking our world, where the university, the artworld, and neoliberal political institutions, are increasingly unfulfilling objects of desire, and unreliable sources of refuge. The project was curated by Hic Rosa Collective. came together in 2015, to convoke a platform for thought, action, provocation, production, respite, and recovery in the realms of aesthetics, poetics, and politics and their common material bases. What unites us is an attentiveness to the methods, processes, and hospitalities that irrevocably link everyday life with knowledge and cultural production; we seek to ventilate and revivify the politics suffocated by moralistic maps or order-conserving foreclosures of thought, inquiry, critique, form, place, desire, expression, and action. Common Tern is an internationalist cooperative of worldmaking cultural workers.Contributions by: Asma Abbas, Colin Eubank, Safi Alsebai, Sara Mugridge, Nathaniel Madison, Daniel Neilson, Ezra Lee, Valerie Fanarjian, Ciarán Finlayson, Avonlea Fisher, Ari Fogelson, Elizabeth (Zibby) Glass, Jody Leonard, Isabella Lee, Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes Gabriel Salgado Yashfeen Talpur Hannah Walker, Milo Ward, Philip Zorba, Sanya Hussain, Stephen Hager, Coco Marcil, Ethan Ackelsberg, Isaac Brosilow, Christopher Carrico, Starling Carter, Marvin González, Zahabia Khuzema, Lucy Peterson, Brianna Pope, Renata Summo-O'Connell, Yashfeen Talpur, Hannah Walker, Eric Aldieri, Ashna Ali, Zara Anwarzai, Sean Brannock, Silvana Carotenuto, Sami Chohan, Miri Davidson, Ejeris Dixon, Edgar Flores Noriega Lillian Goldberg, Lewis Gordon, Hajra Haider Karrar, Sy Klipsch-Abudu, Kenji C. Liu, Dresda Emma Mendez de la Brena, Bindu Menon Mannil, Hasan Mujtaba, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Anna Poplawski, Shahana Rajani, Sumana Roy, Vianny Ruiz, Sadia Salim, Rei Terada, Omer Wasim, Zohaib Zuby.